Bactra Review    Oriental Despotism

Oriental Despotism

A Comparative Study of Total Power

byKarl A. Wittfogel

Yale University Press, 1967 (1957)
Hydraulic despotism --- i.e. despotism from the need to control very large scale water-works, especially for irrigation --- water's bulky and you need lots of it, so small-scale hydroagriculture doesn't get very far --- need large amounts of labor, central control --- ``election of the despot no remedy'' --- export of hydraulic pattern to other parts of the world (e.g. Russia) --- ``beggar's democracy'' and ``beggar's property'', i.e. it wouldn't have been worth the trouble to manage _everything_, so let them alone in harmless things --- managerial caste --- rule through terror --- myth of benevolence --- Karl Wittfogel began his intellectual career as a member of the famous Frankfurt School, the Institut fur Socialforschuung, and as a member of the German Communist party. The only traces of those experiences in this, his magnum opus, are an intense if not irrational anti-Communism, and a certain degree of red-baiting. I rather suspect these were genuine reactions, and not protective coloration; as he says in the preface added in 1962,
It was my belief in these values [``basic scientific truths and human values''] that put me behind the barbed wire of Hitler's concentration camps. My final thoughts go to those who, like myself, were passing through that inferno of total terror. Among them, some hoped for a great turning of the tables which would make them guards and masters where formerly they had been inmates and victims. They objected, not to the totalitarian means, but to the ends for which they were being used.

Others responded differently. They asked me, if ever opportunity offered, to explain to all who would listen the inhumanity of totalitarian rule in any form. Over the years and more than I can express, these men have inspired my search for a deeper understanding of the nature of total power. [p. v]