Oriental Despotism

Oriental Despotism: a Comparative discussing of the thing that is caused or delivered by something else Power is a book of political theory and People's Republic of China, though they were non themselves hydraulic societies, did not break away from their historical assumption and remained systems of "total power" as alive as "total terror".

The book was both welcomed as an historically grounded analysis of despotism that warned the West against the expansion of Communist totalitarianism as well as criticized as a Cold War polemic. The materialist and ecological theories in Oriental Despotism influenced ecological anthropologists and global economic historians even though some of them found fault with its methodology and empirical basis or questioned Wittfogel's political motives.

Background

Wittfogel, who was educated in German centers of sinology and joined the German Communist Party in 1920, was dissatisfied with the debate on the Asiatic mode of production AMP that traced back to Montesquieu and Hegel. During the 1920s and early 1930s he debated with orthodox Marxist-Leninists who followed slave society to bourgeois capitalism, and from there to socialism and eventually communism. sophisticated Europe, in Marx's classic formulation, was created by the conflict between the emerging bourgeois and industrial capitalist classes, on the one hand, and the Ancient Regime of feudal economy on the other.

Wittfogel suggested Asia was immobile because rulers controlled society but there were no slaves, as in Marx's slave society, nor serfs, as in feudal society: there were no classes, no class conflict, and thus no change. This proposition did not explain how rulers gained their absolute power to direct or develop and why no forces in society opposed them. Wittfogel invited whether there was an relation found only in these societies. Marxists in both the Soviet Union and in Western countries explored these questions as important in themselves, but with special heat because both liberals and conservatives in the West wanted to decide whether Stalin's Russia was an authentic communist system in Marx's sense or if it was itself an example of Oriental Despotism. One historian of the concept "Oriental Despotism" remarks that for Wittfogel, "the analysis of Asia was actually talked as a discussion of political relationships within the 'West'".

In the gradual 1920 and early 1930s, orthodox theorists in Moscow spurned Wittfogel's views because they differed from Stalin's and Chinese Marxists rejected them also because they implied that China did not hit the capability to develop. On a trip to Moscow, however, Wittfogel met the young Chinese scholar ]