The Hylozoic Theory of Power
Pachter, Henry
ORIENTAL DESPOTISM, by Karl August Wittfogel. Yale University Press, 1957, 447 pp., $7.50. In calling his book "a comparative study of total power," the author is doing himself justice,...
...With such a method it is possible to prove anything...
...apparently the book has been given for review not to the experts in the field but to professional anti-Communists who would praise its anti-Soviet slant...
...But here is a second turn of irony—Wittfogel, who now belongs to the extreme right, still cannot prove Stalin wrong without the proper Marx quotations, and he cannot submit that a theory is correct except by proving that Lenin held it...
...to make the argument really comprehensive, reference must be made to the provision of drinking water, to shipping and even ocean communications...
...His book is deeply defeatist...
...The irony is, that this idea is based on a suggestion by Marx, elaborated by Max Weber and expounded in an earlier (German) book by Wittfogel...
...Can Wittfogel have failed to overcome his one-time Stalinism in his heart and in his mind...
...nor is there any serious attempt to explain why hydraulic Works generated a theocracy in Egypt and a-religious mandarins in China...
...How, for instance, do we explain Japanese despotism which plainly had nothing to do with water supply...
...Thus, a duck would be defined a marginal swan and a chicken as a sub-marginal swan...
...Not out of the social structure of the country that fell under the dominion of the granddukes of Muscovy, but in the following mystical way: the Mongols who had seen it work in China, brought the memories of this form of state to the Russian plains and left these memories there for the granddukes to pick them up several hundred years later...
...to recall the sum total of these features, then, we use the terms "despotic," "oriental" and "hydraulic" interchangeably...
...It will not suffice to evoke the huge irrigation canals or flood dikes of ancient empires which still evoke our admiration...
...This reviewer, however, wonders whether Wittfogel has really done the good cause a good service...
...if they did not actually do it, their predecessors had, or they had learned the techniques of despotism from neighboring governments which once had been connected with the control of water supply...
...To a degenerate Marxism it opposes nothing but Marxist cretinism, and instead of a clue to the understanding of oriental societies it gives us a label...
...To make this appear as something rather close to our "hydraulic" type of society, we use various devices, such as emphasizing Japan's cultural and political ties with the eminently "hydraulic" China, naming among the measures which a Japanese reform government took, first a decree relating to dikes, and we end with the assertion that "in a submarginal way (Japan) was related to the institutional patterns of the hydraulic world...
...and what of the enormous draining of the marshes by the British gentry in the 17th century...
...In such a case, the difficulty is not in the alleged rule, but in the contradictory exception...
...Why should a gifted and knowledgeable sociologist—once the philosopher of the German Communist party—thus have wasted his vast store of information...
...If it is true, as he claims, that despotic government is natural to the East, then there is no alternative for the suppressed nations in the Soviet orbit...
...WITH THIS METHOD we can go very far in proving whatever we like...
...Yale University Press, 1957, 447 pp., $7.50...
...he seems to prove too much...
...For obvious reasons Russian academies rejected these views and Wittfogel berates them properly for rejecting Marx...
...To MAKE Matters worse, this interpretation happens to be the most primitive of all available text-books of Marxism...
...How did oriental despotism come to Russia...
...No one can gainsay that...
...All these despotic governments, Wittfogel suggests, based their power on an identical service which they rendered their subjects: they organized and supervised the waterworks which assured farming...
...There is no explanation of these anomalies in the 447 pages of the book...
...Thereupon we find most of these features in the Japanese society and triumphantly hold them up as proof that this really is an "oriental" society...
...On the other hand, the Roman Empire was transformed into "oriental despotism" under Diocletian without benefit of hydraulic works...
...Wittfogel's theory is utterly unhistoric because the variety of oriental societies had to be pressed into a pre-conceived pattern, and the many useful observations on despotic government are torn from their proper context to be thrown into the basket of a general theory instead of being developed from their historical origins...
...Hence unfortunately the inventory of despotic societies had to be fitted into the strait-jacket of the particular interpretation of "historical materialism" to which Wittfogel subscribes...
...technological explanation of history, leaving class structure, social organization, instruments of power and other relevant data to be explained by technology alone, or rather by one set of technological data above all others...
...The reason is made clear in a brilliant and amusing chapter on the history of the theory, or rather on the misfortunes of the theory in Soviet and anti-Soviet literature...
...Wittfogel shows that Stalin feared the idea of an "oriental type" society which is nei ther capitalist nor socialist...
...Since 90 per cent of the ancient empires were 90 per cent of the time ruled by despots and at some time at least also were dependent upon water supply, it really is not difficult to es tablish a statistical correlation between water and despotism...
...For instance, starting from the observation that most birds have feathers, feet and other things in common with the species swan, we might classify all birds in terms of their relationships to the swan species...
...it may even be susceptible of elaboration and of application to other fields of knowledge...
...In calling his book "a comparative study of total power," the author is doing himself justice, for the book indeed is an immense file case of characteristics which at various times have been common to many societies of oriental type...
...To prove this contention, it will be necessary to define the control of water supply as broadly as possible...
...Likewise, Wittfogel leaves out of this classification system such "hydraulic" societies as the Dutch—clearly they were neither "oriental" nor despotic...
...first we describe many features of a despotic government which often are found in societies which depend on water control...
...The book, however, pretends to be more—it tries to prove a theory which would explain the similarities...
...Does he still believe in the iron law of History which makes Progress in these areas dependent upon the Iron Cohort...
...The most outrageous example of this simplistic view concerns the country where a correct theory would be most desirable—Russia...
...It looks for a strictly "materialistic," i.e...
...Strangely enough, no professional historian has lodged a protest in any learned magazine...
...We proceed in two stages...
...The wealth of information and a number of highly interesting ideas which have been digested into this monumental work, unfortunately are more likely to bewilder the reader than to enlighten him...
...To be sure, a number of birds would be left out of the scheme...
Vol. 5 • September 1958 • No. 4
