Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power by Karl A. Wittfogel Review by: Arnold J.

Toynbee The American Political Science Review, Vol. 52, No. 1 (Mar., 1958), pp. 195-198 Published by: American Political Science Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1953021 . Accessed: 04/11/2011 18:14
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BOOK REVIEWS
Study of Total Power. BY KARL A. WITTFOOritutal Dcspotism: A Comnparative GEL. (New Haven: Yale University Press; London: Oxford University Press. 1957. Pp. xix, 556. $7.50.) This is a queer book by a fine scholar. Professor Wittfogel, in his preliminary a('knowledgrments,tells us, as every author should do, what was the genesis of his book. His belief in human values caused him (to his great personal credit) to be interned in Hitler's concentration camps. "iMy final thoughts," he records, "go to those who, like myself, were passing through that inferno of total terror." Some of his fellow victims asked him, "if ever opportunity offered, to explain to all who would listen the inhumanity of totalitarian rule in any form. Over the vrears an(I more than I can express, these men have inspired my search for a deeper understanding of the nature of total power." Ifere indeed is a strong iiiceiitive to research and writing. But what result would oie expect Professor Wittfogel's experience to produce? Surely a fulldrecssstudy of the National Socialist regime in Germany, and this for at least
three
glime;

reasons. afl(Id eveI

First, Professor Wittfogel

the most penetrating

has had direct experience

and imaginative scholar

of this re-

understands

I)etter something that he has been through himself than something that he has been able to study from documents only-as Professor Wittfogel has studied the regime of the Liao (Khitan) dynasty in medieval China. Secondly, the Nazi re_rii e is the example of total power that is most easily comprehensible to Westciii writers and readers, because Hitler and his National Socialist movement are entirely home-grown products of our Western civilization. There is nothing "( )rientaLfl" or "hydraulic" about Nazi Germany (I will explain in a moment wxat, Professor Wittfogel means by his rather quaint jargon). A third reason
for beginning

with the Nazi regime in the contemporary

Western World if one

is going to make a serious study of total power is that it is the best (i.e., the worst) example of this atrocity so far known to us. Search all the surviving recor(dsof human behaviour all over the globe since the beginning of recorded history, and you will find nothing to equal this. The Nazis' cold-blooded murder of millions of people, their tortures, their espionage, their devilish policy of inciting children to denounce their parents-these leave the Assyrians and the Aztecs dead beat. So one would expect Professor Wittfogel to begin with the Nazis, and to take tlhemias the standard for his comparative study. But not a bit of it. After his illiiininating reference in his acknowledgments, he hardly mentions the Nazis

again. And, when he does mention total power in our Western World or in the CGraeco-Rornan World, it is always in general terms and nearly always in the form of an apologia for it: it was not really so bad after all, or at any rate it has never lasted very long.
rThe wielders of total power whom Professor WVittfogel is stalking in this book

are not our Western Nazis; they are the Russiaii Communists; and I have a 195

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most uncomfortable suspicion that the book-beneath its load of authentic and massive learning-is really a political book and not a scientific one. At any rate, what it all leads up to is a common-form contemporary Western indictment of the Communist regime in the Soviet Union. Of course, what is trite may nevertheless be true, and, from the standpoint of the minority in the Western World that believes in, and tries to practise, what we consider to be genuine democracy, Russian Communism is about the next-best target to German NationalSocialism for a democratic Western attack on totalitarianism. Then why does not Professor Wittfogel attack the Russian Communist regime direct, on the basis of its, to our minds, glaring intrinsic demerits? The way is open, but he does ioot take it. Instead, he gets at the Russian Communists by the roundabout route of an attack on what he calls "Oriental or Asiatic hydraulic agromanagerial despotism." Here I have three bones to pick with him. First, he is doing mankind a serious disserviceein trying to resuscitate the propaganda myth-invented by European Greeks in the fifth century B.C.-of the antithesis between a good Europe and a bad Asia. Second, he is flying in the face of the considered opinion of his colleagues the Egyptologists, Assyriologists, and Indologists in trying to apply to the magically vicious soil of Asia-though not to the magically virtuous soil of Europe-the Marxian thesis that the means of production rigidly determine all other elements of social life. Third, he is barking up the wrong tree: for, when one makes even a cursory comparative study of total power, one finds that the worst cases of it have occurred, not in "hydraulic" societies, but in societies in which agriculture gets its water from the rainfall. In my own association of ideas, the word "hydraulic" suggests drills, brakes, a.rd elevators, but Professor Wittfogel uses it, rather oddly, to mean "irrigational." "Hydraulic" societies, in his parlance, are societies in which agriculture gets its water from the artificial tapping of lake water or river water by irrigation canals. But, to get back to my three quarrels with Professor Wittfogel and, first, his attempt to revive the propaganda myth of good Europe versus bad Asia. We know all about this smear's origin and history. It was invented by European (Greeks in the fifth century B.C. in their very natural animosity against the Persian Empire, which had made an aggressive, though unsuccessful, attempt to conquer them. Alexander the Great was brought up on this myth by Aristotle; but, when he made his own successful conquest of the Persian Empire, he discovered, to his astonishment, that the myth was a lie. As soon as he met the Persians, he recognized in them the qualities of character which had enabled them to give peace and unity to Western Asia for 200 years. His response was to take the Persians into partnership with the Macedonians and the Greeks in the management of the World. But for his premature death, Alexander would have (carried this policy through, and that would have been the end of the lying myth. Unhappily, his insight and his policy died with him, and the myth lived on, unscotched, till it was borrowed from the Greeks, in recent times, by the modern Western conquerors of the World.

BOOK REVIEWS

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This myth of a magic contrast between European virtue and Asiatic vice is the ancient Greek and modern Western counterpart of the medieval Byzantine Greek propaganda myth that the Western Christians were misguided barbarians who were bound to come to grief very soon. This myth was borrowed from the Byzantines by the nineteenth-century Russian Slavophils, and from the Russian Slavophils by the Russian Communists. We know how much it irritates us to be told that Russia alone is holy and orthodox (whether in Christian or in Communist terms) and that we Westerners are erring and doomed schismatics or capitalists. It is just as irritating for the peoples who happen to live within the conventional boundaries of "Asia" to be told by us that, as an inescapable result of their geographical location, they are bound to languish under "Oriental" despotism of the "hydraulic agromanagerial" type. Away with both these propaganda myths! Both are lies, and both are heinous offences against the human race, because both of them are engines deliberately designed to stoke up those tribal animosities by which mankind has made itself so miserai)le. I xvill IIow take up my third point before my second. I contend as against Professor Wittfogel, that all the worst cases of total power and an atrocious abuse of it have occurred in regions where agriculture depends on rainfall, not in regions where it depends on irrigation. National Socialist Germany: there was nothing "hydraulic" about her. Czarist Russia and her successor Communist Russia: there is nothing "hydraulic" about her either. Professor Wittfogel cannot deny that in Russia agriculture depends not on irrigation but on rainfall; but he still claims the Muscovite form of Russian despotism for his "hydraulic agromanagerial" type on the ground that the Muscovite despots may have learnt their trade, not from themselves or from the Byzantines, but from their Tatar overlords, and that the Tatars of the Golden Horde, at the western end of the great Eurasian steppe, may have learnt the tricks of the "hydraulic agromanagerial" trade from brother Tatars who had ridden off in the opposite direction to conquer "hydraulic agromanagerial" China. Professor Wittfogel cites no serious evidence in support of this surely very farfetched piece of speculation; yet it is one of the key theses of his book. Professor Wittfogel himself bears witness that, though the cultivators in "hydraulic" Oriental societies have no say in the government of their community, they are not slaves either. But plantation slavery has played a big part in mankind's economic history. Where has it been rife? In Roman Italy in the last two centuries B.C., and in the West Indies and the Americas since their con(llest by West Europeans in modern times. The only Asiatic case that I can call to mind is the cultivation of the Tigris-Euphrates delta by African (Zanj) slave-labour in the ninth century of the Christian Era. Finally, there is Professor Wittfogel's thesis that in China, India, Iraq, and Egypt, though not in Lombardy or the Netherlands, artificial water-control on a large scale has produced a uniform type of "agromanagerial" despotism. If the late Professor Frankfort were still alive, he would have a lance to break with Professor Wittfogel over that. The differences between the "Asiatic" so-

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cities whose agriculture is based on irrigation are much greater than their resemblalnces. I believe there is nothing more in Professor Wittfogel's thesis than the obvious truth that large-scale enterprises cannot be carried out without a unified and effective high command. This is certainly true of large-scale waterwvorks, but it is also true of armies and ships and industrial enterprises. He-I-e I will leave Professor Wittfogel to be dealt with by the Assyriologists and the Egyptologists. I seldom.write a condemnatory review and dislike wvritilng one of this book--not least because I much admire Professor Wittfogel's pioi1cer work in the economic, social, and political interpretation of Chinese (Ivyiastic histories. But his present book is, in my opinion, something of an aberrationi and still more of a menace. So I have said frankly what I think about it.
ARNOLD J. TOYNBEE.

Th( IRoyalInstitulteof International Affairs.

(bImaug1,,'sNew Conservatism:Its history and Dilemma in the Twentieth Century.

BY KLEMMENS

VON KLEMPERER.

(Princeton: Princeton University Press.

1957. Pp. xxvi, 250. $5.00.) Tlhj8 "chapter in the history of an idea" is, according to the author, "the story of an extreme dilemma between the logic of conservatism and the politics of conservatism" (pp. 3 f.). Conservatism appeared in Europe in the struggle -.gaimt the French Revolutionary idea that rational man could create a new oi-der in his own image. The conservatives "aimed at discovering the order inlierent in things. This faith ill the firmness of the created order was the common grouiid of all conservatives." It is in the light of this origin that we must understlalndthe "central attributes" of the logic of conservatism: change, freedom, irra.tio-lonalisim, and pessimism. These attributes can be comprehended only a, aivist the foil of the corresponding attributes of the liberalism that carried the I'lench Revolutionary idea into the nineteenth century. The conservative con(e pt of change was that of organic growth, which, in alliance with tradition, "-p-eWared as a protection against arbitrary rule" (p. 24). Early conservatives, such -IDsde Maistre and Haller, "made a good case for freedom by defending diversity against the encroachments of a leveling state" (p. 26). While concedinig that "irrationalisin is a double-edged sword," the author concludes that "the irrationalist premises of conservatism" stand for "what is higher than reason and theory" rather than what is "lower" (p. 28). The "nature of conserv .ltive pessirmism" is revealed in the views that "no human effort, no politics wouldd ultimately remedy the ills of the world. Politics had merely a limited fillctdion, it was the 'art of the possible' and an attempt to cope with an existillg o0i'der" (p. 29). Thus "conservatism, like liberalism, was part of that 'hortus ihi'tsCU5t of the nineteenth century,' a forward-looking century which believed ill freedom and the dignity of man]" (p. 31). Whe(nwe turn to the story of conservatism in Germany, we find that, under the influence of Hegel, reinforced by Stahl and Ranke, the acceptance of "the ceicated order" required by the logic of conservatism was transmuted into "an