| Karl August Wittfogel |
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| CATEGORIES ABOUT KARL AUGUST WITTFOGEL | |
| 1896 births | |
| 1988 deaths | |
| american historians | |
| german historians | |
| geopoliticians | |
| theories of history | |
| naturalized citizens of the united states | |
| sinologists | |
| german communists | |
| marxist theorists | |
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Wittfogel is best known for his work ''Oriental Despotism: A comparative Study of Total Power'' published in 1957. Starting from a Marxist analysis of the ideas of Max Weber on China and India 's "hydraulic-bureaucratic official-state" and building on Marx's views of the Asiatic Mode Of Production , Wittfogel came up with an analysis of the role of irrigation works in Asia, the bureaucratic structures needed to maintain them and the impact that these had on society. In his view many societies, mainly in Asia, relied heavily on the building of large-scale irrigation works. To do this, the state had to organize forced labor from the population at large. This required a large and complex bureaucracy staffed by competent and literate officials. This structure was uniquely placed to also crush civil society and any other force capable of mobilizing against the state. Such a state would inevitably be despotic, powerful, stable and wealthy. After arriving in the United States Wittfogel began to reconsider the nature of Communism and became a strong opponent of the ideology. He came to believe that the socialized economies of the Soviet Union would ineviably lead to despotic governments even more oppressive than those of "traditional Asia". Wittfogel came to consider the Soviet Union and the People's Republic Of China as the greatest threats to mankind's further development. These two states were the examples he actually had in mind when writing about " Asian Despotism ". SEE ALSO EXTERNAL RESOURCES Columbia Encyclopedia Wittfogel article |
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