The Origins of Autocracy

was marked by the seemingly irresistible onslaught of the Turks on Europe and the creation of absolutism (giving rise, in particular, to the conceptions of "seignorial monarchy" in France and "autocracy" in Russia). The third such occasion came in the second half of the eighteenth century, when European absolutism appeared to have slid finally into despotism (bringing with it, in particular, Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws). The fourth came in the middle of our century, when the onslaught of what is now called totalitarianism once again seemed to be irresistible. People who died in 1940 could actually have thought that the hour of the Last Judgment had come. This brought with it, in particular, Karl A. Wittfogel's Oriental Despotism as a reac­tion to the extreme danger to which civilization was exposed.

Wittfogel's book—despite the author's political extremism, and the highly debatable but unconditionally expressed thesis of "hydraulic civilization" as the historic source of despotism—nevertheless gave the first detailed description of this political category. In this sense, it could have marked the transformation of despotology into a science.⁶

6. Wittfogel's book Oriental Despotism was received with drawn swords by most spe­cialists, including the historian Arnold Toynbee; the sociologist S. N. Eisenstadt; the sinologist Wolfram Eberhard; Berthold Spuhler, specialist on the Golden Horde; and S. Andreski, a specialist in comparative sociology. It was also attacked in the Soviet press—and, incidentally, from a very interesting point of view. The only review from Moscow known to me berated Wittfogel for not having understood "the real role of despotic society in the East as inevitable at a certain stage of political development of so­ciety." And furthermore, as a "political form [which] was in some respects necessary and progressive (Sovetskoe kitaevedenie, no. 3 [1958], p. 195; my emphasis).

In chapter 4, devoted especially to the "despotists," we will consider this unanimous rejection in more detail. Now let us say only that in casting doubt on Wittfogel's concept of "hydraulic civilization" as a determining condition for "agromanagerial despotism," they also reject the notion of despotism as a distinct political structure, declaring it, for example, as Toynbee did, to be a myth invented by the Greeks in the fifth century в.с. and revived by Wittfogel out of purely political considerations.