The Origins of Autocracy

one time (in 1965) even a candidate for the presidency of that country, described the despotic mode of existence in the following terms only a decade ago: "Once all of Asia was in a state of equilibrium, with its agrarian societies relying for survival on a delicate balance between land and population. Land suitable for rice-growing was limited and rice-eating populations struggled for subsistence; they had neither the time, ability nor energy to think of governing themselves or even of participating in government. The task of governing was left to the few, a small, specialized class of scholar-officials. To labor and obey was left to the many. Thus the centralized state came into being, strong enough to protect these precarious balances from ever-threatening natural or artificial forces, skilled enough to undertake the control of the flow of water, the life-blood of the staple production. . . . Confucius gave this stability a philosophic base which sanctified harmony and reverence for authority. . . . This kind of equilibrium was to last four thousand years, until one day Western man arrived with ideas more explosive than the powder the Chinese had invented for firecrackers at the harvest festival (and which the Westerner would later push into the mouths of cannon)" ("Asian Revolution and Amer­ican Ideology," pp. 344-45).

Sigmund Freud asserted that there are no accidental slips of the tongue, and the fact that Senator Manglapus uses the word "survival" instead of "life" serves, it seems to me, as an exhaustive commentary on the passage quoted here.

... Its [the social order's] essence is determined by the character of the socioeconomic relationships. The concentration of the means of production, and primarily landed property, in the hands of a ruling class of feudal lords is decisive" (Kritiha burzhuaznykh kontseptsii istorii Rossii perioda feodalisma, pp. 30, 31). Unfortunately from this it follows "with extreme clarity" only that both despotism and absolutism are equally based on the concentration of the means of production in the hands of a ruling class of feudal lords. Among "feudal lords," the Soviet historians indiscriminately include English barons, Chinese mandarins, Polish pans, and Turkish effendis. But if the "base" was the same, how their "superstructures" come to differ from each other is mysterious. For all these reasons, I have thought it better not to broach this delicate and painful subject here.