The Origins of Autocracy

within despotic elites—a struggle which at times made despots dependent on their own bureaucratic power base, as Balazs asserts with regard to China (E. Balazs, Chinese Civil­isation and Bureaucracy), or on bureaucrats who had succeeded temporarily in turning themselves into semifeudal landlords, as Christensen asserts for Sassanid Persia (see A. Christensen, L'Iran sous les Sassanides), or on a priestly oligarchy, as Andreski asserts rel­ative to Egypt during the so-called New Kingdom (S. Andreski, Elements of Comparative Sociology, p. 167). Quite the contrary: even Iurii Krizhanich knew that the intraelite struggle, and the dependence of the despot on it, is a generic trait of despotism and the cause of its always having been a structure with an unstable leadership.

And, in any case, none of these objections alters the fact that there is a class of politi­cal structures known to history which over the course of millennia experienced no politi­cal development, and as a consequence proved incapable of changing their fundamental parameters—if you like, their paradigms—from within. It seems to me that this is what Krizhanich, Montesquieu, Hegel, Jones, and Tocqueville had in mind when they wrote about despotism. Until this is refuted, the phenomenon of despotism requires study, regardless of what attitude we take toward Wittfogel's conception; for he was the first- after Montesquieu—to place what I call the science of despotology in the focus of our attention with such force and clarity.

tion of society—by its reduction into two polar classes: "the gover­nors" and "the governed."[20]

To the economic immobility of this system there corresponds the immobility of the class of the governed (the reduction to a minimum of what is called in modern sociology the horizontal mobility of the popu­lation, and its lack of political differentiation, so that the administra­tion confronts not politically discrete society, but a uniform mass of subjects, hypothetically equal before the person of the despot.[21]