The Origins of Autocracy

This also explains the monstrous stability of despotic systems, since it excludes the possibility of the emergence of a political opposition (or reformist potential) which sets itself the goal not simply of replac­ing the current occupant of the throne, but of bringing about a quali­tative change in the system based on an alternative model of political organization. Victorious mass uprisings in medieval China, for exam­ple, which immediately and slavishly copied the despotic structure just destroyed, but with new personnel, confirm Wittfogel's conclu­sion as to the absence in despotic structures of a political opposition.¹² This inability of despotism to transcend itself even in thought indi­cates not only its incapacity for institutional modernization, which is already known to us, but also—what is even more important—its tragic incapacity for self-demolition. It can be destroyed only from without.

The absence of these latent limitations—social, economic, and ideological—leads to the inability of despotic systems to resist being subjected to the private goals of the despot. This naturally may lead to mistakes, for the correction of which, as we already know, no mech­anism other than murder is envisaged in despotic systems. As para­doxical as this may seem, the death of the despot proves to be the sole means of correcting mistakes of administration. It is precisely the im­mense degree of divergence of goals, deriving in the last analysis from the complete autonomy of the administration from the system, which makes the unlimited personal power of the despot just as abso­lutely unstable as despotism itself, considered as a political structure, is absolutely stable.

12. "In contrast to the independent writers who, under Western absolutism, chal­lenged not only the excesses but the foundation of the despotic order, the critics of hydraulic society have in almost every case complained only of the misdeeds of individ­ual officials or of the evils of specific governmental acts. Apart from mystics who teach total withdrawal from the world, these critics aim ultimately at regenerating a system of total power, whose fundamental desirability they do not doubt . . . the embittered sub­ject . . . may defeat the government's men in arms. They may even overthrow a totter­ing dynasty. But eventually they will only revive—and rejuvenate—the agromanagerial despotism whose incompetent representatives they eliminated. The heroes of China's famous bandit novel, the Shui-hu-Ch'uan, could think of nothing better to do than to set up on their rebel island a miniature version of the very bureaucratic hierarchy which they were so fiercely combatting" (K. Wittfogel, pp. 134-35).

For this reason, it is not so much the safety of the system as his per­sonal safety which is the point of the despot's political activity. The sole means of securing this safety proves to be permanent, universal, and fruitless terror'³—fruitless because, being a terrorist structure par excellence, despotism nevertheless begins and ends as a structure with an unstable leadership. During the thousand years of Byzantium's existence, for example, some fifty of its emperors were drowned, blinded, or strangled—an average of one every twenty years.

Naturally, some despots give more attention to the economic func­tions of the state (manifesting, as Wittfogel has it, "the maximum ra­tionality of the ruler"), and others to wars and conquests. Some suc­ceed, and others suffer defeat. As a result of this, the state experiences fluctuations, periods of expansion and decline. However, no predic­tability is observed in the alternation of these periods. They are as chaotic as the selection of leadership personnel, as the "purges of the elite," as the rise and fall of the wazirs, ministers, and favorites of the despots, or of the despots themselves. In despotic systems, only unpre­dictability is predictable.'⁴