The Origins of Autocracy

Such arguments are good for rejecting Wittfogel. For understand­ing him, they are useless. In the first place, history and politics are synthesized for him in a single and indivisible whole, like the root and branches of a tree: no aspect of politics can be understood without involving history in the analysis, and no part of history can be under­stood if we leave politics aside. In the second place, the interdisciplin­ary approach, according to Wittfogel, works only in the context of world history (of what he calls an "inter-area" approach). These are his postulates. One may not agree with them; one may regret that he does not always follow them; but one cannot argue with him con­structively without understanding them. A poet, as we know, is judged by the laws of his genre.

At any rate, on this methodological plane, Wittfogel struggled (quite unsuccessfully, to judge by many reviews of his work) on the Western front, so to speak, against his super-specialized colleagues from European and American academia, insisting on his right to syn­thesize history, politics, and theory. In all other dimensions, his strug­gle took place on the Eastern front.

The thrust of his conception, on the level of abstract theory, con­sists in the denial of the Marxist postulate as to the unilinear nature of the historical process. This theme is painful for him, as for any de­frocked Marxist, and he returns many times to the assertion of what he calls the "multilinear theory of social development." This is a highly respectable point of view. The only trouble is that, having tri­umphantly declared it, Wittfogel is unfortunately by no means in a position to adhere to it. In fact, his central thesis asserts that despo­tism has one historical starting-point—the need to construct gigantic irrigation facilities in Oriental agrarian societies, leading to the for­mation of a managerial-bureaucratic class which enslaves society. This is why Wittfogel prefers to call despotism a "hydraulic" or "ag- romanagerial" civilization. However, at this point he encounters a strange phenomenon: some civilizations, which correspond to his de­scription of despotism, turn out to be located outside the "hydraulic" sphere. A historian who has asserted the "multilinear theory of social development" should not be bothered by this circumstance. On the contrary, it should only serve as the starting-point for the analysis of other parallel "lines." However, for some reason, Wittfogel declines to follow the logic of the theory he is defending. Instead, he suddenly starts to erect a highly complex hierarchy of despotisms, intended to free politics from hydraulics and to permit him to extend his con­ception to the predominant portion of the "nonhydraulic" world. In addition to the "dense" or "nuclear" despotisms, this hierarchy in­cludes "marginal" or even "semimarginal" despotisms, which no longer have even the remotest relation to artificial irrigation of crops. Thus, the entire world—beyond the confines of Western Europe and Japan—regardless of the amount of precipitation, is drawn into the pit of hydraulic despotism, and gradually marshalled in one uniform "line." At this point, Wittfogel's conception suddenly begins to take on, obviously and with frightening clarity, those same features of uni- versalism which he so hates in Marxism. Only, in place of the unilinear gospel according to Karl Marx, we get the bilinear (obviously Man- ichaean) gospel according to Karl Wittfogel. And by this detour, we again return to the same old bipolar model. This is in turn directly connected to the problem of Russia as a "semimarginal despotism."

In the early articles of the 1950s and in his book, Wittfogel does not seem to harbor the slightest doubts as to Russia's membership in the despotic family. However, in answering his opponents Nicholas Riasanovsky and Berthold Spuler during a 1963 debate in Slavic Re­view, he seems a bit more careful. Here is his final formulation: