Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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32 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Deep Germanic insight into pre-industrial geopolitics, July 24, 1998
During an argument about California's water policies, I hear a Sierra Club representative pronounce that all irrigation-based societies were short-lived. Wittfogel shows just the opposite: at least in pre-industrial societies, cultures that can organize reliable agricultural irrigation schemes have been remarkably stable, productive, and powerful. The downside is that the conditions encourage rigid and despotic social forms. Book is weakest trying to make a case that Soviet Communism was a cultural descendent of Babylon (although Marx thought so too). The Germanic "Big Thought" style is stimulating for most of the book but gets a little heavy-handed in spots when it drifts away from hard facts. You don't have to read the whole thing to get the idea. It has a lot to say about the interplay of culture and environment.
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"Oriental" means "extreme", June 8, 2007
Regarding Wittfogel's classic work with the "politically correct" lens of today, it is unfortunate that he titled his book "Oriental Despotism" because that too often leads to perspective readers' hasty (and erroneous) conclusion that (a) Wittfogel believed that only the "Orient" or governments east of West Europe were dictatorial; and therefore (b)Wittfogel most certainly must have been racist.
Alas, neither assumption is true because Wittfogel included into his class of "Oriental Despotism" also such polities as Egypt of the Pharaohs, Czarist Russia, and the pre-Columbian kingdoms in Central & South America, such as the Incas and Aztecs. And those certainly were not "oriental"!
To date, Wittfogel's thesis remains insightful and important. This is that geography or ecology determines the kind of government that is formed--IN A PRE-INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY. He hypothesized that in the pre-industrial age, places that undertake "hydraulic" agriculture have a hyper-despotic (or dictatorial) government for functional reasons. His thinking goes as follows:
* Pre-industrial farming can be divided into two types: (a) hydro (where farming has the good fortune of on-the-spot rainfall; or (b) hydraulic (where there is fertile soil but not on-the-spot rainfall; therefore, water will have to be brought in via irrigation or hydraulic engineering, e.g., dams, reservoirs, irrigation channels, and flood control dikes).
* In a pre-industrial society, however, this large-scale hydraulic construction requires the manual labor of LARGE numbers of people.
* Human nature being what it is, most people cannot see the benefits to themselves of engaging in such labor.
* Therefore, people will have to be coerced to undertake such labor--but only in the agricultural off-season, so as not to affect farming. Thus, this is a semi-slave or corvee labor.
* To coerce people to work on the hydraulic projects requires a very powerful--i.e., despotic--government.
* Once such a despotic government is in place, nothing can stop it from growing even bigger and more dictatorial, short of a massive popular uprising that is extremely destructive in lives and property. Nor can such a government be prevented from using corvee labor for non-hydraulic projects, such as the construction of palaces, mausoleums, the great pyramids of Egypt, the impressive "temples" in Central & South America, & the Great Wall of China.
* Once such a hyper-despotic state is in place, the ruler (be it pharoah, czar, king, or emperor) shapes the society's culture & ideology to his own benefit, into one that emphasizes the status quo, obedience & submission to authority, and a hierarchical authoritarian social structure; and deemphasizes individualism, freedom, and innovation.
* This hyper-despotic state is unchecked by anyone--man or institution (such as church)--which makes it different from the despotism of monarchies in medieval Western Europe. The latter at least had to contend with the Catholic Church. Ergo, the name "Oriental Despotism" to contrast it with the garden-variety "Western (European) Despotism."
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A must read book, with a view to anticipating what could be updated for today, January 26, 2008
I was recently reminded why this book is so important even for today. And I want to suggest a method of re-reading this book.
I read the book in 1986 once and have not re-read it since. But its themes stay with me always. Later I read more on branches of thought related to Wittfogel. To the specialist, Joseph Needham and others that followed may not be related. But to the generalist in me, the story is related.
Wittfogel hit the central nerve of what drives societies and the growth of governments, large organizations or empires. My read is that it was the how wealth and power flowed through rulership structures (ie, control the water, salt distribution, inheritance tax, etc) and how rulers retained power.
To graft the analysis onto to today, we could track not only governments or companies, but key organizations. Say the Fed, for instance. And say the Fed in coordination with large banking as well as related organizations. The picture that would come through, I suspect, is the control of the flow of capital and money flows in ways which could be compared to the control of water irigation and its impact on agricultural output thousands of years back.
To me it makes a lot of sense. On the one hand our societies are more decentralized (there are more flows to track). Yet the flow of money and the ability to direct it has got to be the most important control activity engaged in by the leaders of today (we don't need to call them financial despots, but we can use a few labels perhaps...).
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by Roberto Bolano
