Karl August Wittfogel
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Karl August Wittfogel (Woltersdorf (Germany, 6 September 1896 — New York City, 25 May 1988) was a German historian and sinologist.
Wittfogel took a Ph.D. at the University of Frankfurt in 1928. He joined the German Communist Party in 1920 and in the 1920s and early 30s, he was an active member of the party. Between 1925 and 1933 he was a member of the Institute for Social Research, better known as the Frankfurt School. During this period he was a vocal critic of the German Nazi Party and when Hitler came to power in 1933 he decided to leave Germany. Before he could leave he was arrested and interned in a concentration camp, but was released following an international outcry. He moved to the United States, becoming a naturalized citizen in 1939. There he held academic positions at Columbia University and at the University of Washington where he taught until his retirement in 1966.
Wittfogel is best known for his work Oriental Despotism: A comparative Study of Total Power published in 1957. Starting from a Marxist analysis of the ideas of Max Weber on China and India's "hydraulic-bureaucratic official-state" and building on Marx's views of the Asiatic Mode of Production, Wittfogel came up with an analysis of the role of irrigation works in Asia, the bureaucratic structures needed to maintain them and the impact that these had on society. In his view many societies, mainly in Asia, relied heavily on the building of large-scale irrigation works. To do this, the state had to organize forced labor from the population at large. This required a large and complex bureaucracy staffed by competent and literate officials. This structure was uniquely placed to also crush civil society and any other force capable of mobilizing against the state. Such a state would inevitably be despotic, powerful, stable and wealthy.
After arriving in the United States Wittfogel began to reconsider the nature of Communism and became a strong opponent of the ideology. He came to believe that the socialized economies of the Soviet Union would ineviably lead to despotic governments even more oppressive than those of "traditional Asia". Wittfogel came to consider the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China as the greatest threats to mankind's further development. These two states were the examples he actually had in mind when writing about "Asian despotism".
