Wittfogel, Karl August (1896-1988). In his book
Rivers of Empire, Donald Worster (p. 23,
24, and 29) provides an excellent short biography of Karl August Wittfogel.
"Wittfogel was born in 1896 in the Hanoverian village of Woltersdorg,
Germany. He grew to maturity during the most tumultuous period in modern times, the era
of the two world wars, the Russian Revolution, the fascist madness, and the rise
of totalitarianism. In 1920 he joined the German Communist party, subsequently
becoming one of the leading Marxist scholars in the Weimar Republic. But he was
also, in this chaotic swirling of ideas, a student of the writings of that other
seminal thinker in Germany, Max Weber. It was Weber who first introduced him to
the peculiar "hydraulic-bureaucratic official-state" in China and India, and as a
student of those states, Wittfogel soon made his reputation by attempting to
discover how their bureaucratic apparatus had come into being and what impact it
had had on their social structure."
"In his first work, Economy and Society in China, published in
1931, he attempted the difficult task of merging Weber's emphasis on the influence
of bureaucracy on thought and power with Marx's analysis of economic class relations
and politics. That significant early work was written at the Institute for Social
Research--popularly known as the Frankfurt School--which Wittfogel had joined in
1925."
"Just as he was launching himself on his career as an Asia scholar, however,
Wittfogel's world fell apart. In 1933 Adolf Hitler took command of Germany, and
immediately the young scholar found his life in danger, for he had been an outspoken
critic of fascism, assailing it from the public platform in city after city. While
attempting to flee the country, he was picked up by the police and thrown in a
concentration camp."
"A vigorous outpouring of protest from English and American intellectuals
persuaded the Gestapo to release him after several months, and thereupon he
migrated to the United States, first to Columbia University, then to the University
of Washington, where he taught Chinese history until his retirement in 1966. By
that point, he had long since forsaken his early communist enthusiasms--if fact, he
had become rigidly anticommunist, attacking the Russians as vigorously as he
once had the fascists. His was a wild, heady life, one that was always in the thick
of momentous issues." Today it is hard to find any treatise on ancient hydraulic
society that does invoke Wittfogel's ideas.
He published Oriental Despotism: A comparative Study of Total Power
in 1957. The book examines the origins of complex societies and states. Historical
in nature, the book identifies the management of water as a method used by Chinese
emperors to gain power over their people. The emporers developed "hydraulic
societies" which were dependent on complex irrigation systems. Wittfogel felt that the
cost of hydraulic construction and its subsequent maintenance required a political
and social structure capable of forceful extraction of labor. This led to
despotism. "Those who control the (hydraulic) network are uniquely prepared to
wield supreme power."
"Even as Wittfogel was wandering off into anticommunist tendentiousness, he began
to acquire a following among a new groups of scholars, the cultural ecologists in
anthropology. They were less interested in either his new or his old politics than
in his theory of irrigation and society. In 1953 Julian Steward, an
anthropologist at Columbia and later at University of Illinois, asked Wittfogel
to join a symposium on irrigation assembling in Tucson, Arizona, where he would
meet experts on Meopotamia and Mesoamerica, intensely attracted to his hydraulic
ideas."
Donald Worster (p. 30) criticizes the ecological anthropologists for not
extending their studies and conclusions to modern hydraulic societies. "One of the most
serious weaknesses in that literature, it must be said straight off, is that the
modern experience with irrigation hardly appears in it. Nowhere do the ecological
anthropologists--nor does Wittfogel, for that matter--seem to realize
that the link between water control and social power might occur in places other than
the archaic cradles of civilization nor that the past hundred years have seen more
irrigation development than all of previous history."
At 91, Karl Wittfogel died leaving behind his wife Ester Goldfrank, a renowned
anthropologist.
 | Source |
|---|
| | Worsher, Donald. 1985. Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and Growth of the American West, Pantheon Books, New York. |
