Name Karl Wittfogel Role Playwright | Education Leipzig University | |
Died May 25, 1988, New York City, New York, United States Party Communist Party of Germany Books History of Chinese Society: Liao, 907-1125 | ||
Karl August Wittfogel (6 September 1896, in Woltersdorf, Germany – 25 May 1988, in New York, United States) was a German-American playwright, historian, and sinologist. Originally a Marxist and an active member of the Communist Party of Germany, after the Second World War Wittfogel was an equally fierce anti-communist.
Contents
- Biography
- Playwright
- Oriental Despotism
- Selected Works in German
- Interviews
- Plays
- Works in English
- On Wittfogel
- Papers
- References
Biography
Karl August Wittfogel was born 6 September 1896 at Woltersdorf, in Lüchow, Province of Hanover. Wittfogel left school in 1914. He studied philosophy, history, sociology, geography at Leipzig University and also in Munich, Berlin and Rostock and in 1919 again in Berlin. From 1921 he studied sinology in Leipzig. In between Wittfogel was drafted into a Signal Corps Unit (Fernmeldeeinheit) in 1917
Before the First World War, he was the leader of the Lüneburg Wandervogel group. In 1918, he set up the Lüneburg local of the radical Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD). In 1920, he joined the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). Wittfogel met Karl Korsch in 1920 and was invited to the 1923 conference that helped establish the Institute for Social Research and from 1925 to 1933 was a member of the Institute. He received his Ph.D. from the Frankfurter Universität in 1928. Wittfogel was always an active and faithful member of the communist party and a vocal critic of all its enemies. When Hitler came to power in 1933, Wittfogel tried to escape to Switzerland, but was arrested and interned in prisons and concentration camps. An international outcry led to his freedom in 1934.
He left Germany for England and then the United States. Wittfogel's belief in the Soviet Union was destroyed with the Hitler-Stalin alliance, and he began to hate the totalitarian, "asiatic" nature of Russian and Chinese Communism from Lenin to Mao. He turned against his former comrades and denounced some of them, as well as American scholars such as Owen Lattimore and Moses I. Finley, at the McCarran Committee hearings in 1951. He came to believe that the state-owned economies of the Soviet bloc inevitably led to despotic governments even more oppressive than those of "traditional Asia" and that those regimes were the greatest threat to the future of all mankind.
In 1921 Wittfogel married Rose Schlesinger. Wittfogel's second wife was the sociologist Olga (Joffe) Lang, a Russian sociologist who traveled with him to China and collaborated with him on a project to analyze the Chinese family. Lang later published a monograph on the Chinese family and a biography of the anarchist writer, Ba Jin. Anthropologist Esther Schiff Goldfrank became Wittfogel's wife in 1940. Wittfogel held academic positions at Columbia University from 1939 and was professor for Chinese history at the University of Washington from 1947 to 1966. He died on May 25, 1988.
Playwright
In the early 1920s, Wittfogel wrote a number of communist, but also somewhat expressionistic, plays: "The Cripple", performed with other short plays on October 14, 1920 at Erwin Piscator's Berlin Proletarian Theatre, and "Red Soldiers", "The Man Who Has an Idea", "The Mother", "The Refugee", "The Skyscraper" and "Who is the Biggest Fool?", all of which were published by Malik. Wittfogel declined an offer to become the dramatic producer of the revolutionary Volksbühne (People's Stage) in Berlin, because he wanted to concentrate on his academic studies. He published some long Hegelian essays on aesthetics and literature in Die Linkskurve, journal of the Association of Proletarian Revolutionary Writers, and was a member of its editorial staff from April 1930.
Oriental Despotism
Wittfogel is best known for his monumental work Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power, first 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 sceptical view of the Asiatic Mode of Production, Wittfogel came up with an analysis of Oriental despotism which emphasized the role of irrigation works, the bureaucratic structures needed to maintain them and the impact that these had on society, coining the term "hydraulic empire" to describe the system. 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. As only a centralized administration could organize the building and maintenance of large-scale systems of irrigation, the need for such systems made bureaucratic despotism inevitable in Oriental lands. 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. Wittfogel believed this hydraulic hypothesis applied to Russia under the Soviet Union.
The sinologist Frederick W. Mote, however, strongly disagreed with Wittfogel's analysis, but others, such as Barrington Moore, George Lichtheim and especially Pierre Vidal-Naquet are among those who found the thesis stimulating. F. Tökei, Gianni Sofri, Maurice Godelier and Wittfogel's estranged pupil Lawrence Krader, then Maoist F. Kramer or Claus Leggewie/Helmut Raich concentrated on the concept. Two Berlin leaders of the SDS student movement, Rudi Dutschke and Bernd Rabehl, have published on these themes. Then East German dissident Rudolf Bahro later said that his Alternative in Eastern Europe was based on ideas of Wittfogel, but because of the latter's later anti-communism, Wittfogel could not be mentioned by name. Bahro's later ecological ideas, recounted in From Red to Green and elsewhere were likewise inspired by Wittfogel's geographical determinism.
The Hydraulic Society thesis was also taken up by ecological anthropologists such as Marvin Harris. Further applications of the thesis included that to Mayan society, when aerial photographs revealed the network of canals in the Mayan areas of Yucatan. Critics have denied that Ceylon or Bali are truly hydraulic in the Wittfogel sense.