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Karl August Wittfogel
USIFNO | 2013-06-25 13:58
Karl Wittfogel in the American Communist newspaper.The Daily Worker, 1926.
Karl August Wittfogel (6 September 1896, Woltersdorf – 25 May 1988, New York) 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 Anticommunist.
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[1]
Before the First World War, he was the leader of the LüneburgWandervogel group.[2] In 1918, he set up the Lüneburg local[3] of the radical Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD). In 1920, he joined the Communist Party of Germany (KPD).[4] Wittfogel met Karl Korsch in 1920[5] and was invited to the 1923 conference that helped establish the Institute for Social Research[6] and from 1925 to 1933 was a member of the Institute.[7] He received his Ph.D. from the Frankfurter Universität in 1928.[8] All the time Wittfogel was an active and faithful member of the communist party and a vocal critic of all its enemies.[9] When Hitler came to power in 1933, Wittfogel tried to escape to Switzerland, but was arrested and interned in prisons and concentration camps.[10] An international outcry[11] 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.[12] Anthropologist Esther Schiff Goldfrank became Wittfogel's wife in 1940.[13] 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,[14] 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.[15] 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.[16] 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.[17]
The Asiatic Mode of Production
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. 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. Wittfogel's anticommunism led in Oriental Despotism to extend the hydraulic hypothesis to Russia, where it hardly is applicable.
Barrington Moore, George Lichtheim and especially Pierre Vidal-Naquet are among the noted scientists who wrote on Wittfogel. F. Tökei, Gianni Sofri, Maurice Godelier and Wittfogel's estranged pupil Lawrence Krader, then Maoist F. Kramer or Claus LeggewieHelmutRaich 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.
Selected Works (in German)
VomUrkommunismusbiszurproletarischen Revolution, EineSkizze der Entwicklung der bürgerlichenGesellschaft, 1. TeilUrkommunismus und Feudalismus, VerlagJungeGarde, Berlin C 2, 1922, 79 p.[18]
Die Wissenschaft der bürgerlichenGesellschaft. EinemarxistischeUntersuchung, Malik, Berlin, 1922
Geschichte der bürgerlichenGesellschaft. Von ihrenAnfängenbiszurSchwelle der großen Revolution, Malik, Wien, 1924
Das erwachende China, EinAbriß der Geschichte und der gegenwärtigenProbleme Chinas, AGIS Verlag, Wien, 1926
Shanghai- Kanton, VereinigungInternationaleVerlags-Anstalten, Berlin, 1927[19]
Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft Chinas, Versuch der wissenschaftlichenAnalyseeinergroßenasiatischenAgrargesellschaft, Hirschfeld, Leipzig, 1931, XXIV, 767 P. (=Schriften des InstitutsfürSozialforschung der Universität Frankfurt am Main, No. 3)
Die natürlichenUrsachen der Wirtschaftsgeschichte, in ArchivfürSozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, 67, 1932, pp. 466–492, 597-609, 711-731.
Die Theorie der orientalischenGesellschaft, in ZeitschriftfürSozialforschung, Vol. 7, No. 12, Alcan, Paris, 1938
Interviews
“Conversations with Wittfogel”. Telos 43 (Spring 1980).Telos Press, New York.
Plays
Julius Haidvogel (= K. A. Wittfogel), Der Krüppel (The Cripple). in Der Gegner, Vol. 2, Nr. 4, Malik, Berlin, 1920, p. 94ff..
Rote Soldaten.PolitischeTragödie in fünfAkten (Red Soldiers), Malik, Berlin, 1921
Der Mann der eineIdee hat.ErotischesSchauspiel in vierAkten (The Man Who Has an Idea), Malik, Berlin, 1922, and 1933
Die Mutter - Der Flüchtling. ZweiEinakter (The Mother &The Refugee, 2 one-act plays, Malik, Berlin, 1922
Werist der DümmsteEineFragean dasSchicksal in einemVorspiel und vierAkten. (Who is the Biggest Fool), Malik, Berlin, 1923
Gustav von Wangenheim, Da liegt der Hundbegraben und andereStücke, Ausdem Repertoire der Truppe 31, Rowohlt, Reinbek b. Hamburg, 1974
Der Wolkenkratzer. Amerikanischer Sketch (The Skyscraper), Malik, 1924[20]
Works (in English)
The Foundations and Stages of Chinese Economic History, ZeitschriftfürSozialforschung, Alcan, Paris, 4, 1935, p. 26-60.
New Light on Chinese Society; An Investigation of China's Socio-Economic Structure, Institute of Pacific Relations, New York, 1938
The Society of Prehistoric China, Alcan, Paris, 1939
Meteorological Records from the Divination Inscriptions of Shang, American Geographical Society (1940)
Public Office in the Liao Dynasty and the Chinese Examination System ..., Harvard-Yenching Institute (1947)
With Feng Chia-sheng et al., History of Chinese Society, Liao, 907-1125, American Philosophical Society, Transactions. Distributed by the Macmillan Co., New York, 1949
With Chia-shêngFêng and Karl H. Menges, History of Chinese society Liao (907-1125). Appendix V, Qara-Khitay 1949
Russia and Asia Problems of Contemporary Area Studies and International Relations, 1950
Asia's Freedom...and the Land Question 1950
The influence of Leninism-Stalinism on China, 1951
The Review of Politics The Historical Position of Communist China Doctrine and Reality, University of Notre Dame Press (1954)
Mao Tse-tung, Liberator or Destroyer of the Chinese Peasants, Free Trade Union Committee, American Federation of Labor, New York, 1955
The Hydraulic Civilizations Chicago, 1956
Oriental Despotism; a Comparative Study of Total Power Yale University Press, 1957
Class Structure and Total Power in Oriental Despotism, 1960
Results and Problems of the Study of Oriental Despotism 1969
Chinese Society An Historical Survey, 1957
The New Men, Hong Kong, 1958
Food and Society in China and India, New York, 1959
Peking's Independence (1959)
The Marxist View of Russian Society and Revolution, 1960
Viewer's Guide to From Marx to Mao, University of Washington (1960)
The Legend of Maoism, 1960
Class Structure and Total Power in Oriental Despotism, 1960
A Stronger Oriental Despotism 1960
The Russian and Chinese Revolutions A Socio-Historical Comparison 1961
The Marxist View of China China Quarterly, 1962
Agrarian Problems and the Moscow-Peking Axis, 1962
A Short History of Chinese Communism, University of Washington, 1964
The Chinese Red Guards and the Lin Piao Line, American-Asian Educational Exchange, Inc. (1967)
Results and Problems of the Study of Oriental Despotism 1969
Agriculture a Key to the Understanding of Chinese Society, Past and Present, Australian National University Press, 1970
Communist and Non-Communist Agrarian Systems, with Special Reference to the U.S.S.R. and Communist China, a Comparative Approach Univ. of Washington Press, Seattle, 1971
The Hydraulic Approach to Pre-spanish Mesoamerica, Austin, 1972
Some Remarks on Mao's Handling of Concepts and Problems of Dialectics, University of Washington. Far Eastern and Russian Institute, not dated
On Wittfogel
G. L. Ulmen, The Science of Society, Towards an Understanding of the Life and Work of Karl August Wittfogel, Mouton, The Hague, 1978
G. L. Ulmen, ed., Society and History, Essays in Honor of Karl August Wittfogel, Mouton, The Hague, 1978, ISBN 90-279-7776-3
Karl A. Wittfogel, George Taylor, International Encyclopedia of Social Sciences, 18 (London Collier, 1979), p. 812.
Karl August Wittfogel (6 September 1896, Woltersdorf – 25 May 1988, New York) 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 Anticommunist.
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[1]
Before the First World War, he was the leader of the LüneburgWandervogel group.[2] In 1918, he set up the Lüneburg local[3] of the radical Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD). In 1920, he joined the Communist Party of Germany (KPD).[4] Wittfogel met Karl Korsch in 1920[5] and was invited to the 1923 conference that helped establish the Institute for Social Research[6] and from 1925 to 1933 was a member of the Institute.[7] He received his Ph.D. from the Frankfurter Universität in 1928.[8] All the time Wittfogel was an active and faithful member of the communist party and a vocal critic of all its enemies.[9] When Hitler came to power in 1933, Wittfogel tried to escape to Switzerland, but was arrested and interned in prisons and concentration camps.[10] An international outcry[11] 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.[12] Anthropologist Esther Schiff Goldfrank became Wittfogel's wife in 1940.[13] 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,[14] 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.[15] 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.[16] 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.[17]
The Asiatic Mode of Production
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. 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. Wittfogel's anticommunism led in Oriental Despotism to extend the hydraulic hypothesis to Russia, where it hardly is applicable.
Barrington Moore, George Lichtheim and especially Pierre Vidal-Naquet are among the noted scientists who wrote on Wittfogel. F. Tökei, Gianni Sofri, Maurice Godelier and Wittfogel's estranged pupil Lawrence Krader, then Maoist F. Kramer or Claus LeggewieHelmutRaich 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.
Selected Works (in German)
VomUrkommunismusbiszurproletarischen Revolution, EineSkizze der Entwicklung der bürgerlichenGesellschaft, 1. TeilUrkommunismus und Feudalismus, VerlagJungeGarde, Berlin C 2, 1922, 79 p.[18]
Die Wissenschaft der bürgerlichenGesellschaft. EinemarxistischeUntersuchung, Malik, Berlin, 1922
Geschichte der bürgerlichenGesellschaft. Von ihrenAnfängenbiszurSchwelle der großen Revolution, Malik, Wien, 1924
Das erwachende China, EinAbriß der Geschichte und der gegenwärtigenProbleme Chinas, AGIS Verlag, Wien, 1926
Shanghai- Kanton, VereinigungInternationaleVerlags-Anstalten, Berlin, 1927[19]
Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft Chinas, Versuch der wissenschaftlichenAnalyseeinergroßenasiatischenAgrargesellschaft, Hirschfeld, Leipzig, 1931, XXIV, 767 P. (=Schriften des InstitutsfürSozialforschung der Universität Frankfurt am Main, No. 3)
Die natürlichenUrsachen der Wirtschaftsgeschichte, in ArchivfürSozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, 67, 1932, pp. 466–492, 597-609, 711-731.
Die Theorie der orientalischenGesellschaft, in ZeitschriftfürSozialforschung, Vol. 7, No. 12, Alcan, Paris, 1938
Interviews
“Conversations with Wittfogel”. Telos 43 (Spring 1980).Telos Press, New York.
Plays
Julius Haidvogel (= K. A. Wittfogel), Der Krüppel (The Cripple). in Der Gegner, Vol. 2, Nr. 4, Malik, Berlin, 1920, p. 94ff..
Rote Soldaten.PolitischeTragödie in fünfAkten (Red Soldiers), Malik, Berlin, 1921
Der Mann der eineIdee hat.ErotischesSchauspiel in vierAkten (The Man Who Has an Idea), Malik, Berlin, 1922, and 1933
Die Mutter - Der Flüchtling. ZweiEinakter (The Mother &The Refugee, 2 one-act plays, Malik, Berlin, 1922
Werist der DümmsteEineFragean dasSchicksal in einemVorspiel und vierAkten. (Who is the Biggest Fool), Malik, Berlin, 1923
Gustav von Wangenheim, Da liegt der Hundbegraben und andereStücke, Ausdem Repertoire der Truppe 31, Rowohlt, Reinbek b. Hamburg, 1974
Der Wolkenkratzer. Amerikanischer Sketch (The Skyscraper), Malik, 1924[20]
Works (in English)
The Foundations and Stages of Chinese Economic History, ZeitschriftfürSozialforschung, Alcan, Paris, 4, 1935, p. 26-60.
New Light on Chinese Society; An Investigation of China's Socio-Economic Structure, Institute of Pacific Relations, New York, 1938
The Society of Prehistoric China, Alcan, Paris, 1939
Meteorological Records from the Divination Inscriptions of Shang, American Geographical Society (1940)
Public Office in the Liao Dynasty and the Chinese Examination System ..., Harvard-Yenching Institute (1947)
With Feng Chia-sheng et al., History of Chinese Society, Liao, 907-1125, American Philosophical Society, Transactions. Distributed by the Macmillan Co., New York, 1949
With Chia-shêngFêng and Karl H. Menges, History of Chinese society Liao (907-1125). Appendix V, Qara-Khitay 1949
Russia and Asia Problems of Contemporary Area Studies and International Relations, 1950
Asia's Freedom...and the Land Question 1950
The influence of Leninism-Stalinism on China, 1951
The Review of Politics The Historical Position of Communist China Doctrine and Reality, University of Notre Dame Press (1954)
Mao Tse-tung, Liberator or Destroyer of the Chinese Peasants, Free Trade Union Committee, American Federation of Labor, New York, 1955
The Hydraulic Civilizations Chicago, 1956
Oriental Despotism; a Comparative Study of Total Power Yale University Press, 1957
Class Structure and Total Power in Oriental Despotism, 1960
Results and Problems of the Study of Oriental Despotism 1969
Chinese Society An Historical Survey, 1957
The New Men, Hong Kong, 1958
Food and Society in China and India, New York, 1959
Peking's Independence (1959)
The Marxist View of Russian Society and Revolution, 1960
Viewer's Guide to From Marx to Mao, University of Washington (1960)
The Legend of Maoism, 1960
Class Structure and Total Power in Oriental Despotism, 1960
A Stronger Oriental Despotism 1960
The Russian and Chinese Revolutions A Socio-Historical Comparison 1961
The Marxist View of China China Quarterly, 1962
Agrarian Problems and the Moscow-Peking Axis, 1962
A Short History of Chinese Communism, University of Washington, 1964
The Chinese Red Guards and the Lin Piao Line, American-Asian Educational Exchange, Inc. (1967)
Results and Problems of the Study of Oriental Despotism 1969
Agriculture a Key to the Understanding of Chinese Society, Past and Present, Australian National University Press, 1970
Communist and Non-Communist Agrarian Systems, with Special Reference to the U.S.S.R. and Communist China, a Comparative Approach Univ. of Washington Press, Seattle, 1971
The Hydraulic Approach to Pre-spanish Mesoamerica, Austin, 1972
Some Remarks on Mao's Handling of Concepts and Problems of Dialectics, University of Washington. Far Eastern and Russian Institute, not dated
On Wittfogel
G. L. Ulmen, The Science of Society, Towards an Understanding of the Life and Work of Karl August Wittfogel, Mouton, The Hague, 1978
G. L. Ulmen, ed., Society and History, Essays in Honor of Karl August Wittfogel, Mouton, The Hague, 1978, ISBN 90-279-7776-3
Karl A. Wittfogel, George Taylor, International Encyclopedia of Social Sciences, 18 (London Collier, 1979), p. 812.
