It should be noted that there have been times in the history of Europe when despotology has ceased to be mere academic theorizing, and become a weapon in an immediate and urgent political and ideological struggle. We can count at least four such occasions. The first was the attempt by despotic Persia to conquer Athens in the fifth century b.c. (giving rise, in particular, to Aristotle's speculations concerning the existence of "hereditary and despotic royal power among the barbarians"). The second, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries,
5. Ibid.
was marked by the seemingly irresistible onslaught of the Turks on Europe and the creation of absolutism (giving rise, in particular, to the conceptions of "seignorial monarchy" in France and "autocracy" in Russia). The third such occasion came in the second half of the eighteenth century, when European absolutism appeared to have slid finally into despotism (bringing with it, in particular, Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws). The fourth came in the middle of our century, when the onslaught of what is now called totalitarianism once again seemed to be irresistible. People who died in 1940 could actually have thought that the hour of the Last Judgment had come. This brought with it, in particular, Karl A. Wittfogel's Oriental Despotism as a reaction to the extreme danger to which civilization was exposed.
Wittfogel's book—despite the author's political extremism, and the highly debatable but unconditionally expressed thesis of "hydraulic civilization" as the historic source of despotism—nevertheless gave the first detailed description of this political category. In this sense, it could have marked the transformation of despotology into a science.6
6. Wittfogel's book Oriental Despotism was received with drawn swords by most specialists, including the historian Arnold Toynbee; the sociologist S. N. Eisenstadt; the sinologist Wolfram Eberhard; Berthold Spuhler, specialist on the Golden Horde; and S. Andreski, a specialist in comparative sociology. It was also attacked in the Soviet press—and, incidentally, from a very interesting point of view. The only review from Moscow known to me berated Wittfogel for not having understood "the real role of despotic society in the East as inevitable at a certain stage of political development of society." And furthermore, as a "political form [which] was in some respects necessary and progressive (Sovetskoe kitaevedenie, no. 3 [1958], p. 195; my emphasis).
In chapter 4, devoted especially to the "despotists," we will consider this unanimous rejection in more detail. Now let us say only that in casting doubt on Wittfogel's concept of "hydraulic civilization" as a determining condition for "agromanagerial despotism," they also reject the notion of despotism as a distinct political structure, declaring it, for example, as Toynbee did, to be a myth invented by the Greeks in the fifth century в.с. and revived by Wittfogel out of purely political considerations.
In fact, nothing in these arguments against the conception of "hydraulic civilization" operates against the phenomenon of despotism as such. In Igor' D'akonov's study of the social structure of ancient Mesopotamia (Obshchestvennyi i gosudarstbennyi stroi drevnego Dvurech'ia. Shumer) the existence in predespotic Sumer of city-states headed by rulers (ensi) whose power was limited by an aristrocratic senate and an assembly of the people is shown. It follows that large-scale irrigation facilities in ancient Mesopotamia, just as in ancient predespotic China (see L. S. Perelomov, Imperiia Tsin'—pervoe tsentral- izovannoe gosudarstvo Kitaia), could be supported and regulated not only by a centralized bureaucracy, but by city-states of the ancient type. D'akonov notes, however, that despotism nevertheless did arise in Mesopotamia in the Third Dynasty of Ur (2132-24 в.с.), while Perelomov concedes that it appeared in China under the Ch'in Dynasty, though rejecting it for the Yin and Chou Dynasties.
Neither is the existence of despotism refuted by the constant and fierce struggle
When I constructed my "ideal model" of despotism, I was not familiar with Wittfogel's work; I had never had occasion to encounter it in Moscow, and I am not sure that more than a couple of scholars had read it there. I am glad, however, that, at least in certain essential points, the "construction" which I now intend to offer the reader echoes Wittfogel's description.
3. Despotism
This is how it looks. Despotism is based on the total disposition by the administration of the results of the society's economic activity. The despotic state, possessing supreme sovereignty over the entire national product (that is, being able to extract it without hindrance from the producers), does not recognize economic limitations on its power. The absence of economic limitations, by paralyzing the initiative of the producers, naturally leads—in historical perspective—to more or less permanent stagnation. In other words, despotism is incapable of radical economic modernization.
The lack of what we call economic progress is combined with an absence of political dynamism—with what can be called the simple political reproduction of despotism. This confirms Montesquieu's assertion that despotism excludes the historical movement of society. In order to exist for millennia under conditions of economic and political immobility, despotism had to work out a special kind of social structure. It is characterized by extreme simplification and polariza-
within despotic elites—a struggle which at times made despots dependent on their own bureaucratic power base, as Balazs asserts with regard to China (E. Balazs, Chinese Civilisation and Bureaucracy), or on bureaucrats who had succeeded temporarily in turning themselves into semifeudal landlords, as Christensen asserts for Sassanid Persia (see A. Christensen, L'Iran sous les Sassanides), or on a priestly oligarchy, as Andreski asserts relative to Egypt during the so-called New Kingdom (S. Andreski, Elements of Comparative Sociology, p. 167). Quite the contrary: even Iurii Krizhanich knew that the intraelite struggle, and the dependence of the despot on it, is a generic trait of despotism and the cause of its always having been a structure with an unstable leadership.
And, in any case, none of these objections alters the fact that there is a class of political structures known to history which over the course of millennia experienced no political development, and as a consequence proved incapable of changing their fundamental parameters—if you like, their paradigms—from within. It seems to me that this is what Krizhanich, Montesquieu, Hegel, Jones, and Tocqueville had in mind when they wrote about despotism. Until this is refuted, the phenomenon of despotism requires study, regardless of what attitude we take toward Wittfogel's conception; for he was the first- after Montesquieu—to place what I call the science of despotology in the focus of our attention with such force and clarity.
tion of society—by its reduction into two polar classes: "the governors" and "the governed."[20]
To the economic immobility of this system there corresponds the immobility of the class of the governed (the reduction to a minimum of what is called in modern sociology the horizontal mobility of the population, and its lack of political differentiation, so that the administration confronts not politically discrete society, but a uniform mass of subjects, hypothetically equal before the person of the despot.[21]