Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Referring to a form of political organization in which a centralized bureaucracy controls water supplies and irrigation works, the concept was made famous by Karl Wittfogel who wrote a book with this title (1957), but it nevertheless has a complicated history and wider reference. The term despotism is very old, but it is generally considered that Montesquieu (1749) was the first to use it systematically in drawing a distinction between monarchy and despotism. While the former system of government comprised a number of ranked levels, the latter, thought to be characteristic of Asia, featured a chasm between the ruling despot and the people who were all alike in being ‘nothing’. Many other writers were interested in Asiatic societies in the eighteenth century. Adam Smith (1776), for example, argued that despotism, linked to agriculture rather than commerce, was a type of society at a low level of evolutionary development, and largely in a stationary state. In the nineteenth century the focus of attention switched from government and ruler to the supposedly selfsufficient and largely isolated village communities that constituted the individual units of oriental society. With Karl Marx oriental society became the Asiatic system. The development of this concept within the tradition of Marxism is difficult to trace both because Marx's ideas on the evolution of social formations changed ... log in or subscribe to read full text