Karl Wittfogel’s 1957 magnum opus, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power, came out at the peak of the Cold War. As a former Marxist, Wittfogel saw analysis of what he called “hydraulic despotism” in premodern Asian bureaucratic empires as of more than merely regional or historical interest. With an eye to Soviet and Maoist developments, he argued that “[t]otal power, far from merely meekly withering away, is spreading like a virulent and aggressive disease. It is this condition that recalls man’s previous experience with extreme forms of despotic rule.”

Wittfogel contrasted “hydraulic societies” with feudalism and modern capitalism. Driven by ecological imperatives of irrigation and flood control, bureaucratic systems emerged in much of Asia and achieved sustained domination over rival power centers in society. Just as private property existed on the sufferance of political power, so too did individual ambition and social prestige gravitate to state service. While this model prevailed longest and most consistently in settings like ancient Egypt, Mughal India, and premodern China, it found analogues elsewhere whenever material conditions and rulers’ convenience converged, including the Roman and Inka Empires. No part of the world, Wittfogel warned, was immune to hydraulic taming of free peoples; they succumbed on the frontier more easily than they might imagine. In the Cold War context of modern state socialism, indeed, such hierarchical systems could penetrate even more deeply into daily life: “The industrial despotism of the fully developed and totally managerial apparatus society combines total political power with total social and intellectual domination.”

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