CALL FOR PAPERS
Telos Special Issue on Wittfogel and Postliberal World Orders
Co-edited by Adam K. Webb and Joseph Bendersky
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.”
The language of “oriental despotism” smacks of a different age, to be sure. Historians of Asia have also often looked askance at Wittfogel’s world-historical generalizations. Still, the typology and the more timeless questions he raised can carry over in provocative ways to global issues of late modernity. A post–Cold War liberal consensus in the West, around ostensibly freewheeling market globalization and multi-party democracy, has unraveled in the tensions between technocracy and populism. Technological possibilities for intrusive surveillance and algorithmic governance have expanded. Power and confidence are also seen in some quarters to have rebalanced eastward to Xi Jinping’s China and the Eurasia Belt-and-Road axis that stretches out from it.
This special issue of Telos will consider how insights from Wittfogel’s account of hydraulic societies might illuminate emerging patterns of governance, state–society relations, and world order. To what extent do continuities in political culture and templates of authority inform the global vision proffered by rising powers like China? Are alleged trends of de-globalization and resurgent sovereignty merely a pause on the trajectory toward a more pluralistic world society, or do they mark a return to vast continental leviathans of an older sort? What geopolitical and demographic shifts align with or thwart such political visions, on a world stage with the West, Eurasia, and the Global South pulling in different directions over coming decades? Do the social structures, psychological predispositions, and technological capacities of late modernity mark a fundamental break in the conditions under which past models of “hydraulic society” applied, or do they cast familiar shadows with nothing new under the sun? To what extent are images of past societies—with their risks of essentialism—deployed in present discourse about existential struggles for world mastery and their stakes?
Contributions are invited from historical, philosophical, and social science disciplines, and from perspectives both sympathetic to and critical of Wittfogel’s applicability to the present. We are especially interested in original and rigorous theoretical arguments that connect historical insights to contemporary phenomena or cases and their future implications.
Submission Guidelines
Length: Full papers should be 6,000 to 8,500 words, inclusive of citations and references.
Deadline for paper submissions: June 30, 2027
Submissions should be made via Scholastica at our Submissions page and should conform to the Telos style and editorial guidelines.
Inquiries can be directed to Adam K. Webb (adamkwebb@jhu.edu) or Joseph Bendersky (jbenders@vcu.edu).
