The Despotism of Concepts: Wittfogel and Marx on China

Abstract

Despite his claim to have advanced beyond Marxism and arrived at an entirely new conception of the nature of traditional non-Western societies, it is somewhat surprising to learn that Professor Karl Wittfogel still feels the need to seek the testimony of no less an “authority” on Asia than Karl Marx. In a recent article in this journal Professor Wittfogel has once again examined the canons of Marxism in order to find support for the theory of “Oriental despotism.” In this case the articles that Marx and Engels wrote on China during the 1850s have been rescued from obscurity and presented as major canonical texts in the evolution of the doctrine of “Oriental despotism.”