Karl wittfogel biography
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Bio: () German-American historian and sociologist. Karl Wittfogel was born in Germany, where he was a member of the Social Democratic and Communist Parties. He received his doctorate from the University of Frankfurt. After the Nazi Party came to power in Germany, he emigrated to the United States.
Wittfogel is best known for his "hydraulic thesis", which he presented most thoroughly in the book Oriental Despotism (). The hydraulic thesis is a hypothesis about the emergence of the first states on the territory of Asia and Egypt. Wittfogel starts from Marx's concept of the "Asian mode of production" in order to explain the origin and development of oriental despotic states. According to Wittfogel, the Asian way of production is a product of specific ecological circumstances. In the valleys of large rivers (Nile, Indus, Yangtze, etc.), societies have developed irrigation technology to increase agricultural production.
As agricultural prod
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Karl Wittfogel is best known for his "hydraulic hypothesis": he thought that the development of Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, China and Pre-columbian societies had been blocked because of the need to irrigate vast surfaces for agriculture. Water control and distribution had spawned authoritarian centralized empires and sprawling bureaucracies, both deeply hostile to change. Western Europe was free of such limitations and thus could rise, alone. A short introduction and comment.
Wittfogel's Lifeline
Karl A. Wittfogel was born on 06 September in Woltersdorf (Germany). In , he entered the German Army. In , he joined the socialist party. In , he became a high school teacher in Tinz. In , Wittfogel joined the communist party. In , he concluded his first marriage.
In the twenties, Wittfogel wrote several communist essays and novels. Between and , he worked as a research associate at the Institute for social research of University of Frankfurt. In he published his first analysis of C
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Karl�August�Wittfogel
Wittfogel, Karl August (). In his book Rivers of Empire, Donald Worster (p. 23, 24, and 29) provides an excellent short biography of Karl August Wittfogel.
"Wittfogel was born in in the Hanoverian by of Woltersdorg, Germany. He grew to maturity during the most tumultuous period in modern times, the era of the two world wars, the Russian Revolution, the fascist madness, and the rise of totalitarianism. In he joined the German Communist party, subsequently becoming one of the leading Marxist scholars in the Weimar Republic. But he was also, in this chaotic swirling of ideas, a lärjunge of the writings of that other seminal thinker in Germany, Max Weber. It was Weber who first introduced him to the peculiar "hydraulic-bureaucratic official-state" in China and India, and as a lärling of those states, Wittfogel soon made his reputation by attempting to discover how their bureaucratic apparatus had komma into being and what impact it had had on their socia