Karl August Wittfogel

From Conservapedia

Karl August Wittfogel (6 September 1896 - 25 May 1988). Wittfogel was a German historian and sinologist. In the 1920s and early 30s, he was an active member of the German Communist party and, between 1925 and 1933, a member of the Frankfurt School.

Deconstructionism, critical thinking, and the political correctness movement were birthed at the Frankfurt School. Leading figures of the Frankfurt School are Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and Wittfogel as well. [1]

After being interned in a concentration camp by the Nazis (1931–33), he moved to the United States, becoming a naturalized citizen in 1939. There he held academic positions at Columbia University and at the University of Washington.

Wittfogel had a point in considering, in the 50s, the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China as the greatest threats to mankind's further development. These two states were the examples he actually had in mind when writing about "Asian despotism", and how it could be vanquished.

His research on the relationship between the managerial demands of irrigation agriculture and the development of bureaucratic totalitarianism, outlined in his book, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power (1957), profoundly shaped anthropological theories of the origins of complex societies and the state.