Abstract

Karl August Wittfogel is the most controversial writer on Asia in the twentieth century and one of the most controversial figures in the history of Marxism and the Communist Movement. His journey from a Marxist and Communist in good standing in the 1920s to a “heretic” in 1931 with the publication of his book, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft Chinas, to a “renegade of Marxism” and opponent of the Communist movement, most notably in his 1957 book, Oriental Despotism, is one of the most extraordinary intellectual and political developments of a major thinker in recent times. Already in the tumultous years of the Weimar Republic, Wittfogel was an intellectual and political storm center and he has remained so until the present.