Special Issue of Telos on Wittfogel and Postliberal World Orders

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).

Telos 215 (Summer 2026): China and Sovereignty

Power, Philosophy, and World Order

“China remains the inscrutable elephant in the room for the world’s political theorists and policymakers. Its growing importance to the world’s economy and politics compels us to continue to analyze its ideological currents and political conflicts.”
—David Pan, “Introduction”

Telos 215 (Summer 2026): China and Sovereignty continues our series of issues on contemporary Chinese politics and thought. In this issue, we examine how Chinese engagement with Western thinkers such as Marx, Foucault, and Schmitt has shaped competing visions of sovereignty and world order. We also feature a special section on China and Taiwan, drawn from a recent symposium at the University of California, Irvine, on the nature of the Chinese government and the appropriate U.S. response to China’s rise.

Telos 215 (Summer 2026): China and Sovereignty

Introduction
David Pan

The “Cultural Revolution” in China and World Political Thought
Alexander Lukin

Immanent Critique without Rupture: Daoist Philosophy and the Archaeology of Order
Guojun Jiang

Schmitt in China

Sous l’œil des Chinois: The Reception of Carl Schmitt in Contemporary Chinese Political Thought
Alvise Capria

Carl Schmitt, Nazism, and the Silence of Chinese Intellectuals
Qi Zheng

China’s Schmitt Fever: Instrumentalization of Carl Schmitt by Chinese Ideological Elites
Joseph W. Bendersky

China, Taiwan, and the United States

The Nature of Chinese Communism: Taiwan, Free Societies, and the World of Tomorrow
Gordon G. Chang

The Three Layers of China’s Politeia
Eric Hendriks

China, Sovereignty, and World Order: The Chinese Communist Party’s Attempt to Transform International Norms
David Pan

The Nature of the Chinese Regime and What the United States Should Do
Miles Yu

From Ideology to Strategy: Rethinking the Chinese Challenge
Russell A. Berman

A Quarter Century of Peace and Prosperity
John Graham

Notes and Commentary

Authoritarianism, Totalitarianism, and Boredom: A Rejoinder to Hendriks and Pan
Salvatore Babones

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