The Origins of Autocracy

Notwithstanding that Toynbee's essay displays to the full his awe­some erudition in regard to the conflicts between popes and em­perors, it appears considerably less well-founded than Wittfogel's ar­gument, and I frankly do not see any adequate basis for the haughty criticism to which Toynbee subjects his opponent. Rather, both of them give the impression of being helpless prisoners of the fatal bipo­lar model, which has deprived them of the possibility of following the concrete processes of Russian history, and of answering its concrete questions. They were simply more interested in global constructions than in the urgent problems of any particular national history. As a result, however, this particular national history has proved to be beyond the limits of the global models which they have constructed.

5. The "Patrimonial" Interpretation

Until recently, the lively competition between the "Tatar" and "By­zantine" interpretations has, for the most part, dominated philosoph­ical-historical thinking about Russia in the West. However, with the appearance of Richard Pipes's book, Russia Under the Old Regime, which has apparently proved unusually popular,¹

'' this thinking has taken on a new dimension. A fundamentally new conception has emerged, rejecting from the outset the very thought of Russia as an "Oriental despotism."²⁰ Instead, Russia is defined as a "patrimonial monarchy"—that is, a polity "where the rights of sovereignty and those of ownership blend to the point of becoming indistinguish­able;"²

' or, more precisely, a political structure run by its tsars much as

When, at the University of California at Berkeley, I recommended that my stu­dents read Pipes's book, it turned out that all 12 (!) copies available in the libraries were in use. I did not hear anything like this about any other book which I recommended.

Pipes writes that while "one might have expected Russia to develop early in its history something akin to the bureaucratic regime of the 'despotic' or 'Asiatic' kind . . . for a variety of reasons its political development took a somewhat different route. . . . [I]t knew nothing of central economic management until the imposition of War Communism in 1918. But even if such management had been required, the country's natural conditions would have prevented its introduction. One need only consider the difficulties of transport and communication in Russia before the advent of railroads and telegraphs to realize that the kind of control and surveillance essential to an 'Orien­tal Despotism' was entirely out of the question here" (Russia under the Old Regime,

p. 20).

Ibid., pp. 22-23. Amazingly, Pipes's definition almost literally corresponds with another one already known to the reader. Only Marx had in mind precisely what Pipes is rejecting: "Oriental despotism." the primitive family is run by the paterfamilias. More than that, the very definition of despotism is subjected to revision. It is treated not as a distinct political structure, but as a "deviation" from normal mon­archy, based not on tradition, but on force. The "patrimonial state," on the other hand, is said to be based on tradition ("the primitive family").

Here conflicts between sovereignty and property do not and cannot arise because . . . they are one and the same thing. A despot violates his sub­jects' property rights; a patrimonial ruler does not even acknowledge their existence. By inference, under a patrimonial system there can be no clear distinction between state and society in so far as such a distinc­tion postulates the right of persons other than the sovereign to exercise control over things and (where there is slavery) over persons.. . . Classi­cal examples of patrimonial regimes are to be found among the Hellenis­tic states which emerged from the dissolution of the empire of Alex­ander the Great, such as Egypt of the Ptolemies (305—30 вс) and the Attalid state in Pergamum (c. 283-133 вс).[63]