First edition of this Marxist analysis of science and education in the bourgeois society, including a prospect of the situation under the dictatorship of the proletariat. This determined radical book was published as volume 8 of the Leine revolutionäre Bibliothek and is based on lectures the 25-year-old Wittfogel gave in Leipzig and Brünn in academic circles and at the Congress of Communist Students in March 1922. The design of the cover is by John Heartfield, the brother of the publisher Wieland Herzfelde.

Some of Wittfogel’s analyses, e.g. that of the class division of the academic staff foreshadow Karl Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge. Wittfogel was an active member of the Communist Party, and is best known for his anthropological and sociological book Oriental Despotism: A comparative Study of Total Power, published in 1957, when he had become a critique of communism and Stalinist despotism.

Der Malik-Verlag, 1916-1947, p. 254.

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