During an argument about California's water policies, I hear a Sierra Club representative pronounce that all irrigation-based societies were short-lived. Wittfogel shows just the opposite: at least in pre-industrial societies, cultures that can organize reliable agricultural irrigation schemes have been remarkably stable, productive, and powerful. The downside is that the conditions encourage rigid and despotic social forms. Book is weakest trying to make a case that Soviet Communism was a cultural descendent of Babylon (although Marx thought so too). The Germanic "Big Thought" style is stimulating for most of the book but gets a little heavy-handed in spots when it drifts away from hard facts. You don't have to read the whole thing to get the idea. It has a lot to say about the interplay of culture and environment.