Moore's Social Origins Research Articles

Where and When Was Democracy Invented?

Barrington Moore's Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy made explicit an influential but usually unstated principle for comparative political sociology. In his search for the social sources of different sorts of political systems, Moore devoted chapters to revolutionary or quasi-revolutionary upheavals in England, France, the United States, Japan, China, and India. He did not feel it equally important to consider the history of democracy in Scandinavia, the Low Countries, or Switzerland (not to mention Canada, Australia, and New Zealand). The lesser players on the world stage, buffeted by the prestigious ideologies of the greater players, tied to the latter's economies and sometimes assaulted by their armies, are less rewarding as research sites for comparativists looking for distinct national “cases” to test their ideas. Small, weaker powers are not, in this reasoning, independent cases of anything. One presumes the same logic led Moore to include only third world giants like China and India and not the many other countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Characteristically, it is Germany and Russia that Moore regards as the most significant cases of democratic failure omitted from his study: not Spain or Italy, let alone Bolivia or Burma.Barrington Moore, Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966), pp. xi–xiii. Moore went on to tackle the missing German case in Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt (White Plains, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1978) and, more briefly, the Russian in Authority and Inequality Under Capitalism and Socialism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). In many a theory of “modernization,” England—or England and France—have been taken as prototypes or paradigmatic cases, and the broad outlines of their histories are therefore far more likely to have entered the education of American sociologists than the histories of other places in Europe or beyond. Sometimes the presumed centrality of one or more of these cases is made explicit, sometimes not.

Social Revolutions in the Modern World.

Introduction Part I. Doing Macroscopic Social Science: 1. A critical review of Barrington Moore's social origins of dictatorship and democracy 2. Wallerstein's world capitalist system: a theoretical and historical critique 3. The uses of comparative history in macrohistorical research Part II. Making Sense of the Great Revolutions: 4. Explaining social revolutions: in quest of a social-structural approach 5. Revolutions and the world-historical development of capitalism 6. France, Russia, and China: a structural analysis of social revolutions Part III. A Dialogue about Culture and Ideology in Revolutions: 7. Ideologies and revolutions: reflections on the French case, byWilliam H. Sewell, Jr 8. Cultural idioms and political ideologies in the revolutionary reconstruction of state power Part IV. From Classical to Contemporary social revolutions: 9. What makes peasants revolutionary? 10. Rentier state and Shi'a Islam in the Iranian revolution 11. Explaining revolutions in the contemporary Third World 12. Social revolutions and mass military mobilisation Conclusion: reflections on recent scholarship about social revolutions and how to study them.

Democratic Transition and Breakdown in Western Europe, 1870-1939: A Test of the Moore Thesis

Barrington Moore's Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy is widely regarded as a contemporary classic, yet there have been few attempts to evaluate the validity of his argument on a large number of comparable cases. This article makes such an attempt with all Western European countries experiencing democratic rule between 1870 and 1939. It seeks (1) to explain what structural and historical features distinguish the breakdown cases from those that remained democratic, and (2) to trace the process of class coalition formation in the transition to democracy and the subsequent breakdown. Moore's thesis does fit, with some modification. All four breakdwn cases were characterized historically by an authoritarian coalition of labor-repressive landlords, the state, and the bourgeoisie that contributed to the breakdown of democratic rule in the 1920s and 1930s. In contrast, in none of the democratic survivors did such a coalition materialize. This difference can be traced largely to the strenght of the agrarian elite in the late 19th century. However, in contrast to Moore's characterization of the conservative authoritarian path, the ruling coalition, except in Germany, did not play a modernizing role, and only in Austria can the bourgeoisie be described as a "dependent" partner in the coalition. Moreover, because it stops too early, Moore's analysis greatly underplays the role of the organized working class in the transition to democracy and attributes far too positive a role to the bourgeoisie.

Sources of peasant consciousness in South‐east Asia: A survey

Since its publication in 1976 The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in South-east Asia' by James C. Scott has been a benchmark for later discussions on both the nature of peasant societies and the causes of peasant rebellions in the region. Scott rode a wave of academic interest in peasant societies, rebellions and revolutions, begun in I966 with the publication of Barrington Moore's Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, sustained by Eric Wolf's Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century in x969, and the launching of specialist publications like theJournal of Peasant Studies in 1974, among others. The global backdrop had been three decades of anticolonial rebellion and the emergence of radical Third World states. The previous year, 1975, witnessed the dramatic end of the Vietnam war, a conflict which more than any other had shaped the thinking and expectations of radical scholars in the west about the possibilities of peasant political action. Conference papers and journals attempted to divine the revolutionary potential of the peasantry in various Third World countries. Thailand, for example, was soon expected to go the same way as neighbouring Laos and Kampuchea, overwhelmed by peasant-backed revolutionary forces. Little emphasis at the time was placed on the organizational prerequisites of revolution party organization, and so on as studies tended to assume the spontaneous rebelliousness of peasants in the face of oppression and immiseration. They were heady days and many radicals were infected by a romanticism about peasant movements and peasant societies. The debacle of Pol Pot's Kampuchea was still to come, along with renewed conflict throughout Indochina. Scott's book was a product of this mid-I970s milieu, though it was not unrealistically romantic about the prospects for peasant political action. His attempt to provide a coherent theory of why peasants rebel immediately prompted a wide-ranging and exciting discussion of both peasant societies and the nature of peasant rebellions in South-east Asia. Many authors tried to emulate his book. On the other hand, Scott's work also provoked considerable critical commentary, including a whole book in 1979 by Samuel Popkin, The Rational Peasant, which contained an idiosyncratic critique of moral economy arguments. Unfortunately, since then, arguments about peasant societies and rebellions have

The theory of democratic development

Theories of democratic development address themselves to two distinct though related questions: What are the common pathways that all of today's democracies have had to pursue to emerge out of nondemocratic feudalisms into democracy? And, what conditions must be met by newly emergent democracies if they are to endure and achieve stability? Political histories of democracies typically pursue the question of emergence whereas modern analytic studies tend to focus on the conditions of stabilization.' Of all the recent theoretical works in the field, Barrington Moore's Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy2 stands out as the major effort to answer both sets of questions. In a generally laudatory review, Ronald Dore says of Moore's work that "anyone who has harbored the fantasy of spending some years licking the recent social and political history of the world into some sort of intelligible shape ... will read Barrington Moore's book with envy."3 Even Moore's most acerbic critics have acknowledged that his work is the predominant one in the field. One of them, Joseph Femia, states that Moore's book "has been the most challenging, influential and highly touted of all the writing examining the prerequisites of democracy."4 Another, Stanley Rothman, notes that "it is not hard to find reasons why Barrington Moore's Social Origins has had such widespread influence. ... Its approach, that of comparative historical sociology, seeks clues to the present in the past, and Moore demonstrates mastery of a wide range of historical materials."5

The Barrington Moore thesis and its critics

The critical response to Moore's Social Origins may reveal as much about the present state of social science as it does about the book itself. While the critics accused Moore of an excessive emphasis on economic factors, the economists and economic historians virtually ignored the book; while Moore's case studies were all historical, national historians have tended to overlook them. The academic group which showed the greatest interest was the new field of “comparative modernization,” which consists mostly of sociologists and sociologically-oriented historians. Critics of this school were enthusiastic about the interdisciplinary and comparative aspect of the book, but tended not to discuss the theoretical issues presented by Moore, except for a vigorous defense of non-Marxist and anti-Marxist positions. In general the critics did not defend value neutrality, which Moore attacked, and were impressed by Moore's case for progressive violence, but eager to move on to other topics, instead of considering the implications of these issues. There were only a few committed cold warriors; Stanley Rothman described Moore as a former fellow traveller, and Gabriel Almond indicated that Moore was soft on communism, but these arguments were the exception rather than the rule.

The Social Origins of Liberal Democracy: The Swedish Case

Implicit in Dahrendorf's Society and Democracy in Germany and explicit in Moore's Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy are respectively a liberal and a radical model of democratic development. Neither of these models adequately accounts for the experience of Sweden, a remarkably successful “late developer.” Although Swedish industrialization proceeded with little public ownership of the means of production, with limited welfare programs until the 1930s, and above all with restricted military expenditure—all factors Dahrendorf implies are crucial for democratic development—it did not produce the traditional liberal infrastructure of bourgeois entrepreneurs nor a vigorous open market society. Similarly only three of Moore's five preconditions for democracy obtained in Sweden: a balance between monarchy and aristocracy, the weakening of the landed aristocracy, and the prevention of an aristocratic-bourgeois coalition against the workers and peasants. There was no thorough shift toward commercial agriculture and, most important, there was no revolutionary break with the past. Consequently, one has to evolve a radical liberal model of development which states the conditions for the emergence of democracy in Sweden without revolution. This model contains implications for the further modernization of American politics.

The Social Origins of Liberal Democracy: The Swedish Case

Implicit in Dahrendorf's Society and Democracy in Germany and explicit in Moore's Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy are respectively a liberal and a radical model of democratic development. Neither of these models adequately accounts for the experience of Sweden, a remarkably successful “late developer.” Although Swedish industrialization proceeded with little public ownership of the means of production, with limited welfare programs until the 1930s, and above all with restricted military expenditure—all factors Dahrendorf implies are crucial for democratic development—it did not produce the traditional liberal infrastructure of bourgeois entrepreneurs nor a vigorous open market society. Similarly only three of Moore's five preconditions for democracy obtained in Sweden: a balance between monarchy and aristocracy, the weakening of the landed aristocracy, and the prevention of an aristocratic-bourgeois coalition against the workers and peasants. There was no thorough shift toward commercial agriculture and, most important, there was no revolutionary break with the past. Consequently, one has to evolve a radical liberal model of development which states the conditions for the emergence of democracy in Sweden without revolution. This model contains implications for the further modernization of American politics.

A Critical Review of Barrington Moore's Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy

Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant In the Making of the Modern World. By Barrington Moore, Jr. Boston: Beacon Press, 1966. Many pay lip service to the classical tradition in sociology, but few indeed work in terms of its mandate – which calls upon social scientists to assess, from a comparative and historical perspective, the prospects for freedom, rationality, and democracy in a modernizing world. Of the intrepid few who do consciously carry forward the classical tradition, most elaborate theoretical leads from the enormous scholarly legacy of Max Weber. Barrington Moore, Jr.'s Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy is therefore all the more unusual and interesting because it is not only a work solidly within the classical sociological tradition, but also the product of a Marxist scholarly perspective. And, leaving aside the literature on imperialism, it is virtually the only well-elaborated Marxist work on the politics of modernization to which one can point. Social Origins does not postulate one route to the modern world which must be taken by all countries. Nor does it assign the strategic political roles in modernizing revolutions to the bourgeoisie or the proletariat. Yet in deeper and more significant ways, Social Origins is a Marxist work. In it Professor Moore relies for theoretical sustenance upon the central conceptions of Marxist political sociology – “the conception of social class as arising out of an historically specific set of economic relationships and of the class struggle as the basic stuff of politics .”

Barrington Moore and the Dialectics of Revolution: An Essay Review

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be the master—that's all.”Through the Looking GlassIt is not hard to find reasons why Barrington Moore's Social Origins of Democracy and Dictatorship has had such widespread influence. Its approach, that of comparative, historical sociology, seeks clues to the present in the past, and Moore demonstrates mastery of a wide range of historical materials. Yet I feel that the book is ultimately unsatisfactory, for it is marred by a lack of respect for its own sources of information and by contradictions and non-sequiturs at critical points in the argument.In this critique I shall first examine the general thesis of the book and then turn to the case studies which Moore uses to support his arguments. I shall also attempt to account for the sharp contrasts in the quality of scholarship which characterize the study, and will attribute them to Moore's preconceived ideological assumptions about the nature of the good society.