Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy : Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World

Rating:
Summary: Moore's Paths to Modernity
Review: Democratic and totalitarian states might differ on key variables, but both are modern - resting on industrial civilization & the commercialization of agriculture. But how they got there is another matter. At the most general level, Barrington Moore Jr.'s "Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy" seeks to explain differing national paths towards this modernity. More specifically, he seeks to analyze the evolution of modern political systems through their social, economic and institutional bases. Even more specifically, he posits a bold thesis that the particular relationship between peasants and landowners in a given country, more than any other factor, determines whether that country will eventually become democratic, communist, or fascist. And more specifically still, Moore argues that in countries where landowners were able to secure political power independent of the crown, and become bourgeois managers of commercial agriculture in a way that created minimal political grievance among those who worked the land, then the result was capitalist democracy. However, in countries like Russia, China, Germany and Japan where this process was halted, forced, abortive, or out of sequence, then the result was dictatorship. In the communist cases, this dictatorship came about through a revolution from below, spurred on by disgruntled peasants against a non-commercial, non-bourgeois landowning class; while in the fascist cases the modern revolution came down from "above" as landowning elites used the tools of the state (preindustrial bureaucracy) to impose modernity on a politically powerless peasantry.

In proving his argument, Moore gives evidence in the following manner: "the inevitable analytical necessity of isolating certain manageable areas of history can lead to partial truths that are misleading and even false unless and until one subsequently puts them back into their proper context" (224). In other words, Moore recognizes that his relative historical isolation of the landowner/peasant relationship can obscure a whole range of other factors from the analysis (international relations, culture, religion, etc.). Therefore, due to the acknowledged danger posed by such an isolation, much of his book is spent "re-situating" the landowner/peasant relationship back into its particular national context (through his detailed case studies) in order to "control" for other variables like religion and culture by showing their importance to be only secondary at best in explaining paths to modernity. Because of this richly detailed method, one can say that Moore is quite methodologically sophisticated. He acknowledges both the value of Marxist class analysis, and the value of Weberian consciousness analysis, without falling prey to their economic and cultural determinism - or without falling prey to determinism of any kind, for that matter: "All of this does not of course mean that some inexorable fate drove Germany toward fascism from the sixteenth century onward, that the process never could have been reversed" (436).

Furthermore, Moore warns of the dangers of excessive methodological quantification. His case studies are not shy about using statistics to prove their claims, but he consistently offers a healthy dose of skepticism against researchers overly reliant on numerical data (using partial truths that are misleading and false outside their context, to paraphrase his earlier quote). Moore is also fond of the occasional counterfactual to illustrate his historical claims, as shown in one of the research questions that underpin his inquiry: "is this activity necessary to the society? What would happen if it stopped or changed?" (471). For instance, he asserts that America's "capitalist revolution" (the Civil War) could not have happened if northern industrialists had not been able to build a political coalition with western farmers, against the South, by awarding them free land. Therefore, if the western territories had not been open to settlement, then America's capitalist revolution might have been delayed or irrevocably shattered.

On the whole, Moore displays a broad knowledge of the existing literature in his citations, as he reviews a wide body of work on each of the cases studied. The only glaring problem with his methodology per se is that its obvious grand historical/comparative focus makes for a lack of parsimony and exactitude. The book is full of linguistic qualifiers ("largely", "partially", "may have been", etc.), vague, ambiguous, semi-causal arguments like "considerations such as these show the difficulty of connecting the specific terms landlord and peasant to any general notion of social classes" (190), and weak theory-building statements such as "the instability of French democracy during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is partly due to this fact" (426) (without, of course, specifying what causes might make up the other part(s) of the explanation). In Moore's defense, however, one would have to admit that a grand comparative work such as his cannot bother to empirically sketch out the causal relationship at work in each and every local, regional and historical micro-case.

A further strong point of Moore's work is its predictive power. While the road to modernity has ended for the countries in question, there are still countries today that are dealing with the same kinds of landlord/peasant issues as they attempt to commercialize agriculture in line with economic globalization. Furthermore, the political lessons of the book can even shape our future understanding of his six cases themselves, as they evolve beyond modernity. For instance, Moore prophetically (for 1966) states that "contemporary Chinese society, despite severe difficulties and setbacks, shows signs of moving ahead. By learning from Soviet mistakes, China could conceivably surpass Russia" (230). And now they have. While Moore's theory would not have predicted China's post-Soviet success with any statistical exactitude, it is a measure of Moore's perceptiveness as a historically grounded comparativist that he could even arrive at such a speculation.

Rating:
Summary: Well thought out
Review: for someone who loves political theory, this is an excellent book to read that delves deeply into what causes revolutions and what creates a dictatorship and what creates a democracy. the only problem with this book is that it can't seem to take an account of why India is still a democracy. the peasants won in india, but they are still a democracy.

Rating:
Summary: An interesting book, but....
Review: In "Social Origins", Barrington Moore conducts a study of economic, social and political change in the modern era. Moore survey's modern societies from England to Japan comparing social and economic structures with emphasis on class stratification.

Moore uses a hybrid Marxist analysis and turns it on its head by finding common conditions favorable to democracies and conditions that lead to fascist and commmunist dictatorships. Moore finds some common factors to successful transition to include a need for social change to accompany technological change, the strength of a "middle class" and the need to address the concerns of agrarian society.

In the end Moore believes that the industrial change took place at great cost in every society. The key to successful transistion to democracy was in how this "industrial revolution" was implemented.

Whether one agrees totally or not, "Social Origins" never ceases to be stimulating in its analysis.

Rating:
Summary: Remarkable Comparative History
Review: In "Social Origins", Barrington Moore conducts a study of economic, social and political change in the modern era. Moore survey's modern societies from England to Japan comparing social and economic structures with emphasis on class stratification.

Moore uses a hybrid Marxist analysis and turns it on its head by finding common conditions favorable to democracies and conditions that lead to fascist and commmunist dictatorships. Moore finds some common factors to successful transition to include a need for social change to accompany technological change, the strength of a "middle class" and the need to address the concerns of agrarian society.

In the end Moore believes that the industrial change took place at great cost in every society. The key to successful transistion to democracy was in how this "industrial revolution" was implemented.

Whether one agrees totally or not, "Social Origins" never ceases to be stimulating in its analysis.

Rating:
Summary: A good class based analysis
Review: Moore is an intellectual tour de force. In this book he attempts to explain how democracy developed in some states, while other, seemingly similar, states turned to fascism and authoritarianism. While I certainly cannot cogently summarize Moore in a small paragraph, it remains a book and an argument that needs dissemination. In general, the key to understanding how states develop is to understand the balance of class power within each society. The choice of regime, or rather the regime type that develops within a state, is determined by the dominant class and with whom that class aligns. According to Moore democracy develops if the bourgeoisie gains enough power to break the hold of the aristocracy and the failure to do so can not only doom democracy, but it also raises the possibility of fascism. Moore supplements his theoretical augments with an ample amount of well-analyzed historical case studies. In the end, even if one does not agree with his arguments or conclusions, the book still needs to be read, understood, and engaged by anyone who wants to understand democratization.

Rating:
Summary: Making the modern world
Review: One of the very best introductions to how the modern world came to be -- at a high level of detail. This is political economy as it should be written.

Rating:
Summary: An interesting book, but....
Review: There are a couple of quick points I'd like to add. First, these ambitious books often cover so much (and I think well in this case) that historical errors are bound to crop up. For example, Japanese historians have pointed out errors in the Japan chapter that should be considered.

Second, the end of Adam's otherwise very informative review is simply incorrect. China with a GDP/capita of around $4500 has NOT outstripped Russia at $9000 GDP/capita. This , of course, does not reflect at all on the book, but too often those who eschew statistical based political science run the risk of being way off in evaluating success/failure or change. Certainly not everyone, but I have seen this strong tendancy.