Barrington Moore, Jr.: Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World

...In general one of the most revolting features of revolutionary dictatorships has been their use of terror against little people who were as much victims of the old order as were the revolution aries themselves, often more so...

...This stratum, subject to new strains and stresses as the modern world encroached upon it, provided the main destructive revolutionary force that overthrew the old order and propelled these countries into the modern era under communist leadership that made the peasants its primary victims...

...the relationship of the American Civil War to the French and English experiences of revolutionary capitalism (a brilliant essay in which Moore, it he perhaps underestimates somewhat the inherent differences between the social structure of nineteenth-century America and those of seventeenthcentury England and eighteenth-century France, nonetheless updates the argument of Charles Beard in the Rise of American Civilization and contributes in his own right probably the best and most sympathetic treatment of the triumph of Northern democratic capitalism over the plantation-slave South which we have in the literature...

...In our time, however, peasant revolution means Communism and perhaps Stalinism...

...That, however, is an ultimate necessity, a last resort in political action, whose rational justification in time and place varies too much for any at tempt at consideration here...

...There are no separate sections on Germany and Russia, but Moore makes use of his broad knowledge of both these societies...

...But if the men of the future are ever to break the chains of the present, they will have to understand the forces that forged them...

...Communist repression has been and remains so far mainly directed against its own population...

...The repression by liberal society, both under earlier imperialism and again now in the armed struggle against revolutionary movements in the backward areas, has been directed very heavily outward, against others...

...Furthermore, if the defeats and occupations of 1945 may be seen as providing in some sense the bourgeois revolutions which Germany and Japan both missed, then their post-1945 capitalist stability, although not discussed by Moore, would seem to bear out his general theory...

...Indeed, present tendencies in world politics suggest that the future may lie with Americansupported conservative modernizers in the underdeveloped areas (i.e...

...SOCIAL ORIGINS OF DICTATORSHIP AND DEMOCRACY: LORD AND PEASANT IN THE MAKING OF THE MODERN WORLD, by Barrington Moore, Jr...

...Moore's method avoids both the position (defended by some historians) of anti-theoretical empirical nominalism, and the opposite extreme (defended by some sociologists) which sees history as only a collection of facts to be pulled out of context in order to but tress abstract and largely ahistorical grand theories about the nature of man and society...

...To the extent that such is the case, the task of honest thinking is to detach itself from both sets of preconceptions, to uncover the causes of oppressive tendencies in both systems in the hope of overcoming them...

...And in the absence of more than the most feeble steps toward modernization a huge peasantry remained...

...It amounts to a form of revolution from above...

...Whether they can actually be overcome is dubious in the extreme...

...Barrington Moore's Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy is one of the finest books ever written by an American social scientist...

...In the long run, then, Moore's analysis of the pattern of conservative-modernization probably has more to say about the future than do his discussions of either the bourgeois or the Communist revolutionary paths to industrial modernity...

...the role of the peasantry and landed upper classes in the diverse historical development of China, Japan, and India (a series of essays in which Moore seeks to find the social origins of Communist revolution, reactionary modernization, and democratic stagnation in the complex interrelationships between the peasant villagers, the landed elites, the urban bourgeoisie, and the national authorities which evolved in China, Japan, and India, respectively...

...The great agrarian bureaucracies of these countries served to inhibit the commercial and later industrial impulses even more than in the preceding [i.e...

...As long as powerful vested interests oppose changes that lead toward a less oppressive world, no commitment to a free society can dispense with some conception of revolutionary coercion...

...Communism as a set of ideas and institutions cannot escape responsibility for Stalinism...

...Perhaps we best gain an insight into Moore's over-all approach, however, if we attempt to follow him in more detail into the specific treatment of two of the analytic problems he poses for himself, namely: the questions of the social origins of fascism and of Communism...

...Moore's statement above, concerning the peasants as the primary victims of the Communist triumph which they help to bring about, is symptomatic of the deep ambivalence toward revolutionary methods which pervades the entire book...

...But the outcome, after a brief unstable period of democracy, has been fascism...

...That there are huge differences between the two goes with...

...with various forms of the military-bourgeois alliance...

...While on a substantive level I would wish to contest Moore here and insist that the peasantry was victimized by Russian Communism but not by Chinese Communism, I would prefer to concentrate on the question of Moore's over-all approach to revolution...

...The last stage of capitalism, if the post-1945 histories of Japan and West Germany may be taken as examples, would seem to be more a situation of industrial-capitalist stability and workingclass integration into a Swedish-like atmosphere of progressive democratic state-capitalism in a society in which a triumphant bourgeoisie has either banished or finally tamed pre-bourgeois elements...

...I shall call this the capitalist and reactionary form...

...the failure of a bourgeoisie to take control of its society on the English model, than it is evidence of the last stage of a triumphant capitalism...

...Moore is especially insightful in his treatment of the inherently conservative bias of Gandhi's ideology...

...Fascism emerges then, contrary to the traditional Marxist view, not as the last stage of a dying and threatened monopoly capitalism, but rather as the defensive maneuver of a capi talism which has never really been triumphant in a society where prebourgeois elites have retained their landed and military prerogatives well into the twentieth century...

...out saying...

...The second route [to industrial modernity] has also been capitalist, but culminated during the twentieth century in fascism...

...And in doing so, he provides us with his own example of that type of generalized yet historically rooted social science for which he called ten years ago in his Political Power and Social Theory...

...In Moore's analysis, then, democracy, fascism, and Communism emerge not simply as the political choices of modern man, though they remain this in part, but rather as the results of the varied ways in which the agrarian question was worked out in different national histories...

...Finally, he concludes with a group of essays utilizing the comparative method to arrive at the larger gen eralizations implicit in the earlier treatment of particular nations...

...Nevertheless this common feature of repressive practice covered by talk of freedom may be the significant one...

...All of us who are concerned with modern historical developments are happily in Moore's debt...

...The results were two-fold...

...Afterward sections of a relatively weak commercial and industrial class relied on dissident elements in the older and still dominant ruling classes, mainly recruited from the land, to put through the political and economic changes required for a modern industrial society, under the auspices of a semiparliamentary regime...

...If it took a revolutionary form at all, the revolution was defeated...

...To put the matter another way, fascist movements are efforts to align mass support behind essentially atavistic and pre-bourgeois ideologies (for which Moore develops the generic term of Catonism after Cato) in a quasi-democratic society which has been dominated by a reactionary capitalist alliance and which finds itself suddenly threatened by economic disruption and/or revolutionary upheaval from below...

...It is possible, therefore, that Barrington Moore may, in the last analysis, have written even more as a historian than he intended...

...In the place of such a surrender, I would urge the view that both Western liberalism and communism (especially the Russian version) have begun to display many symptoms of historical obsolescence...

...Yet it is possible, nonetheless, that there may be a certain dated irrelevance to the entire debate among American radicals and academics as to the moral validity of revolutionary coercion in the modernization process...

...Instead, Moore chooses to explore comparatively a broad range of historically rooted middlelevel questions concerning the social basis of the politics of modernization...

...As successful doctrines they have started to turn into ideologies that justify and conceal numerous forms of repression...

...Moore is largely concerned with the social basis in agrarian relationships among the peasantry, landed elites, and national authorities, which relationships largely predetermine whether a society will be ripe for the bourgeois, reactionary, or Communist paths to modernity...

...Whether the ancient Western dream of a free and rational society will always remain a chimera, no one can know for sure...

...And the theoretical conclusions arrived at are empirical in the best sense, in that they remain ultimately historical, avoiding ahistorical sociological abstraction, without, however, allowing a concern for the details of history to stifle the need to generalize...

...In his introduction Moore seeks to distinguish between the democratic capitalist and the reactionary capitalist paths to an industrial modernity: The first and earlier route through the great revolutions and civil wars led to the combination of capitalism and Western democracy...

...Could he be sure that a contemporary peasant revolution would move a society in the direction taken by the bourgeoisdominated peasant revolution in eighteenth-century France, Moore would unhesitatingly opt for revolution...

...by the Kuomintang in China...

...With relentless intellectual honesty and range, Moore manages to shed new light on some of the central questions of our time: the origins of democracy, fascism and communism, and the over-all nature of industrial modernization...

...Thus, if fascism is the result largely of an unstable alliance between a modernizing bourgeoisie and strong prebourgeois elements in a situation of formal democracy, Communism emerges as the product of a social situation in which formal democracy is lacking and neither the bourgeoisie nor the traditional elements are able to act as modernizing agents with any real degree of success...

...reactionary-capitalist] instances...

...Moreover, in a brilliant section on India, entitled "The Price of Peaceful Change," Moore explores the human cost involved for the peasant masses in grafting a Western democratic political structure onto an Indian socio-economic foundation of traditional agrarian ignorance and stagnation...

...In those countries the bourgeois impulse was much weaker...

...In the course of over 500 pages, Moore explores such problems as: • the differences between the French and English revolutionary paths to essentially bourgeois societies (here Moore utilizes all the available modern scholarship on the English Civil War and the French Revolution to argue that the progressive-capitalist quality of the English aristocracy made the real difference between the English and the French methods of defeating landed reaction...

...The irony in terms of Moore's analysis is that America, itself the purest form of the bourgeois revolutionary society, should have assumed, appar ently successfully, the twentieth-century role of ensuring that any future breakthrough into industrial modernity should be accomplished by non-revolutionary means...

...Moore is too aware of the crimes and unfulfilled promises of Communism, as is evidenced by his earlier writings, to endorse revolution totally...

...Moore tells us that his study will try to understand the role of the landed upper classes and the peasants in the bourgeois revolutions leading to capitalist democracy, the abortive bourgeois revolutions leading to fascism, and the peasant revolutions leading to communism...

...Altogether the communist defense requires an act of faith about the future that involves too great a surrender of critical rationality...

...The method throughout, therefore, is one of comparative historical sociology...

...Germany and Japan are the obvious cases, though only the latter receives detailed treatment in this study for reasons given above...

...It may be that in his brilliant discussion of the social origins of the bourgeois and Communist revolutions Moore has described historical possibilities that have already passed us by...

...In any event, the existence of a powerful fascist movement is more evidence of bourgeois failure, i.e...

...In order to fulfill such an ambitious program, Moore moves through a series of studies of the modernization process in England, France, the United States, China, Japan, and India...

...In the first place these urban classes were too weak to constitute even a junior partner in the form of modernization taken by Germany and Japan, though there were attempts in this direction [i.e...

...In Moore's view, Communism is the result of an even more decisive variety of bourgeois failure than the situation of partial bourgeois failure which forms the social basis for a fascist development: The third route [into the world of industrial modernity] is of course communism, as exemplified in Russia and China...

...Industrial development may proceed rapidly under such auspices...

...Yet, with all his awareness of the hidden human cost exacted by the avoidance of revolution, Moore is not prepared unconditionally to endorse the revolutionary path...

...He remains deeply troubled by the problem of revolution, but as usual he meets the issue head on and in full view of his readers: The ugly side of the Stalinist era had institutional roots...

...Far more than the Vietnam War (which may best be seen as the last expression of the major wave of social and national revolution which swept a world destabilized by World War II, rather than as the forward edge of a new revolutionary wave), the recent events in Brazil and Indonesia may reflect better the dominant conservative drift of our times...

...It would be difficult, in either moral or analytical terms, for any vision of contemporary radical scholarship to transcend Moore here...

...On the one hand, Moore is well aware, as we have seen, of the extent to which Western democratic capitalism, despite its present animus toward revolutionary violence, itself rests on revolutionary roots...