Barrington Moore Jr.
Barrington Moore Jr. was an American political sociologist, and the son of forester Barrington Moore.
He is well-known for his Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World, a comparative study of modernization in Britain, France, the United States, China, Japan, Russia, Germany, and India. The book puts forth a neo-Marxist argument that class structures and class alliances at particular points in time can account for the kinds of social revolutions that occurred and did not occur in those countries, putting some countries on a path to democracy, whereas others were put on a path to authoritarianism or communism. He famously argued, "no bourgeois, no democracy," which emphasized the important role played by a large middle-class in accomplishing democratization and ensuring democratic stability.
Education and private life
He graduated from Williams College, Massachusetts, where he received a thorough education in Latin and Greek and in history. He also became interested in political science, and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. In 1941, Moore obtained his Ph.D. in sociology from Yale University. He worked as a policy analyst for the government, in the Office of Strategic Services and at the Department of Justice. He met Herbert Marcuse, a lifelong friend, and also his future wife, Elizabeth Ito, at the OSS. His wife died in 1992. They had no children.Academic career
His academic career began in 1945 at the University of Chicago, in 1948 he went to Harvard University, joining the Russian Research Center in 1951. He was emerited in 1979. Moore published his first book, Soviet Politics in 1950 and Terror and Progress, USSR in 1954. In 1958 his book of six essays on methodology and theory, Political Power and Social Theory, attacked the methodological outlook of 1950s social science. His students at Harvard included comparative social scientists Theda Skocpol, and Charles Tilly.Views
Social origins of dictatorship and democracy
Moore's groundbreaking work Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy was the cornerstone to what is now called comparative historical analysis in the social sciences. In that work he studied the conditions for the sociogenesis of democratic, fascist and communist regimes, looking especially at the ways in which industrialization and the pre-existing agrarian regimes interacted to produce those different political outcomes. He drew particular attention to the violence which preceded the development of democratic institutions.Moore lists five conditions for the development of Western-style democracy :
- the "development of a balance to avoid too strong a crown or too independent a landed aristocracy"
- a shift toward "an appropriate form of commercial agriculture"
- a "weakening of the landed aristocracy"
- the "prevention of an aristocratic-bourgeois coalition against the peasants and workers"
- a "revolutionary break with the past".
In the simplest sense, Social Origins can be summarized with his famous statement "No bourgeois, no democracy" although taking that idea at face value undercuts and misinterprets the nuances of his argument.
- In England, the effect of the "bourgeois impulse" was to change the attitudes of a portion of the landed elite towards commercial farming, leading to the destruction of the peasantry through the enclosure system and the English Civil War which led to an aristocratic, but moderate democracy.
- In France, the French Revolution did directly include the bourgeoisie, but it was the overwhelming influence of the peasantry that determined "just how far the revolution could go." The peasantry remained thereafter a reservoir of reactionary attitudes.
- In the United States, the industrial north's victory over the Southern planter elite in the Civil War cemented the U.S. path to modernity through liberal democracy, but only after southern planters "acquired a tincture" of urban business - essentially changing their attitudes towards capitalist accumulation. The result, however, was that once this transformation took place, the Northern capitalists ended Reconstruction and allowed the South to implement Jim Crow.
- For Moore, the influence of the bourgeoisie in Japan was significantly more limited than in England, France, and the U.S. Instead of the capitalist accumulation through the "bourgeois impulse" as it did in those three cases, Japan's late transition to industrial modernity was induced through "labor repressive" agriculture - squeezing the peasantry to generate the necessary capital for modernization. This "revolution from above" served to cement a reactionary alliance of a weak bourgeoisie and powerful landowners that culminated in fascism.
- In China, the overwhelming strength of the peasantry vis-a-vis the bourgeoisie and the landed elites resulted in the Chinese Revolution, but they were its first victims. Here, the bourgeoisie allied with the peasants, and created a "revolution from below." Moore criticized attempts by other sociologists to retroactively identify some kind of useful "function" served by the Chinese system of imperial government, and argued that the more likely reason for its prolonged survival was that most people, especially peasants, simply accept their social system "unless and until something happens to threaten and destroy their daily routine."
Moore primarily uses J.S. Mill's method of agreemen
The wide range of critical response to Social Origins was examined by Jon Wiener in the journal History and Theory. Theda Skocpol and Margaret Somers described Moore's book as a "work of virtually unparalleled ambition" in terms of substantive scope and complexity of its research design.
On tolerance
In 1965, Moore, Herbert Marcuse, and Robert Paul Wolff each authored an essay on the concept of tolerance and the three essays were collected in the book A Critique of Pure Tolerance. The title was a play on the title of Immanuel Kant's book Critique of Pure Reason. In the book Moore argues that academic research and society in general should adopt a strictly scientific and secular outlook and approach theories and conjectures with empirical verification.Works
- Soviet Politics – The Dilemma of Power: The Role of Ideas in Social Change, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1950.
- Terror and Progress, USSR: Some Sources of Change and Stability in the Soviet Dictatorship, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1954.
- Political Power and Social Theory: Six Studies, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1958. Erweiterte Ausgabe: Political Power and Social Theory: Seven Studies, Harper & Row, New York, 1965.
- Barrington Moore, Jr., Robert Paul Wolff, Herbert Marcuse: A Critique of Pure Tolerance, Beacon Press, Boston, 1965.
- Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World, Beacon Press, Boston, 1966. .
- Reflection of the Causes of Human Misery and on Certain Proposals to Eliminate Them, Beacon Press, Boston, 1972.
- Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt, M.E. Sharpe, White Plains, NY, 1978. .
- Privacy: Studies in Social and Cultural History, M.E. Sharpe, Armonk, NY, 1983.
- Authority and Inequality under Capitalism and Socialism, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1987.
- Moral Aspects of Economic Growth, and Other Essays, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 1993.
- Moral Purity and Persecution in History, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2000..