Barrington Moore Jr.

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Barrington Moore Jr. (12 May 1913 - 16 October 2005)^[1] was an American political sociologist, whose works include 1966's Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World. 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's groundbreaking work, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (1966), was the cornerstone to what is now called comparative-historical analysis in the social sciences. Moore's concern was the transformation of pre-industrial agrarian social relations into "modern" ones. He highlighted what he called "three routes to the modern world" -- the liberal democratic, the fascist, and the communist -- each deriving from the timing of industrialization and the social structure at the time of transition.

In the simplest sense, Social Origins can be summarized with his famous statement on page 418 "No bourgeoisie, no democracy," though 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." Despite 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 instigate Jim Crow.

Moore also directly addressed the Japanese transition to modernity through fascism and the communist path in China, while implicitly remarking on Germany and Russia. 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 induced their late transition to industrial modernity 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 culiminated 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 ironically they were its first victims.

After graduating from Williams College, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, he took his Ph.D. in sociology from Yale University in 1941. Moore then worked as a policy analyst for the OSS during World War II, under Herbert Marcuse. In the 1950s he was based at Harvard's Russian research center, where he wrote books about the Soviet Union. In 1958 he published a book of essays on methodology and theory entitled Political Power and Social Theory, in which he attacked the methodological outlook of 1950s social science. While at Harvard, his students included comparative social scientists Theda Skocpol, Charles Tilly, and Anthony Marx.