Wiener1976 - A MELHOR REVIEW PDF

Wesleyan University
Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern
World by Barrington Moore,
Review by: Jonathan M. Wiener
History and Theory, Vol. 15, No. 2 (May, 1976), pp. 146-175
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REVIEW OF REVIEWS
Lord and Peasant in

the Making of the Modern World. By Barrington Moore, Jr. Boston: Beacon
Press, 1966. Pp. xix, 559.
SOCIAL ORIGINS OF DICTATORSHIP AND DEMOCRACY.
The British historian Ronald P. Dore spoke for numerous readers and reviewers of Social Origins when he wrote in the Archives europeenes de
sociologie:
Many of us have passing moments when we think it would be rather nice to sit
down in the British Museum or the Widener Library and spend a few years licking
the recent social and political history of the world into some sort of intelligible
shape. Anyone who has ever harboured such fantasies will read Barrington Moore's
book with envy.1
Moore's analysis of the "intelligible shape" of modern societies was a

challenge to the prevailing modernization theory, which assumed that all
modernizing societies, from the sixteenth century to the present, have undergone essentially the same process. Rostow's "economic take-off," Huntington's "expanded participation," and Chalmers Johnson's "multiple dysfunction" were the dominant concepts of modernization theory;2 Moore offered
as an alternative a neo-Marxian theory of three divergent "routes to the
modern world," which he termed "bourgeois revolution," "revolution from
above," and "peasant revolution." He argued that the radically different costs
and achievements of each were explicable in terms of divergent patterns of
social class development, and concluded that violent social revolution has
been a prerequisite for increasing freedom and rationality in the world.
"Bourgeois revolutions" for Moore were the violent social upheavals in
1. Ronald P. Dore, "Making Sense of History," Archives eiiropeenes de sociologie
10 (1969), 295.
2. Walt W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto
(Cambridge, 1960); Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New;
Haven, 1966); Chalmers Johnson, Revolutionary Change (Boston, 1966). Charles Tilly
recommends Moore on these grounds: "Does Modernization Breed Revolution?" in;

Comparative Politics 5 (1973),
436.

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OF REVIEWS
147
Engl'and, France, and the United States which abolished the domination of
the traditional landed elite and brought capitalist democracy. "Revolution
from above" was the process in Germany and Japan by which the traditional
landed elite defeated popular revolution and preserved its dominant position
during industrialization, a process which culminated in fascism. "Peasant
revolution" in Russia and China destroyed the traditional elite without a
revolutionary bourgeoisie. All modernizing societies have undergone a version
of one of these three types of revolution, Moore argued, supporting his claim
with case studies of England, France, the United States, Japan, China, and
India.
Moore's theory focuses on social classes as the crucial units of analysis.
It rests on the implicit Marxian thesis that particular classes favor political
structures-which protect or further their socio-economic interests. A nation's
political structure is shaped by the antagonisms and coalitions among its
social classes; the strength or weakness of landed aristocracy, bourgeoisie,
peasantry, and proletariat are thus the central issues for understanding
politics. The transformation of agriculture from subsistence to commercial
production is the key event which shapes subsequent class developments,
and the different forms of commercialization favor different political outcomes.
This article surveys the critical response to this neo-Marxist comparative
history, which reveals as much about the present state of social science as
it does about the strengths and weaknesses of Moore's work. American social
scientists, and political scientists in particular, were much more likely than
Europeans to object to Moore's Marxism; while his kind of historicallyoriented social theory is a well-developed tradition in Europe, in the United
States it suffered in comparison with the work of Talcott Parsons, who moved
social theory in a non-historical, idealist direction. The American critics
tended to be less theoretically self-conscious than the Europeans, who were
more likely to praise Moore's critiques of idealist, empiricist, and multi-causal
approaches to social change. An examination of the critical response to
Social Origins thus reveals a good deal about the status of neo-Marxist theory
in Europe and America, the terms in which it is debated, the prevailing arguments - the strengths and weaknesses not just of Moore's work but of the
various positions taken in support of and against it.
Since the book was published in 1966, it has been translated into French,
German, Spanish, Italian, and Swedish. It won the Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award in 1967 and the American Sociology Association's MacIver
Award in 1968. In 1975 it went into its tenth American printing. According
to the Social Science Citation Index, Social Origins has been referred to in
journal articles at an increasing rate, more often in 1974 than in 1973, and
more often in 1974 than other comparative studies of modernization published
around the same time - Huntington's Political Order in Changing Societies,

REVIEW OF REVIEWS
148
C. E. Black's Dynamics of Modernization, and Reinhard Bendix's NationBuilding and Citizenship.3 All this suggests that, far from disappearing from
consciousness, the book may be more influential now, ten years after its
publication, than it was initially.
Several dozen discussions of Social Origins have appeared in the ten years
since it was published. These have been of five kinds: debates over method;
consideration of conceptual issues; efforts to situate Moore as a theorist;
examinations of the case studies; and new applications.
I.
METHODOLOGICAL
CRITIQUES
The most frequent criticism of Social Origins was that Moore's neo-Marxist
method, which put social classes at the center of his explanation, was excessively narrow and omitted other causal factors from consideration. American
political scientists were the most critical of Moore's method. One of the
most important anti-Marxist critics was David Lowenthal, who wrote in
History and Theory that Moore's argument was "essentially defective" because of his assumption that "ideas are generated by social classes out of
their own needs and interests, mainly economic."4 Moore thus underestimated
the independent role of ideas in history, the "deliberations and speeches of
statesmen," and the influence of intellectuals on politics. Lowenthal argued
that, while Moore occasionally expanded Marxism to "include decisive noneconomic causes, especially political ones," he refused to see "the supremacy
of politics over economics" because he adhered to "Marxist dogma." And
the one case study Lowenthal examined in detail - the American chapter
he described as an application of the "faulty theory of economic determinism."'5
The charge of economic determinism was also made by Lee Benson,

Gabriel Almond, and Stanley Rothman, among others. Benson's idiosyncratic criticism was first presented at the 1970 meeting of the Organization
of American Historians' panel on "The Barrington Moore Thesis and the
Civil War," and was part of his larger project of discrediting and eventually
abolishing the "established historiographic system." He found Moore's work
to represent "the best done to date," but nevertheless "not worth serious
consideration." Moore was "an economic determinist" who believed that
3. On the dangers of relying on the Social Science Citation Index, see Jon Wiener,
"Footnote-Or Perish," Dissent 21 (1974), 588-592.
4. David Lowenthal, review essay in History and Theory 7 (1968), 259. All untitled
reviews cited will be of Social Origins. See also Lester M. Salamon, "Comparative
History and the Theory of Modernization," World Politics 23 (1970), 83-103.
5. Lowenthal, 259, 273, 269.

REVIEW OF REVIEWS
149
"purely economic considerations motivated men"; as a result, he "distorted

past reality beyond recognition.'6
Gabriel Almond, reviewing Social Origins in the American Political Science
Review, wrote that Moore "tends to be an economic determinist" with an
approach to causation which "lacks balance."7 He praised Moore for nevertheless "compelling us to look hard at some things we would greatly prefer
to avoid," particularly "the comparative costs of the different political routes
to modernization." Perez Zagorin in the Political Science Quarterly agreed
that it was a "serious weakness" for Moore to "lay such heavy stress on
economic relations."8 And Stanley Rothman's longd review essay in the
American Political Science Review sought to demolish Social Origins on the
grounds that,Moore believed economic interests "inevitably . . . moved actors
towards a predetermined end," "determined" ideology, politics, and culture,
and made past revolutions "inevitable.'9
Two types of alternatives were proposed to Moore's "economic determinism": cultural explanations of social change, and various "multi-factor"
approaches. Lowenthal put forward the cultural-idealist position: Moore's
"greatest error" was that "he almost totally discounts formal ideas as an
original and independent source of influence in human history.""' Liberalism
and industrial capitalism have their origin not in "the econolnic activities"
of merchants, but rather in the cultural values created by "modern philosophy
and science." Industrial capitalism is the "product" of the ideas and values
of Bacon, Boyle, and Newton, and liberalism, communism, and fascism are
all value-systems created by or in reaction to the ideas of Locke, Montesquieu,
and Rousseau."1
Rothman also argued for cultural explanations, writing that "the cultural
inheritance of a society is a significant part of any explanation."112 J. D. Y.
6. Jack P. Greene, "The 64th Annual Meeting of the Organization of American
Historians," Journal of American History 63 (1971),
689-690. Lee Benson, Toward the
Scientific Study of History (Philadelphia, 1972), 228, 232, 244. James L. Roark has
suggested that Benson's proposal is essentially
to apply the categories of Chalmers
Johnson to American history: compare Lee Benson, "Middle Period Historiography:

What Is To Be Done?" in American History: Retrospect and Prospect, ed. George
Billias and Gerald Grob (New York, 1971), with Chalmers Johnson, Revolutionary
Change (Boston, 1966), 138-142. James L. Roark, "Masters without Slaves: Southern
Planters in the Civil *Warand Reconstruction,"Ph.D. Diss., Stanford University, 1973,
51, n. 125.
7. Gabriel L. Almond, review in American Political Science Review 61 (1967),
769.
8. Perez Zagorin, "Theories of Revolution in Contemporary Historiography," Political Science Qutarterly 88 (1973), 40.
9. Stanley Rothman, "BarringtonMoore and the Dialectics of Revolution: An Essay
Review," American Political Science Review 64 (1970), 82, 62.
10. Lowenthal, 258-259.
11. Lowenthal, 261-262.
12. Rothman, 64.

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REVIEW OF REVIEWS
Peel, in an article on "Cultural Factors in the Contemporary Theory of

Development," criticized Moore for failing to see that "culture -ideas
about what is good, about what exists - must be a critical and irreducible
factor."13
But Social Origins included an explicit and powerful critique of cultural
explanations that these critics did not respond to in a satisfactory way. Moore
is opposed to cultural explanations because they assume that social inertia
is the "natural" state of society, that social change requires explanation
while the continuity of value-systems does not. Analyzing societies in terms
of their prevailing value-systems "begs the fundamental question." Moore
writes: "why did this particular outlook prevail when and where it did?"
The answer for Moore must be social and historical; particular values are
maintained and transmitted by identifiable groups under certain historical
conditions, "often with great pain and suffering" for those who assert conflicting values.14
Indeed, Moore's critique of cultural explanations won praise, particularly
among European critics. Wolf-Dieter Narr, a leading scholar of the Frankfurt
School of critical theory, commended Moore for rejecting culture as an
explanatory factor in its own right.15 Knut Borchardt, reviewing Social
Origins for Der Staat, similarly praised Moore for making social structure
his explanatory focus rather than culture.16 Pierre Lantz wrote in L'Homme
et la society that Moore's most significant contribution was his rejection of
cultural explanations of political forms.17 Gianfranco Poggi's review in the
British Journal of Sociology described Moore's "outstanding contribution"
as his "devastating critique of cultural explanations," and Peter Nettl wrote
in the New Statesman that "Moore hacks away at the insufficiency of a purely
cultural . . . explanation
and forces us again and again always to look at
the realities of both social structure and rhetoric."18

Lawrence Stone presented a "multi-factor" alternative in the New York
Review of Books. While he did not describe Moore as an economic determinist, he complained that Moore's causal analysis consisted "almost entirely
of conflicting social forces," a focus which "seems unduly narrow." This
13. J. D. Y. Peel, "Cultural Factors in the Contemporary Theory of Development,"
Archives europeenes de sociologie 14 (1973), 301-302.
14. Moore, 486.
15. Wolf-Dieter Narr, "Demokratie zur Entwicklung - Entwicklung zur Demokratie:
Thesen zu Statik und Dynamik von Demokratie," 6sterreichische Zeitschlrift fuir Politikwissenschaft 2 (1973), 19-32.
16. Knut Borchardt, review in Der Staat: Zeitschrift fiur Staatslehre, 8ffentliches Recht
und Verfassungsgeschichte 7 (1968), 513-516.
17. Pierre Lantz, review in L'Homme et la societe' 16 (1970), 366.
18. Gianfranco Poggi, review in British Journal of Sociology 19 (1968), 217; Peter,
Nettl, "Return of the Intellectual," New Statesman 73 (1967), 435.

REVIEW
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methodological narrowness made the book "a flawed masterpiece.'9 The

two factors Stone believed were neglected were demography and ideology.
Demographic growth "leads to land hunger, the flight to the city, agriculture
for the market, and a shift of agricultural profits from peasant or tenant to
landlord. It is demographic stagnation or decline which reverses the pattern."
And "the ideological factor" - traditional patterns of deference, religious
ideas, nationalism - plays "an important part" in "the modernizing
process."20
Almond's critique in the American Political Science Review also focused
on missing "factors," particularly the "international environment" and "the
political decisions of elites," were "independent variables" that "affected the
timing of and the patterns of bureaucratic centralization" in England, France,
and Germany.21 Reinhard Bendix agreed in the Political Science Quarterly
that Moore's neglect of the "international setting" was an error, the consequence of Moore's view that social change is "primarily the product of forces
internal to society.'>22The same criticism was made by Roger Masters in the
French journal Critique.23
Isaac Kramnick, writing in History and Theory, was also concerned with
additional factors which somehow must be "taken into account." He classified Moore's as an "economic explanation," and argued that "any decent
theory must take into account the political factor as well as all the others
economic, sociological, and psychological."24 Lee Benson simply listed
"religious groups, ethnocultural groups, voluntary associations and schools"
as "noneconomic" factors which "operated as significant determinants of
group consciousness and group conflict . . . or significantly affect the distribution of political power."25 Cyril Black's list of factors in the American
Historical Review was even longer: "ideology, social psychology, leadership,
war, diplomacy, and indeed, chance, must be taken into account," he wrote.26
While Moore considers cultural explanations to be based on false assumptions, he considers this "multi-factor" approach to be a form of "intellectual
chaos."27 The attempt to come up with a complete list of factors, and to
measure the role played by each, case by case, is not a theory, but rather
19. Lawrence Stone, "News from Everywhere,"New York Review of Books 9 (1967),
34.
20. Idem.
21. Almond, 769.

22. Reinhard Bendix, review in Political Science Quarterly 82 (1967),
626.
23. Roger D. Masters, "L'Industrialisationet les paysans," Critique: Revue genterale

des publications frantcaises et etrangeres No. 251 (April, 1968), 424.
24. Isaac Kramnick, "Reflections on Revolution: Definition and Explanation in

Recent Scholarship,"History and Theory 11 (1972), 40, 62.
25. Benson, 243-244.
26. C. E. Black, review in American Historical Review 72 (1967), 1338.
27. Moore, 135.

152
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OF REVIEWS
the absence of theory. It gives the comparative analyst no way of distinguishing what is fundamentally important from what is not, no starting point
for analysis, and no method of systematically examining the structure of
interrelationships among the cases to be studied. It leaves the reader with
"theoretical" conclusions like Rothman's, that in England "the changing
political culture played some role, and religious factors played at least as
important a role as economic."28 Presumably the multi-factor advocate then
goes on to the other cases, finding perhaps that in China the demographic
factor as well as the diplomatic was more important than the social, while in
Japan military factors outweighed psychological ones. "Chaos" is indeed the
word for such conclusions.
The inadequacies of cultural and multi-factor approaches suggest that
Moore's own method requires closer scrutiny. Those who criticized Moore
for economic determinism overlooked the crucial distinction between Moore's
kind of social-class analysis and deterministic writing. Moore argues that
social classes are the fundamental units of analysis. "Social class as arising
out of an historically specific set of economic relationships" is his starting
point, along with the notion that "class struggle [is] the basic stuff of
politics."29 But it does not follow that social classes (or individuals) inevitably pursue their economic interests in every situation. Moore's method of
class analysis is "economic" only in the broadest sense. Extracting an economic surplus from the underlying population is the fundamental task of
every ruling class, and classes are defined in terms of the various mechanisms
for surplus extraction - feudalism, agrarian bureaucracy, different forms
of commercial agriculture.
Comparative analysis is facilitated by the limited historical "solutions" to
28. Rothmnan,66-67.
29. Moore, "Strategyin Social Science" in Political Power and Social Theory (Cambridge, 1958), 111-159. Similar arguments are made in Eugene D. Genovese, "Marxian
Interpretations of the Slave South," In Red and Black (New York, 1972), 322-324;
and in E. J. Hobsbawm, "Karl Marx's Contribution to Historiography"in Ideology in
Social Science, ed. Robin Blackburn (London, 1972), 265-283. Moore here is very
close to Marx: "The specific economic form, in which unpaid surplus labor is pumped
out of direct producers, determines the relationships of rulers and ruled, as it grows
directly out of production itself, and, in turn, reacts upon it as a determining element.
Upon this, however, is founded the entire formation of the economic community which
grows up out of the production relations themselves, thereby simultaneously its specific
political form. It is always the direct relationship of the owners of production to the
direct producers-a relation always naturally corresponding to a definite stage in the
development of the methods of labour and thereby its social productivity-which reveals the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social structure, and with it
the political form of the relation of sovereignty and dependence, in short, the corresponding specific form of the state. This does not prevent the same economic basis
due to innumerable different empirical circumstances, natural environment, racial relations, external historical influences, etc., from showing infinite variations and gradations.
in appearance,which can be ascertainedonly by analysis of the empirically given circumstances." Karl Marx, Capital (New York, 1967), III, 791-792.

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153
the task of surplus extraction during the transition to commercial agriculture:

the solutions include the destruction of the peasantry by the traditional aristocracy and its replacement with hired labor; the retention of the peasantry
on the land by the aristocracy and the intensification of traditional levers of
exploitation; and the retirement of aristocratic landlords to absentee status
while the peasants are left at the mercy of the market. All three forms of
commercialization further the economic interests of the elite, but each tends
toward a drastically different political outcome. Thus reference to economic
interests alone explains little.
There are differences among aristocracies, among peasantries, and among
bourgeoisies, which result from unique configurations of existing political
alternatives, semi-autonomous ethnic, regional, and religious cultures, and
particular world views, and which are related to particular economic interests
but are not wholly subordinate to them. Moore rejects the assumption that
the behavior of a class in any particular situation is determined by the
"economic factor" rather than the "religious factor" or the "diplomatic
factor." Social class is the unit of analysis, but in its cultural, ideological,
and political concreteness, not only in terms of its members' abstract economic interests, Moore seeks the totality and the interrelationships among
the various "factors" as they shape historically concrete social classes.
In Social Origins Moore repeatedly rejects economic determinist explanations. The conception of bourgeois revolution as the result of a "steady
increase in the economic power of the bourgeoisie" Moore considers "a
caricature of what took place"; he rejects as "obviously inadequate" the
notion that peasant revolts are caused by the deterioration of the peasants'
economic situation under the impact of commerce and industry.0
Some reviewers made it a point to praise Moore precisely for rejecting
economic determinist explanations. Lawrence Stone, anticipating criticisms
like Rothman's, wrote, "to accuse Moore of swallowing uncritically [a] simplistic economic determinism . . . is willfully to misunderstand what he is
trying to say."3' The French journal L'Homme et la society similarly praised
Moore for avoiding the "mechanistic scheme of economic infrastructure and
political superstructure."32
Eugene Genovese shared Moore's concern that class analysis be distinguished sharply from economic determinism, and most of Genovese's essay
on "Marxian interpretations of the slave south" is an attack on various forms
of vulgar Marxian determinist writing. But, Genovese wrote, Moore "is so
anxious to repel [a] crude economic interpretation that he concedes far
more ground than is necessary or safe." Moore, in arguing that the South
was a separate civilization, "minimized the economic aspect" of planter
30. Moore, Social Origins, 428, 453-454.
31. Stone,
32. Lantz,
34.
366.

154
REVIEW OF REVIEWS
domination, and "obscures the class issue," while at the same time paying
little attention to ideology. In consequence, "despite a framework that places
social class at the center, he never analyzes the slaveholders as a class; he
merely describes certain of their features and interests in a tangential way."
A genuine class analysis, Genovese wrote, would consider the "hegemonic
mechanisms" of the planters' domination as a "special case of class rule,"
the role of planter ideology in defending a particular set of economic
interests.33
This was not a proposal that the "ideology" variable be added to a multifactor analysis, but rather an argument for more attention to the reciprocal
influence of ideology and economic interests in establishing a system of class
dominance and subordination. Moore in principle agreed that "we cannot do
without some conception of how people perceive the world and what they
do or do not want to do about what they see," but Genovese is right in pointing out that Social Origins is not really concerned with this crucial issue.34
Another Marxist criticism of Moore's method came from Theda Skocpol,
writing in Politics and Society. She drew on theories of imperialism to argue
that international forces play a critical role in economic development. Not
only the rate of modernization, but "the very possibility of its occurrence"
are shaped by international political and economic conditions, she argued.
Revolutions from above and below are not simply indigenous social developments, but are also responses to the penetration of pre-modern societies by
external political and economic forces.35 Gareth Stedman Jones and Robin
Blackburn of the New Left Review criticized Moore on similar grounds for
paying insufficient attention to the dependence of the bourgeois democracy
he admires on the imperialism he condemns.36
The most valuable single aspect of Moore's method of class analysis, in
the view of several European critics, was the light it cast on the peasantry
as a crucial political actor. The British social theorist Anthony Giddens
and Le Monde's reviewer shared this assessment, as did Joseph Featherstone,
who wrote in The New Republic, "the book's most impressive achievement
is its discussion of the role of the peasant in modern times."37 Victor Alba,
reviewing Social Origins in the Mexican daily Novedades, agreed.38
33. Genovese, 345-348.
34. Moore, 487.
35. Theda Skocpol, "A Critical Review of Barrington Moore's Social Origins of
Dictatorship and Democracy," Politics and Society 4 (1973),
30-33.
36. Gareth Stedman Jones, "The History of U.S. Imperialism"in Ideology in Social
Science, ed. Blackburn, 219-222; Blackburn, "Introduction,"11.
37. Anthony Giddens, The Class Structure of the Advanced Societies (London, 1973),
147; "Les Conflits de classes dans les societies modernes," Le Monde, 17 Jan. 1970;
Joseph Featherstone, "Modern Times," The New Republic 156 (1967), 35.
38. Victor Alba, "Modernizaciony Fascismo," Novedades (Mexico City), 5 Jan. 1967.
For other Spanish-language responses, see Markos J. Mamalakis, "Nuevamente la
Teorfa de los choques y coaliciones sectoriales," Trimestre Econ6mico 40 (1973), 157-

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Eric Hobsbawm generally praised Moore's method in the American Sociological Review, but observed that his focus on relations between peasant and
landlord neglected some of the more subtle aspects of agrarian class structure.
Hobsbawm listed them: rural society's "marginal and mobile strata, its nuclei
of permanent dissidence and withdrawal, its permanent flux of intercommunal and inter-gentry conflict and alliance, and its occasional or permanent
recognition of wider social units." Hobsbawm said that Moore's chapter on
China in particular demonstrated that he was "aware of some of these dimentions"; the problem was that the necessary primary research had not been
done, and "the comparativist can only be as good as the material available
for comparison."39
II.
CONCEPTUAL
ISSUES
A number of objections were raised to the conceptual structure of Moore's

typology of modernization. Hobsbawm suggested that Moore's conceptions
of "dictatorship" and "democracy" required "rather more preliminary analysis," and that his conception of democracy was limited to "a constitutional
framework."40Hobsbawm was implicitly arguing that Moore held what Marxists view as a "bourgeois" concept of democracy. While he is not a Marxist,
Lawrence Stone criticized Moore along similar lines: Moore's conceptions
of dictatorship and democracy, he wrote, were based on "formalist, institutional, and legal standards," on the notion that "the institutions of AngloSaxon societies are the last word in political equity and wisdom" -a
view
which is "old-fashioned and insular."41 Moore defined the "development of
democracy" as a "long and certainly incomplete struggle" to accomplish
three related goals: to "check arbitrary rulers," to "replace arbitrary rules
with just and rational ones," and to "obtain a share for the underlying population in the making of rules."42 While Moore does regard Anglo-Saxonstyled democracy as a significant achievement, he emphasized that it has
become an "ideology that justifies and conceals numerous forms of repression."43 But he would probably agree with Joseph Featherstone's statement
that "it would be a mistake to conclude that because this freedom was
tainted or incomplete, it was not worth having."44
158, a criticism of Moore for ignoring the service sector; and Robert W. Cox, "Un
analisis idiologico de las doctrines de asistencia al desarrollo," Foro Internacional 13
(1973), 316, which describes Social Origins as an analysis of the relationship between
repressive labor systems and political authoritarianism.For an Italian review which is
primarily a summary, see C. Mongardini in 11 Pensiero Politico, 21 Sept. 1970, 167.
39. E. J. Hobsbawm, review in American Sociological Review 32 (1967), 822.
40. Hobsbawm, 822.
41. Stone, 32.
42. Moore, 414.
43. Moore, 508.
44. Featherstone, 34.

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Most of the problems with Moore's conception of "dictatorship" are a

consequence of the fact that the title of the book is a misrepresentation of
its thesis. The phrase "dictatorship and democracy" suggests a cold-war
conception of world politics, in which fascism and communism are linked
as alternative forms of totalitarian dictatorship. Moore, however, distinguishes
them sharply in terms of their class origins and evaluates them differently in
terms of their political consequences. He regards the violent destruction of
the old order, of the kind which occurs in peasant communist revolutions,
to be a prerequisite for increasing freedom and rationality in the world. At
the same time, he emphasizes that "the claims of existing socialist states to
represent a higher form of freedom than Western democratic capitalism rest
in Joseph Featherstone's phrase,
on promises, not performance" -or,
of
freedom."45
guarantee
"revolution is no
Stone also criticized Moore's notion that each of the revolutionary routes
represents an historical "culmination." "Fascism and Stalinism," he wrote,
"both now look like short-term transition phases rather than as permanent
and deep-seated structural phenomena."46 Germany, Italy, and Japan today
have relatively viable democratic institutions, and the Soviet Union is apparently evolving toward increasing political participation and personal freedom,
he wrote. Cyril Black made a similar argument, asking, "in what sense did
the conservative route taken by Germany and Japan 'culminate' in fascism?"
and pointing out that fascism survived for less than a dozen years in both
countries.47 Stone came to the harsh conclusion that Moore, in seeking the
"social origins of dictatorship and democracy," was not "asking a significant
question." The question Moore was in fact posing was "under what conditions a given society is likely to pass through a relatively brief authoritarian
phase as it enters the modern world." But Stone considered that question
"not a terribly important one," because "the phase is not likely to be prolonged much beyond the period of industrial take-off."48
This critique of Moore's concept of fascism as a "culmination" overlooks
the fact that Germany's "authoritarian phase" occurred in one of the world's
most developed industrial societies, not during the "period of industrial takeoff." And it does not seem fruitful to define "culminations" in terms of their
brevity or longevity. In the dozen-year life of the German and Japanese
fascist states, they took an unprecedented human toll; they were "relatively
brief" only because of war on a previously unimagined scale, which itself
transformed the world. As Michael Walzer remarked, even though a society's
45.
46.
47.
48.
Moore, 506; Featherstone, 36.

Stone, 32.
Black, 1338.
Stone, 32.

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development culminates in fascism, "one may hope for further 'culmina"49

tions'.
The success of democratic institutions in postwar Germany, Japan, and

Italy is not a refutation of Moore, as Stone and Black suggested, but rather
a variation on his thesis, as some reviewers observed. Roger Masters argued
that international war destroyed the anti-democratic traditional elites of Italy,
Germany, and Japan, just as internal revolutions had done so in England,
France, and the United States.50N. Gordon Levin made the same argument,
writing that "the defeats and occupations of 1945 may be seen as providing
in some sense the bourgeois revolutions which Germany and Japan both
missed."51
Stanley Rothman's long polemical attack on Moore criticized him on the
culminationo" issue, among many others. Social Origins, he wrote, makes the
erroneous argument that fascism is "the necessary outcome of so-called
conservative modernization.".52But this is not Moore's argument. Moore
wrote that "where the [reactionary] coalition succeeds in establishing itself,
there has followed a prolonged period of conservative and even authoritarian
government, which, however, falls far short of fascism"; in Germany, Italy,
and Japan, fascism eventually took power, but "it failed in other countries,"
even those where the same "reactionary syndrome" was present --notably
Russia and early nineteenth-century England.-55Moore spends several pages
explaining why periods of conservative modernization led to fascist rule in
some cases but not others.
Other reviewers questioned Moore's conception of his three types of modernization as "alternative routes" and "successive stages." Reinhard Bendix
wrote that Moore considered the various revolutions from the sixteenth to
the twentieth century "on a par, irrespective of the time and setting in which
they occurred."'54He overlooked Moore's crucial argument that the three
types "are much more clearly successive historical stages" than they are
"alternative routes."955
Cyril Black's criticism focused on Moore's contention that his types constituted successive historical stages. "In what sense have democracy, fascism,
and communism succeeded each other?" he asked, arguing that "the introduction of communism . . . preceded that of fascism."56 What Moore says is
that "conservative revolutions from above" bring about successful moderni49. Michael
50. Masters,
Walzer,
424.
"The Condition
of Greece,"
Dissent
14 (1967),
429.
51. N. Gordon Levin, Jr., "Paths to Industrial Modernity," Dissent 14 (1967), 241.
52. Rothman, 80.
53. Moore, 437, 442.
54. Bendix, 626,
55. Moore, 414.
56. Black, 1338.

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REVIEW OF REVIEWS
zation before peasant revolutions do, which is only to say that Germany
industrialized before Russia and China.57 Fascism does not appear in nineteenth-century Germany, but conservative modernization, which later culminates in fascism, does. It is in this sense that what Moore calls "the
reactionary experience" of industrialization precedes "the communist
method."
Theda Skocpol observed that Moore never explained his statement that
"the methods of modernization chosen in one country change the dimensions
of the problem for the next countries who take the step."58 This failure to
specify the relationships between "successive stages" Skocpol saw as a consequence of Moore's refusal to bring an international or intersocietal perspective
to his modernization theory. From such a perspective, peasant revolutions
are efforts to resist "warped industrialization through penetration by 'multinational' corporate capital." She saw Moore "groping toward . . . this conclusion," but lacking any theoretical way of sustaining it.59
Some reviewers claimed that Moore's conception of "exploitation" is not
an objective and measurable category. Stanley Rothman's critique was based
on the mistaken notion that Moore believed all ruling classes are "equally
exploitative." Rothman suggested that "a concept which is not used to differentiate among societies has [no] empirical utility."60While this latter statement is true, it does not apply to Moore's concept of exploitation. Moore
does not believe that all ruling classes have been "equally exploitative"; he
argues that exploitation has an objective character which can be measured
in terms of "rewards and privileges commensurate with the socially necessary
services rendered by the upper class."'61This varies among societies and
historical periods; he argues that the less the degree of exploitation, the
greater the chances for social stability in a particular society.
Rothman thought Moore's use of the concept of exploitation was based
on a Marxian definition.2 In fact, Marx strenuously rejected the notion that
there were "socially necessary services rendered by the upper class," as well
as the conception of exploitation as an unequal exchange of services or
values. Marx insisted that no attempt to improve the terms of the exchange
between working and ruling classes could abolish exploitation, and that the
upper class was not "socially necessary." In his use of "exploitation," Moore
is closer to functionalism than to Marx.63
57. Moore, 414.
58. Moore, 413.
59. Skocpol, 32.
60. Rothman, 80, 63.
61. Moore, 470.
62. Rothman, 62.
63. I am indebted to David Romagnolo and John Meyer for this argument. Moore
has revised his concept of exploitation and brought it closer to Marx's in Reflections on

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159
Other criticisms were made of Moore's conceptual structure. Skocpol correctly observed that the "strength of the bourgeois impulse" is a key variable
in determining which route a society takes, but is not easily isolated or
measured. In principle, she wrote, it is possible to examine the numbers,
dispersion, density, and dependence on government of town dwellers engaged
in commerce and industry; but instead of doing this in a systematic way,
Moore tends to infer "strength" from the different political outcomes.64
Skocpol also criticized Moore's distinction between "labor repressive"
and "market-oriented" commercial agriculture. Moore distinguished between
agrarian elites which relied on "political mechanisms for extracting the
surplus," such as the Junkers, and those which relied on market mechanisms,
which Moore believed characterized the English landlords. Skocpol, pointing
to the English landlords' reliance on such political mechanisms as enclosure
decrees and Poor Laws, argued that there was little basis for saying the
British were less dependent on political mechanisms than the post- 1820
Junkers or the post-Restoration Japanese landlords.65 Skocpol's point is well
taken, but it would be foolish to deny that the political mechanisms employed
by the Junkers were radically different from those of the English landlords.
Some reviewers complained of a general lack of clearly defined concepts.
Lowenthal wrote that "Moore's definitions are woefully inadequate: they are
either inaccurate, uneven, misplaced, or non-existent." He pointed in particular to the terms "capitalism," "fascism," "democracy," and "communism."66 Several other reviewers agreed.67 Anticipating such objections,
Moore wrote that an excessive concern with definitions has "a way of leading
away from real issues to trivial quibbling," and that "the problem, after all,
is what happened and why, not the proper use of labels."68
Stein Rokkan, in a paper for a UNESCO symposium, complained about
a general lack of "formalization" of the conceptual relationships in Social
Origins. His attempt to "help bring out the structure of the argument" in
Moore's "model of 'polity-building' options" was incomprehensible at some
points and irrelevant at others. "The system mathematically allows six twoagainst-two and four three-against-one coalitions," he explained, four of
the Caltses of Human Misery and itpon Certain Proposals to Eliminate Them (Boston,
1972), 53.
64. Skocpol, 12-14.
65. Skocpol, 1415.
66. Lowenthal, 260.
67. Robert H. Somers, "Applications of an Expanded Survey Research Model to
Comparative Institutional Studies" in Comparative Methods in Sociology: Essays oil
Trends and Applications, ed. Ivan Vallier (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1971), 408;
James A. Bill, "Class Analysis and the Challenge of Change," Comparative Political
Stludies 2 (1969), 389-400; Poggi, 217.
68. Moore, 414, 429.

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REVIEW OF REVIEWS
which are likely to occur. After presenting a two-page table outlining these
"options," Rokkan observed that the "logical structure" of Moore's "scheme
of successive 'option points' in each nation-building history" is "astonishingly
similar" to Lipset and Rokkan's Parsonian model of European party systems,
except that Moore's dependent variable is "markedly different."69 Such a
conclusion suggests that a concern for logical structure to the exclusion of
content is of little use.
A similar but much more exhaustive effort to formalize Moore's conceptual
scheme was presented by Robert Somers in an 83-page essay. He complained
that Moore's "descriptive study" was "primarily empirical rather than theoretical," and that it required a "matrix model" for a "systematization" of his
empirical observations. The model Somers offered consisted of a "conceptual
inventory" of five "pertinent variables" - "groups, structures, environmental
factors, past events, cultural values"; he recommended that Moore employ
summary tables and tree diagrams to "aid in the communication of his conclusions."70 Randall Collins, writing in Contemporary Sociology, properly
criticized this kind of pseudo-scientific effort to formalize Moore's thesis as
inappropriate and erroneous.7
III. SITUATING THE THEORY
Attempts to situate Moore as a social theorist accompanied the debate over

class analysis and economic determinism. Eugene Genovese explained the
problem: although Moore's "categories are basically Marxian," he writes
"in a manner calculated to divorce himself from Marxism."72 Responding
to this issue, some reviewers emphasized the extent to which Moore developed
and elaborated Marx's own ideas, while others stressed his divergence from
orthodox Marxism. These discussions of his relation to Marx raised further
questions about situating his work in relation to other theorists, particularly
Max Weber.
The reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement saw no problem and no
need for qualifications; for him, Moore was "fundamentally a Marxist."73
Joseph Featherstone agreed that Moore "does sociology in the grand . . .
historical manner of Marx."174 J. H. Plumb wrote in the New York Times
69. Stein Rokkan, "Modeis and Methods in the Comparative Study of NationBuilding" in Imagination and Precision in the Social Sciences, ed. T. J. Nossiter et al.
(London, 1972), 133-137.

70. Somers, 408, 368, 390.
71. Randall Collins, "Reply [to Somers],"ContemporarySociology 3 (1974), 202-203.
72. Genovese, 353, n. 58.
73. "Lord and Peasant," Times Literary Supplement No. 3434, 21 Dec. 1967, 1231.

REVIEW OF REVIEWS
161
Book Review that Moore's work shows that "Marx demonstrated the type
of historical question that needs to be asked, and the way answers require
to be framed."175Le Monde's reviewer argued that Moore "accepts the essentials of a Marxist analysis," taking Marx's work as a "point of departure"
and moving outside the West to nations Marx himself considered only peripherally.76 Roger Masters held that Moore was in the "tradition of historical,
social, and economic analysis of which Marx was the founder."'77Theda
Skocpol described Social Origins as "virtually the only well-elaborated
Marxist work on the politics of modernization [except for] the literature on
imperialism."78Pierre Lantz, writing in L'Homme et la societe4 praised Moore
for his skillful use of the Marxian dialectic. Moore shows, he wrote, that a
nation's political structure is "neither a determined figure nor a transparent
and interchangeable mask; instead, it is the product of forgotten class struggles, violent crises which have taught men the nature and the price of freedom." Attempting to convey the dialectical character he found in Social
Origins, Lantz wrote that Moore "constructs a Time made of the accumulation of different temporalities which, instead of forming a continuous line,
form a series of complex and changing facets. Thus one escapes from a
specialized time and recovers a historical time of multiple dimensions."79
Others found it necessary to distinguish between Moore's position and
Marx's. Anthony Giddens situated Moore within the Marxist tradition, but
saw him correcting Marx's own "relative neglect" of the peasantry and his
erroneous notion that England was the model for all subsequent modernization.80 C. Vann Woodward distinguished between Moore's "Marxian interpretations" and his refusal to be "an apologist for any regime or ruler."8'
Reinhard Bendix thought the key qualification was that Moore represented
"Marxist thought in its period of disillusionment."982
Some found Moore's divergence from Marxist orthodoxy to be the most
notable aspect of his work. Michael Rogin emphasized that in Social Origins,
"Marxist orthodoxy turns out to be wrong at every point."83 Ronald P. Dore
wrote that Moore's attention to the variations in class alliances was "a good
deal more subtle than the traditional notion of classes emerging one after
75. J. H. Plumb, "How It Happened,"New York Times Book Review 71 (1966), 11.
76. Le Monde, 17 Jan. 1970.
77. Masters, 423. See also James H. Meisel, "Origins: A Dialogue. Tape Recorded,"
Michigan Quarterly Review 7 (1968), 135-138; and A. L. Stinchcombe, review in
Harvard Educational Review 37 (1967), 290-293.
78. Skocpol, 1.
79. Lantz, 367.
80. Giddens, 147, 144.
81. C. Vann Woodward, "Comparative Political History," Yale Review 56 (1967),
453.
82. Bendix, 626.

83. Michael Rogin, review in Book Week 4 (1967), 5.

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REVIEW OF REVIEWS
the other to carry history forward."84Eric Hobsbawm subtly pointed out that
Moore diverged from Marx on fundamental issues, particularly the argument
in Social Origins that the peasantry rather than the proletariat is the key class
in anti-capitalist revolutions, and the assertion of what could be called a
"bourgeois" conception of democracy.85
The German reviewers were particularly concerned about situating Moore
in relation to Marx. Herald Mey wrote a long review essay which appeared
in the K6lner Zeitschrift fur Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, the most respected and widely read German sociological journal.86He noted that, while
Moore explains political development in essentially Marxian terms, the crucial
class struggle as he sees it is between lord and peasant rather than capitalist
and proletarian. At the same time, Moore does not view state power narrowly
as representing the interests of a single class. In this respect, Mey wrote,
Moore's use of class constellations is as close to interest-group sociology as
it is to Marxism. Moreover, Moore's pessimistic liberalism is far from a
Marxist world view.87 In another issue of the same journal, Wolfgang Slim
Freund similarly argued that, while Moore tried to locate the socio-economic
roots of political forms, he does not hold an authentic Marxist political
position.88
The German reviewers argued that Moore was closer to Max Weber and
to Otto Hintze in his theoretical orientation than to Marx. Mey wrote that
Moore followed Weber and Hintze in their support for democracy and liberal
values and their willingness to use Marxist methods while criticizing the
politics of their Marxist contemporaries. It was Hintze, Mey argued, who
developed what has become Moore's Prussian model, and it was Hintze who
indicated the importance of feudal institutions for the development of democracy, a notion that was to influence Moore.89 Knut Borchardt, reviewing
Social Origins for Der Staat, also described Moore as a theorist following
Hintze's lead.90 H. A. Winkler's review of Social Origins in the Hamburg
weekly Die Zeit also saw Weber and Hintze as key influences on Moore, but
84. Dore, 296.
85. Hobsbawm, 822.
86. Peter Christian Ludz, "The Present State of Sociology and Political Science in
the Federal Republic of Germany," European Studies Newsletter 4 (1975), no. 5,
describes the leading journals and scholars in the field.
87. Herald Mey, "Der Beitrag von Barrington Moore Jr. zur soziologisch orientierten
Sozialgeschichte"in Soziologie und Sozialgeschichte: Aspekte und Probleme, ed. Peter
Christian Ludz (Opladen, 1972), Sonderheft 16 of the Kolner Zeitschrift fur Soziologie
und Sozialpsychologie, 473-475, 482. I am indebted to Lutz Berkner for this reference.
88. Wolfgang Slim Freund, "Von der Unmdglichkeit einem Thema Gerecht zu
Werden: der Beitrag der Entwicklungslinderforschung zur sozialwissenschaftlichen
Theorie," K5lner Zeitschrift fur Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie 25 (1973), 166.
89. Mey, 483.
90. Borchardt, 514.

REVIEW OF REVIEWS
163
he emphasized that Moore's types of modernization were not Weberian categories.9Y

Other reviewers rejected the argument*that Moore was some kind of
Weberian. L'Homme et la society indicated that Moore follows not Weber
but rather "the comparative historical method which Comte saw as the distinctive method of sociology," while Dore wrote that he considered Moore's
work to be superior to Weber's in at least some respects: "compare [Social
Origins] with . . . the ambiguous portentousness of Weber on religion, or
the chaotic muddle he makes out of interpreting China, and Moore's is a
model of clarity and precision."92
Stanley Rothman's effort to situate Moore as a theorist portrayed Social
Origins as a "sharp theoretical attack" on Weber.93 Moore, however, has
written that he considers Weber's work to be the basis of much of his own,
and that in his view Weber's method resembled Marx's in several crucial
respects, which distinguish their work from contemporary social science.
In his 1958 essay "Strategy in Social Science," which, as Skocpol pointed
out, is the crucial theoretical introduction to Social Origins, Moore wrote
that Weber shared with Marx a "critical spirit," a refusal to accept the status
quo as given, which had largely disappeared from mainstream social science
(Moore was writing during the "end of ideology" interlude); that Weber
shared with Marx an historical perspective on modern society, which has
been lost by contemporary sociology; and that Weber shared with Marx a
preference for significant questions over technical virtuosity, a preference
reversed by contemporary practitioners of social science.
Between Weber and Marx, Moore argued that Marx provided the more
valuable starting point, primarily because of his methodological emphasis on
social class and his sense that "the whole enterprise of science makes sense
only in terms of moral convictions." Moore distinguishes between Weber's
historical work, which he considers to be a model of comparative sociology,
and his later writing, particularly Economy and Society, which, he writes, is
an "arid desert of definitions."94
91. Heinrich August Winkler, "Bundschuhoder Hemmschuh: Die politischen Rollen
von Bauer und Grundbesitzer,"Die Zeit [Hamburg], 24 Oct. 1969, 30. For another
German effort to situate Moore as a theorist, see Klaus Hildebrand, "Hitlers Ort in der
Geschichte des preussisch-deutschenNationalistaates,"Historisclie Zeitschrift 217 (1973),
584-632. He groups Moore with J. H. Plumb and others who emphasize the connection
between social history and the political system (604-605).
92. Lantz, 326; Dore, 229.
93. Rothman, 62. At every point where Rothman offers Weber as an alternative to
Moore, he footnotes not Weber himself, but Reinhard Bendix, Max Weber: All Intellectual Portrait (Garden City, N.Y., 1960) - an introductorywork whose interpretation
many, including Moore, have criticized; see, for instance, H. Stuart Hughes's review in
the American Historical Review 66 (1960),
154-155.
94. Moore, "Strategy,"esp. 117.

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REVIEW OF REVIEWS
In his critique of cultural theories of society, Moore was explicitly attacking

Parsons rather than Weber.95 Some of those attempting to situate Moore as
a theorist noted this and described him as a critic of Parsonian structuralfunctionalism. Herald Mey grouped Moore with C. Wright Mills and Ralf
Dahrendorf as historically oriented critics of structural-functionalism; Lee
Benson, however, considers Moore to practice a "Hegelian-Parsonian version
of functionalism," to rely on a Parsonian "functional theory of social roles."96
Parsons himself referred to Social Origins in The System of Modern Societies,
not to reply to its theoretical critique, but as a source of half a dozen facts
to be incorporated into a structural-functional analysis of European history.
This curious procedure was apparently intended to demonstrate that a valueoriented analysis could accommodate class-oriented ideas such as Moore's
statements that the French aristocracy was more dependent on the crown
than the English and that the English peasants were weaker than the French.97
One of Moore's most obviously Marxist conclusions was that revolutionary
violence has been a prerequisite for liberal government, that democracy has
prevailed only where a social revolution has taken place. One might think
that many would object to this conclusion, but only two reviewers did:
Lawrence Stone and Lee Benson. Benson considered Moore's argument on
violence to be "the key" to the book, and he found it "terribly wrong and
damaging to the noble cause it is designed to advance."98Stone characterized
Moore's argument as "the Catharsis theory of history," and declared that he
was "in serious disagreement" with Moore on "a basic judgment about the
moral and practical justification for the use of violence." For Stone, "such
violence is . . almost always self-defeating"; the French Revolution was a
case in which "the evil they did came out of the violence they employed."99
This is indeed exactly the opposite of Moore's conclusion that, without a
violent attack on the French landed aristocracy, democracy never would have
had a chance. Moore's position is precisely that the "good" the revolutionaries
did - removing the social obstacles to democratic modernization - came
out of the violence they employed.
Where Stone and Benson disagreed sharply with Moore about the necessity
for revolutionary violence, other critics accepted Moore's argument. Joseph
Featherstone wrote that, for the victors in social conflicts, "violence is the
95. Moore, Social Origins, 486, n. 2.
96. Mey, 474; Benson, 237. A. James Gregor wrote that Social Origins has "grown
directly out of Rostow's 'stages of economic growth' thesis." This is true only in the
sense that to refute is to "grow out of." "On UnderstandingFascism: A Review of Some
Contemporary Literature," American Political Science Review 67 (1973),
1347.
97. Talcott Parsons, The System of Modern Societies (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.,, 1971).
98. Benson, 238, n. 5.
99. Stone, 34. Stone's criticism of Moore on this point is reviewed in Henry Bienen,
Violence and Social Change (Chicago, 1968), 79.

REVIEW OF REVIEWS
165
worst thing that can happen," but for the "victims of history, the worst thing
would be the perpetuation of the present."'00 Michael Rogin commented
while liberals question the necessity of violent revolutions, "Moore reminds
us . . . that they have been essential for democratic political developments.
. . . The refusal to countenance apocalyptic violence from below eventually
produced fascism," and "authoritarian violence from above is the price paid
for failing to overthrow pre-modern authorities."'0' (Moore might reject the
implication of irrationality in Rogin's adjective "apocalyptic" and argue
that popular violence directed at exploitative elites often is characterized by
a clear rationality.) C. Vann Woodward similarly accepted Moore's argument that those who attempted the "democratic parliamentary way" without
social revolution "would end up at the mercies of the totalitarian fascists,"
and Gabriel Almond unexpectedly agreed that Moore's conclusion "is a
most useful corrective for those of us who sometimes permit hope to carry us
away."102
IV. THE CASE STUDIES
"It is very easy, but perhaps not very fruitful nor generous, for the local
expert to pick holes" in particular case studies, Stone wrote, and Hobsbawm
agreed that "it would be easy but pointless for the specialists to criticize any
one of the case studies." He explained that the comparative analyst "does not
compete with the specialists, he exploits them and may have to question
them."'03Most reviewers seemed to accept this view.
The criticism of the case studies was particularly revealing about the present
state of social science. The American chapter was examined most often, the
English second, and the others were seldom discussed; this suggests that
reviewers preferred to write about their own countries and declined to discuss
nations on which they lacked expertise, even though Moore himself is not
a professional "expert" on any of the cases in his book.
Most reviewers who referred to particular case studies did so to illustrate
a methodological or conceptual problem; these issues have already been considered here. Stanley Rothman's attempt at demolition suggested that Moore
systematically misused evidence in his case studies. Moore and Rothman
have taken up several pages of the American Political Science Review in an
101. Rogin, 5.
102. Woodward, 453; Almond, 769.
103. Stone, 32; Hobsbawm, 82. Similar views were expressed in Werner L. Gundersheimer, "Journey to Synthesis," Reporter 36 (1967), 58-59; and in, the anonymous
review in Virginia Quarterly Review 43 (1967), cliv. See also Gilbert Shapiro, review
in American Sociological
Review 32 (1967),
820-321.

166
REVIEW OF REVIEWS
exchange debating the meaning of just two of the nine hundred footnotes in
Moore's case studies.104 Rothman's was the only one of forty or fifty discussions of Social Origins to suggest that Moore systematically misused
evidence; this fact suggests the eccentricity of Rothman's case.
Moore's chapter on the American Civil War provoked more discussion
than any other case study. The most frequent objection was, as Reinhard
Bendix put it, "why discuss the social origin of American democracy by
reference to the Civil War rather than the American Revolution?"105David
Lowenthal argued that the historic events of 1776 fulfill "the most 'radical'
notions of revolution": the transformation of a monarchy into a republic,
the replacement of the aristocratic principle with the egalitarian, the establishment of freedom of religion and the creation of "the great written constitution."1106Lee Benson argued that the question Moore asked, which he read
as "what caused the Civil War?" was "useless"; instead, Moore should have
asked, "who caused it" - a question, Benson says, he does not answer.107
These criticisms were based on a misunderstanding of Moore's purpose,
which was to explain not the Civil War's causes, but rather its consequences:
to analyze the "American route to modern capitalist democracy" in terms
of the same structures used in explaining European and Asian developments
- the modes of commercializing agriculture and the ensuing class coalitions.
The outcome of the Civil War, Moore argued, is the key to the success of
liberal democracy in the United States, because the alliance between northern
industrialists and western family farmers decisively strengthened democracy
by ruling out "the classic reactionary solution to the problems of growing
industrialization
. . . an alignment of northern industrialists
and southern
planters against slaves, smaller farmers, and industrial workers."1108

Several reviewers praised Moore for structuring the argument in this way.
Michael Rogin found Moore's analysis of the Civil War as a "bourgeois revolution" to be "brilliantly relevant," arguing that it "delayed and weakened
the foundations of an alliance which . . . in a slave-owning country, would
have been profoundly anti-democratic."109 C. Vann Woodward similarly
emphasized the importance of Moore's argument that the Civil War was
crucial, agreeing that it "broke the power of landed resistance to democratic
and capitalist advance."110
104. Moore, "Reply to Rothman," American Political Science Review 64 (1970),
83-85; Rothman, "Communication,"ibid., 182-183.

105. Bendix, 627. For a similar view, see Joseph Gusfield, review in Social Forces
46 (1967), 114-115.
106. Lowenthal, .267.
107. Benson, 234, 242.
108. Moore, 131.
109. Rogin, 5.
110. Woodward, 451.

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167
Lawrence Stone also grasped Moore's intention, but felt some problems
remained. "If a reactionary coalition was formed after the failure of Reconstruction, was not the Civil War negotiable after all?" he asked.1"' But a
coalition in which the landed elite is subservient to industrialists is politically
different from one in which they are dominant. And Genovese criticized
Moore's analogy between the planters and the Junkers, arguing that the
Junkers were considerably more modern than the South's slaveowners.112
Aside from his American chapter, Moore's English case study was the
only one to receive widespread discussion, and that discussion tended to
focus on enclosures. Moore held that democratic modernization required the
destruction of the peasantry as a social class, and that this was accomplished
in England during the eighteenth century by the enclosure movement. Stone
wrote that this interpretation "flies in the face of modern scholarship," which
found that enclosures were a slow, "relatively equitable process" which "improved the rural standard of living by providing more food."113 Hobsbawm
agreed with Stone that Moore's view "runs counter to recent fashions in
scholarship," but nevertheless he found it "perfectly tenable" to argue as
Moore did that "though the enclosures may not have been as brutal or as
thorough as some earlier writers have led us to think, [they] eliminated the
peasant question from English politics," which did not occur in France,
Germany, Russia, or China.114
Lowenthal criticized Moore's definition of the English Civil War as a
"bourgeois revolution" because "the Puritan revolutionists . . . did not contend for liberalism, for the rights of man, [or] for capitalism," but rather over
"the status of religion and the relationship of king to parliament." "Only on
the assumption of historical destiny or inevitability," he wrote, "can the
[Puritan] Revolution be called . . . 'bourgeois-democratic'. "115 But, as Moore
indicated, he described the Civil War as a bourgeois revolution because of

its consequences, not because of the immediate issues over which it was
fought. In a related argument, J. H. Plumb wrote that Moore "exaggerates
the extent of bourgeois revolution in seventeenth-century England. . .. A
great deal of land in eighteenth-century England was still held for status
rather than for profit."116Stone agreed that Moore "greatly exaggerates the
degree to which English society . . . had gone over to a competitive,
indi-
vidualistic, commercialized value system" in the seventeenth century.117

111.
112.
113.
114.
115.
116.
117.
Stone, 34.
Genovese, 347.
Stone, 33. Rothman sided with Stone: 67-69.
Hobsbawm, 821; Moore, 426.
Lowenthal, 264-265.
Plumb, 11.
Stone, 32.

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REVIEW OF REVIEWS
Moore's argument, however, was not that the value system changed, but that
the class structure did.
There was little discussion or criticism of the French case study. The
French reviewers did not find any faults.118 Zagorin charged that Moore
"does nothing to explain why the French political order, in contrast to the
English, was so unstable and divided against itself."119 He overlooked
Moore's explanation: the French revolution, instead of abolishing peasant
holdings as the English did, consolidated peasant property, thereby strengthening a class which "cared next to nothing about democracy as such," at the
same time that it "displayed strong anti-capitalist tendencies." Thus the
revolution, by consolidating peasant property, left a "legacy [which] was a
baneful one for a long time."120
One of the most important achievements of Moore's book was to bring
together the study of both Eastern and Western history, to compare the
development of the two "civilizations" in terms of a single theory. Half of
his case studies deal with non-Western societies - Japan, China, and India.
In spite of their significance, these Asian chapters received relatively little
attention from most reviewers. Chalmers Johnson was one of the few who
praised Moore's attention to Asia; he argued that "real area studies," such
as Moore's, "constitute the only legitimate road to a genuine theory of political development.9121 Johnson did not mention the theoretical differences
which separate Moore's work from his own.
Ronald P. Dore, an historian of Japan at the University of Sussex, has
written a study of Japanese fascism organized as a test of Moore's thesis.
He concluded that Moore's case study is "among the four or five best things
to read for a first general picture," but that Moore's causal argument is "wrong
at some crucial points," particularly on some aspects of landlord-peasant
relations and on the importance of international politics for Japanese development.122 Rothman was more favorably disposed toward Japanese authoritarianism than Moore. He argued that Japanese industrialization was less
repressive, and provided more popular benefits, than Moore indicated; he
also rejected Moore's argument that Japanese big business was one of the
main supporters of fascism.123
118. See for instance the review in Bulletin critique du livre franvais (April, 1970),
No. 78913; Masters' review in Critique; and Le Monde's.
119. Zagorin, 41.
120. Moore, 107-108.
121. Chalmers Johnson, "Political Science and East Asian Studies," World Politics 26
(1974), 574-575.
122. Dore, 295-300; R. P. Dore and Tsutomu Ouchi, "Rural Origins of Japanese
Fascism" in Dilemmas of Growth in Prewar Japan, ed. James William Morley (Princeton, 1971), esp. 183-207. G. D. Ness wrote that Moore was "insufficiently impressed
with the development of Meiji agriculture and the emergence of new peasant capitalists"
in nineteenth-century Japan; review in American Sociological Review 32 (1967), 818.
123. Rothman, 77.

REVIEW OF REVIEWS
169
An unusually interesting discussion of Moore's Indian chapter appeared

in The Times of India. The author asked, "why does the country lack, even
twenty years after independence, the driving impulse which led to rapid
m-odernizationelsewhere?" He found the absence of coercion to be the crucial
element, and concluded that "the country must learn to be content with a
slow rate of growth and blame not the rains, but the political system"'24
Rothman preferred to blame the rains: he found that Moore's account of
Indian historical development neglected "the problems of a tropical agriculture dependent on the monsoon," as well as her inadequate natural resources
and political heterogeneity.'25
Dore praised Moore's chapter on China: "compare this performance with
... the chaotic muddle [Weber] makes out of China, and Moore's is a model
of clarity and precision. Compare it with the clear, but passionately singleminded thesis of a Wittfogel, and Moore's is a model of subtlety," he wrote.126
The only criticism of the Chinese case study came from Rothman; he challenged Moore's characterization of Chiang Kai-shek as a "proto-fascist,"
preferring to classify Chiang as "authoritarian," "unattractive," and
"wrong."127
Some reviewers criticized Moore's omission of smaller countries. Stein
Rokkan wrote that Moore "has made no effort to account for politics at
varying levels of size and economic strength; in fact he rejects this task as
unworthy of his intellectual efforts."'28 Rothman argued that the Moore
thesis "is not at all applicable . . . to much of the Third World," and that
Sweden and Norway are "problematical" for Moore.129 Moore anticipated
these objections in his introduction: "smaller countries depend economically
and politically on big and powerful ones," he wrote; thus "the decisive causes
of their politics lie outside their own boundaries," and "their political problems are not really comparable to those of larger countries." His concern
was with "innovation that has led to political power," rather than with "the
spread and reception of institutions that have been hammered out elsewhere."'30
124. Sham Lal, "The System, Not the Stars," The Times of India, 28 May 1968.
India's move toward authoritarianismin 1975 confirms Moore's thesis that democracy
cannot survive without social revolution.
125. Rothman, 79. Ness termed Moore's view of Nehru "too harsh" because it "overlooks the situation in which he worked." Ness, 819, See also H. D. Harootunian, review
in Journal of Asian Studies 27 (1968),
372-374.
126. Dore, 299.

127. Rothman, 74-75.
128. Rokkan, 141; he makes a similar argument in Citizens, Elections, Parties (Oslo,
1970), 70-71, 76. Edith M. Link's review in the Journal of Economic History 27 (1967),
261, argues that "it is not clear" how the Moore thesis would explain Eastern Europe
today.
129. Rothman, 61-62.
130. Moore, xiii.

170
REVIEW OF REVIEWS
V.
NEW APPLICATIONS
Since Social Origins was published, there has been a shift from discussions
of Moore's case studies toward applications of his thesis to new cases.
Sweden was the subject of two such efforts. Francis G. Castles' paper in the
London School of Economics' journal Government and Opposition argued
that "Sweden's development seems to confirm Moore's thesis, but in certain
respects there are important divergences."'131 The changing relationship between lord and peasant is indeed the key to understanding Sweden, he
wrote, but the Swedish nobles withered away, the peasants became small
capitalist farmers, and bourgeois democracy triumphed "without a revolutionary break with the past, and without the destruction or absence of one
or both of the old rural classes."''32This development was a consequence not
of Sweden's economic or political dependence on powerful neighbors, but
rather of the indigenous historical context, which included the absence of
feudalism and the institutionalization of a free peasantry as a Fourth Estate.
Timothy Tilton's article on the Swedish case in the American Political
Science Review argued that it constituted a fourth type for Moore's thesis.133
Unlike Castles, he emphasized that massive emigration substituted for the
development of commercial agriculture as a means of solving the peasant
problem, and that revolutionary violence was avoided because of radical
reforms, concessions by a traditional elite which lacked a professional army
when faced with a revolutionary threat.
Moore's thesis has been applied to such diverse cases as the Greek colonels,
Sicilian mafia, Spanish anarchists, American students, and Turkish bureaucrats, among others. Michael Walzer's analysis of the 1968 Greek colonels'
coup argued that the Moore thesis provided an excellent analysis of postwar
Greek political development. American foreign aid in the 1948-68 period
promoted Greek economic development and at the same time repressed radical social change; as a consequence, oligarchic rule was simultaneously reinforced by American arms and threatened by the enhanced "resentments
and capacities" of the underlying population. The result was the rise of
fascism. 134
Several studies of peasant politics have made use of Moore's thesis. Anton
Blok's study of the Sicilian mafia argued that, in the nineteenth century,
Sicilian latifundists mobilized peasant protest against centralization and then
reaped the main benefits, constituting another of Moore's cases in which
131. Francis G. Castles, "BarringtonMoore's Thesis and Swedish Political Development," Government and Opposition 8 (1973),
316.
132. Castles, 315.

133. Timothy A. Tilton, "The Social Origins of Liberal Democracy: The Swedish
Case," American Political Science Review 68 (1974),
568-569.
134. Walzer, 20.

171
REVIEW OF REVIEWS
peasants become victims of revolutions for which they provided the social
dynamite.135 An article on Turkish politics in the Revue franfaise de science
politique used Moore's case of "peasant revolution" to study the role of the
Turkish elite in a political system in crisis. Ali Kazancigil argued that Turkey
was another case in which an agrarian bureaucracy coupled to royal absolutism created conditions which were unfavorable to the development of
parliamentary democracy.136 Leon Campbell, writing in the Latin American
Research Review, called for an analysis of the Peruvian guerilla movement
in terms of Moore's analysis of peasant politics.137
In a study of Andalusian peasant politics which appeared in the Journal
of Interdisciplinary History, Temma Kaplan described anarchism as an attempt led by independent smallholders to win control of the locality away
from the central government and create a society of small producers another case in which, as Moore argued, a radical anti-capitalist movement
is "the dying wail of a class over whom the wave of progress is about to
roll."138
The same notion of Moore's was applied to the American student movement of the 1960s by Samuel R. Freedman in an article in Social Problems.
He saw the student movement as a protest by petty-bourgeois youth facing
the imminent proletarianization of intellectual work.139 Others who applied
Moore's approach to the United States included Maurice Zeitlin. His study
of corporate ownership and control in the American Journal of Sociology
focused on the "internal differentiation and integration of [the] dominant
class," which Moore had identified as the key issue for political sociology.140
An article in Past and Present on the class structure of the American South
after Reconstruction described southern development as a variant of Moore's
"revolution from above" model, in which a delayed industrialization occurred
under the auspices of a reactionary agrarian elite.141
Others called for further applications of the Moore thesis. Anton Blok
135. Anton Blok, The Mafia of a Sicilian Village, 1860-1960:
A Stuidy of Violent
Peasant Entrepreneurs(Oxford, 1974), 98; see also xxvi.

136. Ali Kazancigil, "La Participation et les elites dans un syste'me politique en
crise: Le cas de la Turquie," Revuie fratiaise
de science politique 23 (1973),
19.
137. Leon G. Campbell, "The Historiography of the Peruvian Guerilla Movement,

1960-1965," Latin American Research Review 8 (1973), 61-62. See also Charles A.
Hale, "The Reconstruction of 19th Century Politics in Spanish America: A Case for
the History of Ideas," Latin American Research Review 8 (1973),
60.
138. Temma Kaplan, "The Social Base of 19th Century Andalusian Anarchism in
Jerez de la Frontera," Journial of Interdisciplinary History 6 (1975),
47-70.
139. Samuel R. Friedman, "Perspectiveson the American Student Movement," Social

Problems 20 (1973), 196-197.
140. Maurice Zeitlin, "Corporate Ownership and Control: The Large Corporation
and the Capitalist Class," American Journal of Sociology 79 (1974),
1112.
141. Jonathan M. Wiener, "Planter-MerchantConflict in Reconstruction Alabama,"

Past and Present No. 68 (1975),
73-94.

172
REVIEW OF REVIEWS
proposed that anthropology be reoriented from its traditional ethnographic

concerns toward the questions Moore raised about the "changing patterns
of dominance and servitude" which accompany modernization. Blok suggested in Human Organization that anthropologists "address themselves to
the realities of power," taking to heart Moore's maxim that "in any society
the dominant groups are the ones with the most to hide about the way the
society works."142An article in the British journal Political Studies argued in
favor of applying Moore's kind of historical specificity to studies of political
socialization.143Ira Katznelson, writing in Race, called for the application of
Moore's critique of pluralism to American urban studies.?44
Moore has also been referred to in discussion of the novels of Italo Svevo,
the history and literature of the Augustan age, the origins of World War I,
the nature of Gaullism, and modern Egyptian politics, among others.145The
most unlikely and inappropriate reference to Moore was in an argument in
Public Policy that the United States should maintain its military bases in
Spain because, as Moore shows, "economic prosperity is a precondition for
the existence of a democratic regime."146
There are two case studies conspicuously absent from this otherwise encyclopedic list of applications: Germany and Russia. While they play a central
role in his thesis, Moore did not include chapters on either in Social Origins.
Le Monde's reviewer considered the absence of these two case studies to be
the principal flaw in the book.147 Knut Borchardt's review of Moore in Der
Staat also criticized the book for focusing on Japanese but not European
fascism.148 David Lowenthal pointed out that Moore devoted much less
space to the differences and similarities of Russian and Chinese communism
142. Anton Blok, "A Note on Ethics and Power," Human Organization 32 (1973),
95-98; Moore, 522.
143. Robert Stradling and Elia T. Zureik, "The Emergence of Political Thought
among Englishmen: A Conflict Perspective,"Political Studies 21 (1973), 285-286.
144. Ira Katznelson, "Participation and Political Buffers in Urban America," Race
14 (1973), 466.
145. John Gatt-Rutter,
"Non-Commitment
in Italo Svevo," Journal of European
Studies 3 (1973), 135-146; Richard Frank, "Augustan Elegy and Catonism" in Aufstieg
und Niedergang der romischen Welt 2 (1974);
Michael R. Gordon, "Domestic Conflict
and the Origins of the First World War," Journal of Modern History 46 (1974), 204;
David R. Cameron and Richard I. Hofferbert, "Continuity and Change in Gaullism,"
American Journal of Political Science 17 (1973), 77-98; Clement Henry Moore, "Author-
itarian Politics in Unincorporated Society: The Case of Nasser's Egypt," Comparative

Political Studies 6 (1974), 193-195; see also Anthony James Joes, "Fascism: The Past
and the Future," Comparative Political Studies 7 (1974),
125.
146. Stephen S. Kaplan, "American Military Bases in Spain: Missions, Alternatives,

Spillovers," Public Policy 22 (1974), 104. Numerous other articles referring to Moore
can be found in the Social Science Citation Index.
147. Le Monde, 17 Jan. 1970.

148. Borchardt, 514.

REVIEW OF REVIEWS
173
than he does to German and Japanese fascism; he rightly suggested that it

is the Russian, more than the German case, that poses potential problems
for Moore's thesis.149
Moore's exclusion of the Russian case certainly does not rest on his own
ignorance; he spent many years studying Soviet politics.150In the preface to
Social Origins he wrote that he "discarded" the draft of a Russian chapter
"because first-rate accounts became available during the course of writing
to which it was impossible for me to add anything."'51'But his bibliography
does not indicate to which studies he is referring. The problem with the
Russian case is the relationship between the revolutionary leadership, the
urban proletariat, and the peasantry. Moore's French study provides a key:
in France, he wrote, the urban laborers "made" the bourgeois revolution,
while "the peasants determined just how far it would go."9152This would seem
to be a fruitful comparative hypothesis with which to approach the issue of
the social-class basis of the Russian revolution.
VI.
CONCLUSION
How does one judge the competing theories of comparative modernization

- class analysis, multi-causal approaches of various kinds, structural-functional theories? Thomas S. Kuhn, discussing competition among paradigms
in the history of science, writes that each theory explains so me problems
better than others, that each poses problems that can in principle be solved
within its own paradigm, and argues that others are less important.155In the
competition among theories, each points to its own successes at solving the
problems it has defined as the important ones.
Some find it tempting to seek the "value" of each theory and to harmonize
their mutually conflicting claims. This indeed is the orientation which lies at
the heart of much of the advocacy of a multi-factor approach. But Kuhn
makes it clear that science has not developed by harmonizing conflicting
paradigms- instead, it has progressed by replacing one theory with another.
This process is the culmination of what Kuhn describes as a power struggle
among the advocates of contending theories - a struggle which in principle
149. Lowenthal, 260.
150. Moore, Soviet Politics: The Dilemma of Power (Cambridge, 1950); and Terror
and Progress: U.S.S.R. (Cambridge, 1954).
151. Moore, Social Origins, xii.
152. Moore, 110. I am indebted to Juan Corradi for this argument. See also Theda
Skocpol, "France, Russia and China: A Structural Analysis of Social Revolutions,"
Comnparative Studies in Society and History (forthcoming, 1976); and "Old Regine
Legacies and Communist Revolutions in Russia and China," Social Forces (forthcoming,
1976).
153. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, 1962), esp.
76-77 and 108-109.

174
REVIEW OF REVIEWS
cannot be resolved by testing a theory against empirical "fact" to prove its

validity. Conflicting theories, he writes, can be judged only in terms of the
importance of the questions they pose and the adequacy of the way they
organize evidence to answer these questions.
Moore is absolutely explicit about the questions he poses: "we seek to
understand the role of the landed upper classes and the peasants in the
bourgeois revolution leading to capitalist democracy, the abortive bourgeois
revolutions leading to fascism, and the peasant revolutions leading to communism," he writes. In organizing the evidence to provide answers, he
focuses on "the ways in which the landed upper classes and the peasants
reacted to the challenge of commercial agriculture."''54
A reading of Moore's critics suggests that the Moore thesis stands. The
critics either did not attempt to make, or else did not succeed at making,
arguments that would lead to its rejection - arguments that Moore asks the
wrong questions or fails to answer them adequately. As the Times Literary
Supplement's reviewer wrote, Moore's thesis "imposes limitations as well as
offering opportunities. But the limitations appear fewer, and the opportunities
greater, than in any alternative approach.... this [is] a very important book
indeed; it may even be a great one."1155
An unfortunately large proportion of the critical remarks arose out of a
misunderstanding of Moore's method. This suggests that a major weakness
of the book is that Moore did not spell out more clearly the distinction
between his method of class analysis and the alternative explanations in
terms of "factors" and "variables." As Gianfranco Poggi wrote in the British
Journal of Sociology, "Moore is not explicit enough ... about his theoretical
assumptions and his conceptual apparatus"; it would have been helpful had
he "clarified the theoretical significance" of his thesis.156 In this respect his
1959 essay "Strategy in Social Science" is essential supplementary reading. It
is unlikely that such a clarification of his method would have changed the
minds- of his idealist and empiricist critics, but at least the issues which
divide them would be clarified.
Given that Moore has demonstrated the value of class analysis of comparative modernization, the task becomes one of strengthening his method
and conclusions. The least satisfactory case for the Moore thesis is the
Russian one; an analysis of Russian developments along the lines set out in
Social Origins would be one of the most important contributions to the
comparative class analysis of modernization.
154. Moore, xvii.
155. Times Literary Supplement,
1231. Randall Collins agreed that Social Origins
was "a breakthrough [with] significant potential for setting a serious political sociology
on its feet at last." Collins, 203.
156. Poggi, 217.

175
REVIEW OF REVIEWS
It would be further strengthened by a fuller and more explicit consideration

of the ideological aspect of development, of the manner in which particular
classes become conscious of their positions, and of the terms in which the
conflicts are fought out, or not fought out. Moore's appendix on "reactionary
and revolutionary imagery" provides a starting point for the study of ideology
in relation to his three types of modernization, but it needs to be integrated
into the case studies in a much more thorough way.
Moore's concept of the "reactionary coalition" of a persistent traditional
landed elite with a weak modernizing bourgeoisie is one of the richest aspects
of his thesis; it deserves elaboration and refinement. It should be particularly
valuable in analyzing social and political developments in contemporary
Latin America, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and elsewhere in developing
areas. Perhaps it would be possible to distinguish variations in the "revolution
from above" model, to explain why in some countries the reactionary coalition
remains in a traditional authoritarian phase, while in others, it moves toward
a fully-developed fascism.
Many would appreciate seeing Moore's argument on the industrial proletariat spelled out in greater detail. That the most industrially developed
countries have not had successful proletarian revolutions is a commonplace
observation; it would be interesting to know Moore's evaluation of the relative importance of capitalist concessions and repression, of liberal hegemony,
of reformism in the labor bureaucracy, and of communist and Soviet strategy.
Finally, there is the question of the practical implications of Moore's
thesis, of the relationship of the student of comparative class development
to his or her own work. The Weltanschauung which informs Moore's work
is closer to Weber's "heroic pessimism" than to Marx's attempts to unite
theory with revolutionary practice.157 Moore works as a politically isolated
individual; he is associated with no movement, intellectual or political. As
Peter Nettl wrote, Moore is "a loner," "a radical of great and austere
He sees his task not as a political one, but as a personal
scholarship."1158
and intellectual one - to work until he can comprehend the whole; to find
the facts, and then "face them like a man," however unpromising they may be.
JONATHAN M.
WIENER
University of California
Irvine
157. Wolfgang Mommsen, "Max Weber's Political Sociology
World History" in Max Weber, ed. Dennis Wrong (Englewood
194. Moore, however, emphatically rejects the narrow liberal
conception of democracy that characterized Weber's political
the World War I period.
158. Nettl, 438.
and His Philosophy of

Cliffs, N.J., 1970), 183nationalism and limited
writing, particularly in


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Wesleyan University

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Lord and Peasant in

Moore's analysis of the "intelligible shape" of modern societies was a

recommends Moore on these grounds: "Does Modernization Breed Revolution?" in;

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The charge of economic determinism was also made by Lee Benson,

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"purely economic considerations motivated men"; as a result, he "distorted

689-690. Lee Benson, Toward the

to apply the categories of Chalmers

Johnson to American history: compare Lee Benson, "Middle Period Historiography:

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Peel, in an article on "Cultural Factors in the Contemporary Theory of

and forces us again and again always to look at

the realities of both social structure and rhetoric."18

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methodological narrowness made the book "a flawed masterpiece.'9 The

21. Almond, 769.

23. Roger D. Masters, "L'Industrialisationet les paysans," Critique: Revue genterale

24. Isaac Kramnick, "Reflections on Revolution: Definition and Explanation in

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the task of surplus extraction during the transition to commercial agriculture:

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A number of objections were raised to the conceptual structure of Moore's

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Most of the problems with Moore's conception of "dictatorship" are a

Moore, 506; Featherstone, 36.

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development culminates in fascism, "one may hope for further 'culmina"49

The success of democratic institutions in postwar Germany, Japan, and

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III. SITUATING THE THEORY

Attempts to situate Moore as a social theorist accompanied the debate over

(London, 1972), 133-137.

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82. Bendix, 626.

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he emphasized that Moore's types of modernization were not Weberian categories.9Y

94. Moore, "Strategy,"esp. 117.

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In his critique of cultural theories of society, Moore was explicitly attacking

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IV. THE CASE STUDIES

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. . . an alignment of northern industrialists

planters against slaves, smaller farmers, and industrial workers."1108

83-85; Rothman, "Communication,"ibid., 182-183.

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indicated, he described the Civil War as a bourgeois revolution because of

vidualistic, commercialized value system" in the seventeenth century.117

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An unusually interesting discussion of Moore's Indian chapter appeared

126. Dore, 299.

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132. Castles, 315.