Barrington, Jr. Moore Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Barrington Moore, Jr. (1913–2005) was an American political sociologist who spent most of his career as senior research fellow at the Russian Research Center, Harvard University. Moore’s interests and intellectual ambitions covered many areas beyond the Russian case, although that was where his studies began. His Soviet Politics (1950) and Terror and Progress, USSR (1954) both examined the role of terror in political relations and became worth revisiting in the post-1989 world.

Moore’s most well-known work is Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (1966), which employs detailed historical and comparative analyses of Britain, France, Japan, India, China, and the United States as a way of developing and testing generalizations about how societies change. In this book, Moore argued that social interests and political structures that are declining may play an important part in structuring the new sociopolitical orders that take their place. The growth of large cities and the emergence of strong, centralizing states posed a major threat to great landowners and rural peasantry throughout Europe and Asia. They fought back or tried to avoid these changes. Moore studied how this happened and the historically significant choices that were made.

Moore showed that different responses to similar economic pressures led to very different political outcomes—democracy, fascism, and communism. He investigated the alliances that rural elites made with urban businesses and central governments. He also looked at the social structures of the peasantry and its historical fate. In some cases it was gradually eliminated (as in England). In others (France and China) it became a revolutionary force.

Unlike his friend, German-born political philosopher Herbert Marcuse, who treated bourgeois capitalism and totalitarian societies as being fundamentally in the same camp, Moore believed dictatorships and democracies were basically different in origin and structure. However, even this fundamental distinction was secondary to the basic question that guided his work: Which historical circumstances favor, and which inhibit, the making of modern societies that are decent and worth living in? The search for answers moved him to study anthropology, economics, history, and philosophy, leading to works of sustained analytical rigor and historical imagination such as Political Power and Social Theory (1958), Reflections on the Causes of Human Misery (1971), and Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt (1978). Moore continued working after Injustice, producing books such as Privacy (1984), Authority and Inequality under Capitalism and Socialism (1987), Moral Aspects of Economic Growth (1998), and Moral Purity and Persecution in History (2000).

In his work Moore maintained the empathetic but detached stance instilled by his early training in Latin, Greek, and both classical and medieval history. He credited the works of sociologists William Graham Sumner and A. G. Keller for his continuing concern with inequality, authority, ideology, and the causes of human misery. Moore was always alert for indications of emancipatory forces that might work in favor of the creation of rational and decent societies. In all his work, he demonstrated that objectivity does not mean neutrality.

Bibliography:

Skocpol,Theda, ed. Democracy, Revolution, and History. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998.
Smith, Dennis. Barrington Moore:Violence, Morality, and Political Change. London: Macmillan, 1983.

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