Nov 14 2005
Book Review: Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, by Barrington Moore Jr.
Book Review: Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, by Barrington Moore Jr.
It was probably an understatement when Barrington Moore started the book by saying, “No problem ever comes to the student of human society out of a blue and empty sky.” After all, the author lived in a very different world than we do today. Having barely survived the most destructive war in human history, his generation quickly fell under the long shadow of the Cold War, in which sanity was sustained by a strategy called MAD.
It is in this historical context, he set out to explore the origins of different political systems of the day. If his hypothesis that it was the agrarian actors who routed societies towards democracy or totalitarianism seemed arbitrary upon first look, it became less so when he pointed out that Russia and China, the two Communist nemesis, were both “overwhelmingly agrarian countries” before turning totalitarian.
To discover a set of determent parameters, Moore started from the other end of spectrum: what forces induced the development of English democracy? His arguments seemed to be inline with some of Wallerstein’s points, that industrialization started earlier in rural area. The result was a significant reconfiguration of agrarian economic structures. There were a slew of new capitalist farmers, in that they all treated the land as capital and operated for profit. Because they were now part of the Market, their interests and outlook were much more aligned with men of commerce than with those of the Crown. At the same time, the English peasantry started a long but gradual decline. All those changes came into play when a revolution broke out (in this case, it was the English Civil War). As a result, weakened Crown had to accept the ascendancy of burgeoning bourgeoisies, with a transforming traditional aristocracy buffering in between. Thus the modern liberal democracy was born.
Any deviation from this standard, if not ideal, path to democracy, according to Moore, would result in revolutionary hemorrhage, as in France, or in eventual totalitarian regimes, as in Russia, Germany and Japan. Further more, the medium through which each democracy or totalitarian gene manifested itself was the relative strength of peasantry. In Moore’s world, if you a peasant, in a popular term used during Chinese Cultural Revolution, you are on the wrong side of history. Their misery during industrialization that E. P. Thompson lamented so profusely in his book was a blessing in disguise according to Moore. Without a thorough breakup of the peasantry as a social-economic force, he seemed to argue, bourgeois revolution either couldn’t happen, as in China, or couldn’t complete, as in France.
“Dictatorship and Democracy” was a seminal study of the world’s major political systems. Barrington Moore Jr. was widely recognized for his contribution to the field of comparative sociology. However, if I read him correctly, the author himself was guarded in the implication (and thus application) of his own arguments. For example, Moore was very much aware of the limited data and historical materials he had access to. And on more than one occasion, he conspicuously precluded other factors in his investigation in order to maintain focus . In addition, as a sociologist, Moore was surprisingly anti-Weber and was dismissive of the “superstructures” of societies he was studying. Although some of his observations and arguments sounded very much Burkean, he nevertheless insisted there was really not much into the lore of “Anglo-Saxon Liberalism” when retracing the progress of English democracy.
Personally, I have great faith in comparative study. Without proper perspective, I believe, historical events are ripe for political manipulation. Reading Moore’s work did not change my conviction but did bring out an antithesis: maybe the breadth of comparative study is in itself a weakness? In order to make subjects comparable, a scholar has to shoehorn individual cases into a uniform structure, a process that is inherently problematic. For example, in order to make the case for the role landed nobility played, Moore made a “scholar-landowner” class out of pre-modern China, and argued that because they were not the operators of actual food production, they lacked the incentive of capitalizing their land. With this arrangement, China did fit within his overall scheme. But was there a class of so-called “scholar-landowner”? Or did the majority of landowners in China never invest in their properties? I think those assumptions are useful to complete Moore’s theoretical framework but are not necessarily representative of historical reality. There are other cases like this, e.g. the one where the author likened KMT under Chiang to the Nazi Party under Hitler, that leave his reasoning exposed to specialist’s challenge.
Despite my reservations about how much Moore’s theory satisfactorily explained Chinese history, I was delighted to read some of his social commentary in the last several chapters. Towards the end of the book, he mercilessly placed Western Liberalism and Communism in the same basket—“[Both] have stared to turn into ideologies that justify and conceal numerous forms of repression.” (p508) When I read it I screamed “Far Out!” I’d argue that Solzhenitsyn provided the positive proof on the Communism side and today’s “freedom warriors” provided the negative counterproof, or nothing will not turn repressive once it becomes an ideology, on Western democracy (I don’t want to use the word “liberalism” because I believe it is by definition anti-ideological).
Another critique of his that caught my eye was against what he labeled “Catonism”—“advocacy of the sterner virtues, militarism, contempt for ‘decadent’ foreigners and anti-intellectualism” (p491, although it was totally uncalled for to get the Legalists, or 法家, involved in this). He characterized such paranoia as the defensive reaction from rural aristocracy, like the Junkers, towards rapid political and economic changes. Given the lively Southern anti-liberal revival that we see today, I wonder whether Prof. Moore, in his last years, has thought about revising his view on American democratization?