Barrington Moore (1913–2005)
Author of Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World
About the Author
Barrington Moore, Jr. has served on the Harvard University faculty for more than 50 years, as a lecturer on sociology and as Senior Research Fellow at the Russian Research Center
Image credit: Barrington Moore, sociologist By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25788974
Works by Barrington Moore
Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (1966) 750 copies, 3 reviews
Reflections on the Causes of Human Misery and Upon Certain Proposals to Eliminate Them (1972) 56 copies
Moral Aspects of Economic Growth, and Other Essays (The Wilder House Series in Politics, History and Culture) (1998) 21 copies
Terror and progress USSR: some sources of change and stability in the Soviet dictatorship (1954) 13 copies
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Other names
- Moore, Barrington, Jr.
- Birthdate
- 1913-05-12
- Date of death
- 2005-10-16
- Gender
- male
- Education
- Williams College
Yale University (Ph.D.) - Occupations
- political sociologist
historian
sociologist - Organizations
- Russian Research Center
- Awards and honors
- Phi Beta Kappa
- Relationships
- Marcuse, Herbert (friend)
Wolff, Robert Paul (friend) - Short biography
- Barrington Moore, Jr., was born into a wealthy family. His parents divorced when he was a young child, and he was raised by his maternal grandparents. As a boy, he loved mountain climbing during his European summer vacations, but was bullied by classmates at his boarding school. He earned his B.A. in classics at Williams College, and then his Ph.D. in sociology at Yale. He learned multiple languages, including Greek, Latin, and Russian. After graduate school, he served in World War II as a civilian analyst in the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the CIA. During this period, he met Elizabeth Ito, a Japanese-American woman whom he married in 1944, much to the disappointment of his upper-class family. His academic career began at the University of Chicago, and in 1948, he joined Harvard University’s Russian Research Center, where he taught and did research until his retirement in 1979.
He was a co-founder and early tutor in Harvard's Social Studies program. Moore published his first book, Soviet Politics in 1950, and Terror and Progress, USSR in 1954. He became famous with the publication of his 1966 book Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World, which explored the ways in which landed upper classes, peasants, and monarchs set the stage for revolutions that pushed their nations toward fascism, communism, or liberal democracy. His many other works included Reflections on the Causes of Human Misery (1972), Injustice: the Social Basis of Obedience and Revolt (1978), and Moral Purity and Persecution in History (2000). In 1965, Moore and his friends Herbert Marcuse and Robert Paul Wolff each authored an essay on the concept of tolerance and the three essays were collected in the book A Critique of Pure Tolerance -- a play on Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. - Cause of death
- pneumonia
- Nationality
- USA
- Birthplace
- Washington, D.C., USA
- Places of residence
- Newport, Rhode Island, USA
Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA - Place of death
- Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
- Associated Place (for map)
- USA
Members
Reviews
This slender mid-1960s volume assembles essays from a trio of leftist Harvard academics, addressing shortcomings in the vernacular political understanding of tolerance for modern American society. The three pieces are arranged in ascending authorial age, as well as anger. As the authors remark in their foreword, "The tone of indignation rises sharply from essay to essay" (vi).
The junior contributor (and now only surviving one) was Robert Paul Wolff, an expert on Kant. In his essay "Beyond show more Tolerance," he discusses the different ways that tolerance operates in the pluralist industrialized world of the twentieth century, as contrasted with the ideas and ideals of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century individualist liberalism. He allows that pluralism does go some ways to accommodate community concerns, but concludes that liberal tolerance fails to support needed reforms in a pluralist setting. He also observes and explains the peculiar antagonism between pluralism and socialism (50-1), showing how--in 1965, as more than half a century later--the ingrained pluralism of the Democratic Party is the really motivated and effective opposition to any possible socialist Left in the US. Ultimately, Wolff argues for the obsolescence of pluralism on just these grounds.
The second essay is by sociologist Barrington Moore, Jr. For his purpose of addressing "Tolerance and the Scientific Outlook," he characterizes the "scientific" very broadly as the "secular and rational," offering this useful touchstone: "For the essence of science, I would suggest, is simply the refusal to believe on the basis of hope" (55). While acknowledging the difficulty of making rational determinations regarding political change, he also emphasizes its necessity on the part of those intellectuals whose role is to criticize both the oppressive status quo and poorly-conceived brutal attacks on it.
Herbert Marcuse is best known as a member of the Frankfurt School and serves as a bogeyman in today's right-wing scaremongering about "cultural Marxism." His "Repressive Tolerance" in this volume is in fact a frequently-referenced document in such discourse. On its own, and in combination with the other two essays of the book, I found it to be reasonable and still relevant. Marcuse points out that while a tolerant society is an unimpeachable liberal ideal, the practice of indiscriminate tolerance in an existing oppressive society redounds to the advantage of the oppressors and the perpetuation of oppression.
"Tolerance toward that which is radically evil now appears as good, because it serves the cohesion of the whole on the road to affluence or more affluence. The toleration of the systemic moronization of children and adults alike by publicity and propaganda, the release of destructiveness in aggressive driving, the recruitment for and training of special forces, the impotent and benevolent tolerance toward outright deception in merchandising, waste, and planned obsolescence are not distortions or aberrations, they are the essence of a system which fosters tolerance as a means for perpetuating the struggle for existence and suppressing the alternatives." (83)
So much has that system advanced in the last half-century, that we can easily see the intensified versions for each of Marcuse's examples. Publicity and propaganda are now personally tailored to each brainwashed smartphone user. Gun "rights" and ammosexual cultural politics foster homicide rates challenging for automobiles to compete with. Mercenary soldiers employed by the US outnumber enlisted personnel in deployments to combat zones, while "volunteers" continue to be damaged and destroyed by "forever wars." And climate catastrophe is a collateral benefit of a petrochemical-driven disposable consumer society. (It perpetuates struggle and suppresses alternatives.)
The perceived currency of Marcuse's essay likely stems from its closing passage, with its clear relevance to the Black Lives Matter movement's protests against police violence. Again, I see nothing to argue with here. In fact, I find it refreshing to see my own view on the question set forth so succinctly. Here is the passage in question:
"Law and order are everywhere and always the law and order which protect the established hierarchy; it is nonsensical to invoke the absolute authority of this law and this order against those who suffer from it and struggle against it--not for personal advantages and revenge, but for their share of humanity. There is no other judge over them than the constituted authorities, the police, and their own conscience. If they use violence, they do not start a new chain of violence but try to break an established one. Since they will be punished, they know the risk, and when they are willing to take it, no third person, and least of all the educator and intellectual, has the right to preach them abstention." (116-7)
My 1969 copy of the book includes a "Postscript 1968" for Marcuse's essay. In it, he returns to his earlier provocation in suggesting "the practice of discriminating tolerance in an inverse direction" (119). He admits that to implement such a proposal would apparently require some sort of elite dictatorship to judge between progressive and regressive agendas, extending tolerance only to the former. But he concludes, "the alternative to the established semi-democratic process is not a dictatorship or elite, no matter how intelligent, but the struggle for a real democracy" (122). Still, a necessary ingredient of that struggle is the disavowal of "the pernicious ideology that tolerance is already institutionalized in this society" (123). Fair enough, but it's also easy to see how advocates of regressive politics would seize on the somewhat confused rhetoric Marcuse constructs around this point in the original essay as an opportunity to indict him. show less
The junior contributor (and now only surviving one) was Robert Paul Wolff, an expert on Kant. In his essay "Beyond show more Tolerance," he discusses the different ways that tolerance operates in the pluralist industrialized world of the twentieth century, as contrasted with the ideas and ideals of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century individualist liberalism. He allows that pluralism does go some ways to accommodate community concerns, but concludes that liberal tolerance fails to support needed reforms in a pluralist setting. He also observes and explains the peculiar antagonism between pluralism and socialism (50-1), showing how--in 1965, as more than half a century later--the ingrained pluralism of the Democratic Party is the really motivated and effective opposition to any possible socialist Left in the US. Ultimately, Wolff argues for the obsolescence of pluralism on just these grounds.
The second essay is by sociologist Barrington Moore, Jr. For his purpose of addressing "Tolerance and the Scientific Outlook," he characterizes the "scientific" very broadly as the "secular and rational," offering this useful touchstone: "For the essence of science, I would suggest, is simply the refusal to believe on the basis of hope" (55). While acknowledging the difficulty of making rational determinations regarding political change, he also emphasizes its necessity on the part of those intellectuals whose role is to criticize both the oppressive status quo and poorly-conceived brutal attacks on it.
Herbert Marcuse is best known as a member of the Frankfurt School and serves as a bogeyman in today's right-wing scaremongering about "cultural Marxism." His "Repressive Tolerance" in this volume is in fact a frequently-referenced document in such discourse. On its own, and in combination with the other two essays of the book, I found it to be reasonable and still relevant. Marcuse points out that while a tolerant society is an unimpeachable liberal ideal, the practice of indiscriminate tolerance in an existing oppressive society redounds to the advantage of the oppressors and the perpetuation of oppression.
"Tolerance toward that which is radically evil now appears as good, because it serves the cohesion of the whole on the road to affluence or more affluence. The toleration of the systemic moronization of children and adults alike by publicity and propaganda, the release of destructiveness in aggressive driving, the recruitment for and training of special forces, the impotent and benevolent tolerance toward outright deception in merchandising, waste, and planned obsolescence are not distortions or aberrations, they are the essence of a system which fosters tolerance as a means for perpetuating the struggle for existence and suppressing the alternatives." (83)
So much has that system advanced in the last half-century, that we can easily see the intensified versions for each of Marcuse's examples. Publicity and propaganda are now personally tailored to each brainwashed smartphone user. Gun "rights" and ammosexual cultural politics foster homicide rates challenging for automobiles to compete with. Mercenary soldiers employed by the US outnumber enlisted personnel in deployments to combat zones, while "volunteers" continue to be damaged and destroyed by "forever wars." And climate catastrophe is a collateral benefit of a petrochemical-driven disposable consumer society. (It perpetuates struggle and suppresses alternatives.)
The perceived currency of Marcuse's essay likely stems from its closing passage, with its clear relevance to the Black Lives Matter movement's protests against police violence. Again, I see nothing to argue with here. In fact, I find it refreshing to see my own view on the question set forth so succinctly. Here is the passage in question:
"Law and order are everywhere and always the law and order which protect the established hierarchy; it is nonsensical to invoke the absolute authority of this law and this order against those who suffer from it and struggle against it--not for personal advantages and revenge, but for their share of humanity. There is no other judge over them than the constituted authorities, the police, and their own conscience. If they use violence, they do not start a new chain of violence but try to break an established one. Since they will be punished, they know the risk, and when they are willing to take it, no third person, and least of all the educator and intellectual, has the right to preach them abstention." (116-7)
My 1969 copy of the book includes a "Postscript 1968" for Marcuse's essay. In it, he returns to his earlier provocation in suggesting "the practice of discriminating tolerance in an inverse direction" (119). He admits that to implement such a proposal would apparently require some sort of elite dictatorship to judge between progressive and regressive agendas, extending tolerance only to the former. But he concludes, "the alternative to the established semi-democratic process is not a dictatorship or elite, no matter how intelligent, but the struggle for a real democracy" (122). Still, a necessary ingredient of that struggle is the disavowal of "the pernicious ideology that tolerance is already institutionalized in this society" (123). Fair enough, but it's also easy to see how advocates of regressive politics would seize on the somewhat confused rhetoric Marcuse constructs around this point in the original essay as an opportunity to indict him. show less
Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World by Barrington Moore
The author ambitiously intends to compare (mostly) and contrast the transition from per-industrial agrarian economies to industrialized capitalist societies in Europe, Japan, China, Russia, and the USA. I am sure most any fan of history and or sociology could nitpick here, I chose to enjoy the ride and mouse or hurl abuse as the mood struck me. Mostly I was amused, entertained, educated, and enlightened. Personally, I feel the differences and variables are too great to summon up from these show more national histories axioms of civilization development out of it. Indeed, seeing these patterns in largely unrelated systems, is too me, a form of apophenia. This is a general term for the human tendency to seek patterns in random information. Everyone experiences it from time to time. Most of us cannot produce a coherent, impressive, educational and researched tome of nearly six hundred pages out of it.
Here is an example of axiomatic analysis of differing cultures in their industrialization:
Throughout there is a fascinating attempt to understand the conditions conducive to the growth of fascism and fascistic governments.
Then there is Catonism. This repressive social order that supports those in power and opposes reforms and development, particularly those that would benefit the peasantry I feel I can see reverberating in the most obstructionist and rightwing parts of my own society.
Finally, a succinct – possibly unfairly so – summary of the core argument here on the impetus of peasants in revolt:
Here is an example of axiomatic analysis of differing cultures in their industrialization:
In any preindustrial society, the attempt to scale bureaucracy soon runs into the difficulty that it is very hard to extract enough resources from the population to pay salaries and thereby make officials dependent on their superiors. The way in which the rulers try to get around this difficulty has a tremendous impact on the whole social structure. The French solution was the sale of offices, the Russian one, suitable to Russia's huge expanse of territory, was the granting of estates with serfs in return for service in tsarist officialdom. The Chinese solution was to permit more or less open corruption.
…
The adaptability of Japanese political and social institutions to capitalist principles enabled Japan to avoid the costs of a revolutionary entrance onto the stage of modern history. Partly because she escaped these early horrors, Japan succumbed in time to fascism and defeat. So did Germany for very broadly the same reason. The price for avoiding a revolutionary entrance has been a very high one. It has been high in India as well. There the play has not yet reached the culminating act; the plot and the characters are different. Still, lessons learned from all the cases studied so far may prove helpful in understanding what the play means.
Throughout there is a fascinating attempt to understand the conditions conducive to the growth of fascism and fascistic governments.
Here the Confucian theory of a benevolent élite has, under the pressure of circumstances, taken on a martial and "heroic" character. The combination is already familiar to the West in fascism. The resemblance becomes still stronger as we see the organizational form that this heroic élitism is supposed to take....
Three features stand out in this brief review of Kuomintang doctrine as formulated by Chiang Kai-shek. The first is the almost complete absence of any social and economic program to cope with China's problems, and indeed a very marked ritual avoidance of the realities of these problems. The talk about "political tutelage" and preparation for democracy was mainly rhetoric. Actual policy was to disturb existing social relationships as little as possible. Such a real attempt policy did not exclude blackmail and forced contributions from any sector of the population that provided a convenient target. Gangsters do the same thing in American cities, without any to upset the existing social order, upon which they actually depend. The second feature, one may call the concealment of the lack of specific political and social objectives through somewhat grotesque efforts to revive traditional ideals in a situation that had for a long time increasingly undermined the social basis of these ideals. Since Professor Mary C. Wright has argued this point cogently and with abundant concrete evidence in The Last Stand of Chinese Conservatism: The T'ung-Chih Restoration, 1862-1874, we need only remind ourselves here that this distorted patriotic idealization of the past is one of the main stigmata of Western fascism. The third and last feature is the Kuomintang's effort to resolve its problems through military force, again a major characteristic of European fascism.
Then there is Catonism. This repressive social order that supports those in power and opposes reforms and development, particularly those that would benefit the peasantry I feel I can see reverberating in the most obstructionist and rightwing parts of my own society.
…attributed to the peasants, but finds a response among the latter because it provides an explanation of sorts for their situation under the intrusion of the market. It is also quite clearly a body of notions that arises out of the life conditions of a landed aristocracy threatened by the same forces. If one glances at the major themes in the form of the aristocratic response that culminated in liberal democracy, one will notice that they also occur in Catonism transposed to a different key. The criticism of mass democracy, the notions of legitimate authority and the importance of custom, opposition to the power of wealth and to mere technical expertise all constitute major themes in the Catonist cacophony. Again, it is in the way they are combined, and even more important the ultimate purpose, that makes all the difference. In Catonism these notions serve the ends of strengthening repressive authority. In aristocratic liberalism they are brought together as intellectual weapons against irrational authority. Catonism, on the other hand, lacks any conception of pluralism or the desirability of checks on hierarchy.... it seems that the Catonist outlook on art merges with a general tendency noticeable in all regimes concerned with maintaining social cohesion, to promote traditional and academic art forms. There is, as has often been noted, a striking similarity between Nazi and Stalinist art. Both were equally strong in condemning Kunstbolsebewiewus and "rootless cosmopolitanism." Similar trends may be observed in Augustan Rome."
… In sketching what finds approval under Catonist notions, it has already been necessary to mention what Catonist theories Concretely they are hostile to traders, usurers, big money, cosmopolitanism, intellectuals. In America Catonism has taken the form of resentment against the city slicker and more generally any form of reasoning that goes beyond the most primitive folk wisdom. In Japan it manifested itself as violent antiplutocratic sentiment. The city appears as a cancerous sore full of invisible conspirators out to cheat and demoralize honest peasants. There is of course a realistic basis for these sentiments in the actual day-to-day experiences of peasants and small farmers who are at a serious disadvantage in a market economy.
As far as feelings (so far as we really know them) and the causes of hatred go, there is not a great deal to choose between the radical right and the radical left in the countryside. The main distinction depends on the amount of realistic analysis of the causes of suffering and on the images of a potential future. Catonism conceals the social causes and projects an image of continued submission. The radical tradition emphasizes the causes and projects an image of eventual liberation. The fact that the emotions and causes are similar does not mean that the emergence of one or the other as a politically significant force depends on skills in manipulating…
… a great deal of talk about the need for a thoroughgoing moral regeneration, talk that covers the absence of a realistic analysis of prevailing social conditions which would threaten the vested interests behind Catonism. Probably it is a good working rule to be suspicious about political and intellectual leaders who talk mainly about moral virtues; many poor devils are liable to be badly hurt. It is not quite correct to assert that the morality lacks content; Catonism seeks a specific kind of regeneration, though it is easier to specify what Catonism is against than what it is for. An aura of moral earnestness suffuses Catonist arguments. This morality is not instrumental; that is, policies are not advocated in order to make humanity happier (happiness and progress are contemptuously dismissed as decadent bourgeois illusions) and certainly not in order to make people richer. They are important because they are supposed to contribute to a way of life that has somehow proved its validity in the past. …Catonist views of the past are romantic distortions…
Finally, a succinct – possibly unfairly so – summary of the core argument here on the impetus of peasants in revolt:
THE PROCESS OF MODERNIZATION … culminates during the twentieth peasant revolutions century with revolutions that succeed. No longer is it possible to take seriously the view that the peasant is an "object of history," a form of social life over which historical changes pass but which contributes nothing to the impetus of these changes. For those who savor historical irony it is indeed curious that the peasant in the modern era has been as much an agent of revolution as the machine, that he has come into his own as an effective historical actor along with the conquests ofshow less
In this book, Moore's stated purpose is to delineate some historical connections between ideas of moral purity and persecution or ostracization. After a few moments of reflection, however, it strikes me as difficult to think of many instances in which persecution that didn't have their roots in some notion of purity, moral or otherwise. It especially won't come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the wide swath of anthropological literature on the subject, like Mary Douglas' "Purity and show more Danger." I thought this book might have something new or interesting to say about it, but I was wrong.
This book has at least two problems that should be considered egregious shortcomings in a book of such sweeping history. Firstly, the paucity of examples from which he chooses to draw is problematic. He considers only, in chronological order: the literature of the Old Testament, the religion wars of sixteenth-century France, the French Revolution, and "Asiatic civilizations." Secondly, one walks away from the book with the idea that the topologies of persecution - how they shame, in what circumstances they occur, their sociological functions, et cetera - are never explored. There is nothing for the almost two millennia between the Old Testament and the France of the 1500s. And then there's the fact that "Asiatic civilizations" is so anachronistic as to be risible. But then again, so is the picture in the back of the book, showing him with a gigantic corncob pipe hanging out of his mouth.
The thesis of the book is that, in the first three historical instances, persecution and concepts of moral purity were closely tied together, while in "Asiatic civilizations" (he considers Confucian and Buddhist religious thought here mostly), the connection is much more tenuous, and perhaps even nonexistent. We are simply told, in instance after instance, that people were persecuted or driven out of different movements or societies (the radicals in the Revolution, Jewish society of the Old Testament, et cetera) because they broke some sort of ethical-moral stricture. This almost reduces the entire book to a set of linear, historical treatments whereas I thought that it would bring in something more integrative and interdisciplinary. show less
This book has at least two problems that should be considered egregious shortcomings in a book of such sweeping history. Firstly, the paucity of examples from which he chooses to draw is problematic. He considers only, in chronological order: the literature of the Old Testament, the religion wars of sixteenth-century France, the French Revolution, and "Asiatic civilizations." Secondly, one walks away from the book with the idea that the topologies of persecution - how they shame, in what circumstances they occur, their sociological functions, et cetera - are never explored. There is nothing for the almost two millennia between the Old Testament and the France of the 1500s. And then there's the fact that "Asiatic civilizations" is so anachronistic as to be risible. But then again, so is the picture in the back of the book, showing him with a gigantic corncob pipe hanging out of his mouth.
The thesis of the book is that, in the first three historical instances, persecution and concepts of moral purity were closely tied together, while in "Asiatic civilizations" (he considers Confucian and Buddhist religious thought here mostly), the connection is much more tenuous, and perhaps even nonexistent. We are simply told, in instance after instance, that people were persecuted or driven out of different movements or societies (the radicals in the Revolution, Jewish society of the Old Testament, et cetera) because they broke some sort of ethical-moral stricture. This almost reduces the entire book to a set of linear, historical treatments whereas I thought that it would bring in something more integrative and interdisciplinary. show less
When I read this in college it became my key to understanding political revolution. Only when it was pointed out to me that Moore was a doctrinaire Marxist did it lose its luster. The book still provides insight into the process of political revolution and the change from traditional to modern society. I still go back and read sections and constantly find some new insights. Highly recommended for the student of political science.
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