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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 August 2014
Stanley Rothman is laboring under a series of misapprehensions. What appears to give them some minimal coherence is evidently the curious conviction that in criticizing Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy he must cope with the work of a disillusioned former fellow-traveller. In discussing my alleged fundamental assumptions, toward the end of his essay, Rothman asserts:
Moore's writing indicates that he is one of that generation of scholars to whom the Soviet Revolution once represented the hope of a radical transformation of mankind. Disillusioned by the results of that Revolution, he has now, with the mellowing of the Soviet regime, been able to justify his earlier enthusiasm for it by arguing that it has been no more repressive than other alternatives. (31,506.)
Upon reflection I think I am entitled to take this as a compliment to my efforts at critical detachment. In my books on the Soviet Union I must have restrained my hostility to the point where my critic could succeed in discovering what he takes to be evidence of enthusiasm. At any rate, his discovery is a completely original one!
After this discovery Rothman goes on to attribute ideas to me that he probably got from reading the works of my very good friend, Herbert Marcuse. For example, so far as I remember, I have never used the expression “non-repressive society,” which has become in a way Professor's Marcuse's trade-mark. (“Less repressive” is quite another expression, which I do use.) Nor did I use the expression “free non-repressive society,” preferring to say “free and rational society,” on the page cited by Rothman in this same paragraph. Indeed, to continue examining this passage as an example of Rothman's criticism, I have never been sanguine about “revolutions in the third world as embodying hope for the future” of mankind, much as such revolutions against American attempts to prop up various forms of political landlordism do seem to me justified. But perhaps Rothman is simply mixed up, because I doubt very much that either Marcuse or I would ever speak about “the goal of a compulsionless society!”
1 With a sense of amused astonishment I reread pages 31 and 506 in Social Origins, which Rothman cited as specific evidence for his claims. On page 31 in footnote 65 I was describing a type of disillusionment that took place in England as the French Revolution entered its radical phase and comparing that disillusionment with American reactions to communist expansion after 1945. In so doing I said: “There is the same ambiguity about the character of the revolutionary enemy, the same exploitation of this ambiguity by the dominant elements in society, the same disillusionment and dismay among its original supporters as the revolution abroad deceived their hopes.” (Italics added) How Rothman could so misread my remarks as to attribute this type of disillusionment to me personally I cannot understand. On page 506 there is no hint at all of my alleged shift of views. Perhaps what Rothman meant to cite was page 505 where I said: “As I have reluctantly come to read this evidence, the costs of moderation have been at least as atrocious as those of revolution, perhaps a great deal more.”
2 That I misuse my sources Rothman asserts more than once. Sometimes he means that my interpretation of an author's data leads me to a conclusion different from that of the author, as in the case of my use of the evidence in Mary Wright's Last Stand of Chinese Conservatism. That is a valid difference, I believe, and one that Rothman also uses when, for example, he draws different conclusions from those of E. P. Thompson (footnote 32), but its validity rests, of course, on the evidence offered for the change.
What appears to be a more damaging accusation is the kind of flat statement Rothman makes about my alleged inability to cite properly. For example, in referring to my discussion of the Community Development Program in India, he says: “Moore does not accurately cite a single case study in which reform is blocked by the power structure of the village.” (p. 00) In the accompanying footnote, he cites only three of my many sources, declaring: “None of them directly support his assertion and Beals [Gopalpur] states almost the opposite on p. 82.”
In the first place, it is simply not true that the three sources (and others cited earlier and later) do not “directly support” my statements, which consist mainly of close paraphrases from the sources cited. Now, as to Beals' stating “almost the opposite” of my general view that the wealthy landlords blocked reform when it threatened their interests or control over the village, I see not the slightest contradiction on p. 82 of Beals' study. There Beals credits the wealthy Gopalpur landlords, who are the “kingpin of the social structure of the villages they control,” with being “the innovators who introduce new agricultural techniques,” as well as other improvements in the village in many cases. But unlike Beals, Rothman does not ask the simple question: “For whose benefit are these innovations or reforms?” Beals had already given his explicit answer on p. 80, where he pointed out that some wealthy landowners introduced new and costly fertilizer, equipment, crops and techniques—but they did this only on their own large acreage farms. Many of these innovations were not suitable for farms of small acreage, as is true elsewhere in the world, of course. Small farmers, then, remained dependent for seed and credit on the wealthy landlord. Furthermore, as Beals adds, on p. 82 but not cited by Rothman, “If those who now serve as laborers are converted into farmers, there will be no one to do the weeding and harvesting.” The landlord's stake in the status quo is, I think, clear.
3 As to my being anti-Weber, I can only say that I regret that Rothman can read Social Origins as constituting in any substantial sense an attack on Max Weber, whom I greatly respect and whose pessimistic views on Western civilization I share.
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