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Barrington Moore and the Preconditions for Democracy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2009

Joseph V. Femia
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Extract

Anxiety about the conditions that promote stable, democratic political relations in the developing countries has been a major preoccupation of both politicians and academics for over a generation now. One manifestation of this concern is the emergence of a new field of inquiry — the study of development — in the social sciences. The conditions most often put forward for political democracy fall into two general and by no means unrelated categories — cultural institutions, or values, and economic development. Political sociologists generally focus on one category or the other. Some, like Harry Eckstein and S. M. Lipset, concentrate mainly on cultural variables, the ‘patterns of integration’ supposedly conducive to the development and maintenance of democratic or authoritarian polities. Those who focus upon economic growth seem to fall into two groups. One school of thought, well represented by Daniel Lerner, emphasizes that democracy, as we understand it, is the end product of the modernization process; and the implicit assumption is that it is the inevitable end product of this process. The other trend in modernization thought, represented most notably by Professor Barrington Moore, argues that political democracy is the result of only a certain type of modernization — namely, the Anglo-American bourgeois variety.

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Articles
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British Journal of Political Science , Volume 2 , Issue 1 , January 1972 , pp. 21 - 46
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1972

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References

1 Harmondsworth: The Penguin Press, 1967. Further references to Social Origins will appear in parentheses in the body of the text.

2 The most comprehensive and suggestive reviews are: Stone, Lawrence, ‘News from Everywhere’, The New York Review of Books, IX (24 08 1967), 31–5;Google ScholarDore, Ronald P., ‘Making Sense of History’, Archives Europeennes De Sociologie, X (1969), 295–305;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Rothman, Stanley, ‘Barrington Moore and the Dialectics of Revolution’, The American Political Science Review, LXIV (1970), 61–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Although I am indebted to all of these articles, I have found the references provided in Professor Rothman’s piece to be particularly helpful.

3 Important works in this field include Chambers, J. D. and Mingay, G. E., The Agricultural Revolution, 1750–1880 (London: B. T. Batsford Ltd., 1966)Google Scholar; Jones, E. L. and Mingay, G. E., eds., Land, Labour, and population in the Industrial Revolution (London: Edward Arnold, 1967)Google Scholar; and Thompson, F. M. L., ‘The Social Distribution of Landed Property in England Since the Sixteenth Century’, Economic History Review, XIX (1966), 505–17.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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6 Of course, this could not distinguish the states of affairs in France during the reign of Napoleon III and the Vichy regime from the situation in Japan. Other explanations, such as duration of the authoritarian situation and historical cataclysm, could be useful in this respect, but Moore takes no theoretical cognizance of either factor.

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