Revisiting the social origins of Dictatorship and Democracy

Empire of the Mind

Fifty-eight years after its first publication, Barrington Moore Jr’s classic work on the sociology of politics, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (henceforth, Social Origins) remains a touchstone in the comparative study of democracies. South Asia offers a particularly interesting subset of cases with which to examine recent public discourse concerning democracy and authoritarianism. If democracy is taken to mean regular and competitive elections by which governments change, and a set of civil liberties including freedom of the press and of association, then only India in the region has experienced stable democratic rule, with the brief interregnum of the Emergency between 1975-1977. Most other states of South Asia and even the wider South-East Asia region have a chequered record of democracy, with the citizens subordinated by military juntas, monarchies, dictators, or single-party rule.

Barrington Moore Jr. was born in Washington DC in 1913. He studied Latin, Greek, and history at Williams College in Massachusetts. He also became interested in political science and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He graduated in 1936 majoring in the classics and received a Ph.D in sociology from Yale University. Moore had a profound impact on a generation of scholars in the social sciences, many of whom were his students at Harvard, where he taught from 1951 to 1979. He had an inspired approach to social science that included a commitment to tackling important questions, an aversion to models that ignored the historical situation in which social change takes place, and a passion for interdisciplinary work that is comparative and historical.

Social Origins is a comparative study of modernisation in Britain, France, the United States, China, Japan, Russia, Germany, and India. He famously argued, “No bourgeois, no democracy,” emphasising the important role of a large middle-class in accomplishing democratisation and ensuring democratic stability.

Besides being a work of scholarship, Social Origins is important from another perspective. It does not postulate one route to the modern world which must be taken by all countries. It points to a set of structural conditions -- of the conception of social class as arising out of a historically specific set of economic relationships -- as the basis for politics.

For most countries in Asia, this meant conditions rooted in the colonial history of the region. Moore begins with a question of obvious importance: Can we explain, comparatively, the historical development of three alternative paths to the modern world -- liberal democracy, communism, and fascism?

The remarkable feature of Moore’s analysis is the degree to which he engages the reader, urging you to share the quest, to explore the question with an informed but open mind. He does not provide theoretical linearity or closure, all the jagged edges, gaps, and the main thrust of his argument are made manifest to the reader. He raises many unanswered questions. Therefore, the analytical framework that he deploys is not limited in time or space, and can be applied, with modifications, even today.

Progress, Moore points out, has invariably and inevitably come with an enormous measure of human suffering. If this continues to be the case -- and there is no reason why this reality should suddenly change -- then one must be wary of those who promise paradise, from market economics to parliamentary democracy, and ask who bears which burden in the transition.

What Moore teaches best is a way to ask questions to be able to make informed and ethical judgements while making choices. Quite simply, all choices have consequences. Moore does not take for granted any social or political arrangements. Instead, he believes the costs of the status quo must be weighed against the costs of changing it. To the question, what was the ‘cost’ of the French Revolution, he adds the question, what would have been the ‘cost’ without the revolution?

Moore’s historical pessimism leads him to worry that despite the triumph of democracy over dictatorships and communist regimes in recent history, enlightened secular rationalism could easily be swamped by anti-rationalism, fundamentalism, and chauvinist religious beliefs. Despite the recent and radical transformations in world politics and economics, in the postmodern era, will the historical weight of fascism increase around the world?

Regardless of the answer, Social Origins invites the reader to continue a dialogue in comparative historical sociology, one that confronts objective conditions to lessen the unnecessary human costs of progress to the modern world.

Read Social Origins. It tell us why, as citizens individually and society collectively, we must inculcate a scientific and secular outlook, and confront theories and conjectures with empirical evidence. That is the only least-cost path to our collective future as a modern society. After all, as responsible citizens we must grapple, as best we can, with the ethical issues of consequence in our own times.