Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World - Hardcover

MOORE,Barrington, Jr.

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9780713900262: Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0713900261 ISBN 13: 9780713900262

Publisher: Beacon Press, Boston, MA, 1967

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Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World, by Barrington Moore, Jr.

From the jacket flap: "Tracing the responses of landed aristocrats and peasants to the growth of industrial and commercial power in China, England, France, India, Japan, and the United States (and suggesting how Germany and Russia fit into the pattern), Barrington Moore transcends the usual ethnocentrism of Western scholarship in a way which makes significant global generalizations possible.

"Exposing as superficial the common assumption that industrialization was the main cause of 20th century totalitarianism, Dr. Moore's careful, documented reassessment of modern political evolution offers scholars and students such important insights as: ... specific factors which have caused or prevented peasant revolutions; ... clarification of the intimate connection between revolutionary violence and the later success of gradual democratic reform; ... a forewarning that modernization without a successful revolution has generally led to fascism; ... a realization that the main revolutionary impulses have come not from social classes on the road to political power, but from those about to be driven off the historical stage; ... a new, comparative dimension for understanding the English and American civil wars within a revolutionary context.

"In examining the factors which have led the major power centers of the world into one or the other of the three dominant political patterns of the 20th century (parliamentary democracy, fascism, communism), Moore provides a particularly engrossing treatment of India--where the issue is still in doubt. Indeed, in every chapter Moore's evidence and reasoning shake us out of passively accepting many political interpretations so fashionable today. There are times when Moore finds it essential to expose the conservative and distorting bias that often lies" etc.

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About the Author:

BARRINGTON MOORE, JR is a Lecturer in Sociology at Harvard University and Senior Research Fellow for the University's Russian Centre. He was educated at Williams College, where he took a degree in Greek and Latin, and at Yale University where he gained a PhD in sociology. His book Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy received the Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award in political science and the MacIver Award in sociology. He is also the author of Soviet Politics: The Dilemma of Power, Terror and Progress: USSR, Political Power and Social Theory and, with Robert P. Wolff and Herbert Marcuse, A Critique of Pure Tolerance. His most recent book, Reflections on the Causes of Human Misery and upon Certain Proposals to Eliminate Them, was given the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award of Phi Beta Kappa.

Review:

A landmark in comparative history and a challenge to scholars of all lands who are trying to learn how we arrived at where we are now. -New York Times Book Review

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