Volume 9, Number 3 · August 24, 1967
News from Everywhere
By Lawrence Stone
Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World
by Barrington Moore Jr.
Beacon, 578 pp., (paperback, $2.95) (paper)
The first point that must be made about this remarkable book is that no single reviewer is competent to deal with it, for its scope is in fact a good deal wider than the title suggests. As described by Moore himself, the task he set himself was to examine the role of two social groups, the landed elite and the peasantry, during the last 300 years or so; and secondly to use the comparative method to try to isolate the factors which are likely to result in political systems of either an authoritarian or a democratic character. To identify these factors, Moore was obliged to look beyond the West to the history of Asia, and to make a close study of China, Japan, and India. As he explains in his Preface, he originally planned chapters on Germany and Russia, but in the end contented himself with a survey of the evolution of England, France, and the US, with frequent comparisons with Germany and Russia. I will be obliged to confine myself mainly to a discussion of Moore's survey of the history of the Western societies, with briefer comments on China and Japan,[1] while the long chapter on India will be wholly neglected, partly because of my own ignorance, partly because the record is incomplete and the conclusions very uncertain. The major hypotheses of the book stand or fall irrespective of the Indian experience and Moore's interpretation of it.
Review, 5404 words
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