Moore, Barrington

(1913-) US sociologist and social historian, whose most influential work Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (1966) did much to rejuvenate comparative historical sociology, after an era dominated by overgeneralized functionalist and evolutionary accounts of social change. In his earlier works Soviet Politics – The Dilemma of Power: The Role of Ideas in Social

Change (1950) and Terror and Progress USSR (1954), Moore had himself utilized functionalist modes of analysis in suggesting that the functional requirements associated with the necessity to industrialize had placed a limit on attempts to realize a socialist society In Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, however, rather than working with the idea of a single set of functional requirements for modernization, Moore's argument is that three distinctive historical routes to the modern world can be identified:

a democratic, and capitalist, route – ‘revolution from below’ – based on commercialized agriculture and the powerful emergence of bourgeois interests (England, France, United States);
a route leading ultimately to fascism – ‘revolution from above’ – where the bourgeois impetus was far weaker and modernization involved recourse to labour-repressive modes of work organization in agriculture by a traditional ruling group backed by strong political controls (Germany, Japan);
a route leading to communist revolution, where neither the commercialization of agriculture nor a recourse to labour-repressive techniques by traditional ruling groups proved effective in the face of peasant solidarity (Russia, China).

Not all Moore's conclusions about these three routes have found universal acceptance (see Smith, 1983). Rather, it is the subtlety of his sifting of historical data while addressing general questions, which has impressed many sociologists and which has done much to stimulate the post-functionalist flowering of historical sociology evident in recent years. Barrington Moore's own subsequent work has failed to reach the heights achieved in Social Origins. It is of interest, however, that in The Causes of Human Misery (1978), an exercise in seeking conclusions on moral questions, he makes the suggestion that while social science is in a position to identify ‘social evils’, it is far less able to identify the basis of the good society See also JUSTICE.