Skocpol, Theda.1973 “A Critical Review of Barrington Moore’s Social Origins of Dictatorship and
Democracy” Politics and Society, Fall
Available (pdf link).
The mandate of the classical theory of sociology is to assess the prospects for freedom, rationality and democracy in a modernising world.
Moore's "Social Origins" was a product of the Marxist scholarly perspective.
Relies on the central conceptions of Marxist political sociology "the conception of social class as arising out of an historically specific set of economic relationships and of the class struggle as the basic stuff of politics". He chose to emphasise economic factors rather than culture or ideas.
I. An analytic summary
A. The Moral of the Story
Not written in the style of a scientist trying to create a falsifiable theory on comparative modernisation.
Moore believed that Marx would be "the last one to deduce social institutions from values" (1958)
Message: the costs from modernisation have been at least as bad as the costs from revolution, perhaps worse.
E.g. the enclosure movement in Britain, Indian democratic stagnation.
The structure of the book is more to work towards a moral conclusion than to test rigorously the Marxist hypothesis.
B. The theoretical argument
The class structures of agrarian states are undergoing the intial stages of economic modernisation are linked to alternate political outcomes via critical political events analysed as class struggles.
Variable 1: Commercial impulse (growth of urban based commodity markets)
Moore must provide variables which explain agrarian strata's a) political propensities, and b) opportunities for extra agrarian class alliances
Variable 2: The alliance between urgan and rural upper classes is important.
1) The form of commercial agriculture - labour repressive versus market
2) Peasant revolutionary potential
Most Marxist writers contrasted exploitative capital-proletariat relationship with some generic feudal lord-peasant exploitative relationship. This task Moore tackles by drawing his above 1 2 distinction.
Some forms of commercial agriculture are more conducive to democracy than others. It is the "use of political mechanisms" to repress the peasants that is a defining characteristic.
Skocpol later takes issue with this - is it a fair criticism or is it just a badly worded point?
Variable 3: Peasant revolutionary potential
Condition is that commercialisation must leave the peasantry at a moderate or low strength as to leave peasant society intact but "impaired".
There are a number of factors that determine whether peasants have a strong or weak revolutionary potential. Ties to landed upper class and degree of radical peasant solidarity.
Type of explanation that Moore is attempting is "sequence analysis" (Somers 1971). Sequence of events that are assumed to have a causal connection.
Certain events make certain other events more likely. Weberian notion of path dependence.
Moore does not obtain complete explanation or anything approaching it.
Assumes commericalisation flowing into industrialisation rather than explaining the process of development.
II. Social origins some fundamental problems
Self styled Weberians or neo-Weberians have criticised the book for either generalising too much or neglecting the causal role of ideas, or both.
A) problems with the operationalisation of the variable strength of the bourgeois impulse
B) difficulties with the distinction between market and labour-repressive forms of commercial agriculture
C) inadequacies of class struggle and class-coalition explanations of political conflicts and societal transformations
D) shortcomings inherent in a theoretical focus on exclusively intrasocietal change-producing processes
A. Bourgeois impulse - the phantom
Nothing said about determining the strength independently of the ppolitical outcomes
It has indirect effects, i.e. offers opportunities to classes
Deemphasis of direct bourgeois political activity
In a systematic assessment of its strength, consider the numbers dispersion and density of upper class urbanites, concentrating on town dwellers engaged in commerce and industry.
Is it really the bourgeois impulse that was important, or the effect it had on upper/lower class relations, and the widening of a semi-powerful society/dispersion of power
B. Market vs labour repressive commercial agriculture
E.g. the English landlords (who Moore identifies as market-commercial) employed Parliamentary decrees to enclose lands, used control of parish political offices to regulate the movement of labourers via administration of justice and the Poor Laws. How were they less dependent on "political mechanisms" for extracting a surplus?
No empirical grounds for market vs labour repressive distinction
I don't think it is as simple as finding the variable. The outcome is more important than operationalising a particular "cause". Think about the balances of power in partial states lit, Linz and Stepan 1996.
Moore labels the German state labour-repressive which Skocpol rejects on the basis that workers were hired not serfs. One of the key things about the German situation was that there were no local markets for produce - probably low commercialisation impulse amongst the peasants. So maybe Skocpol missed the point here.
In Japan for example which Moore claims is labour-repressive due to the very high surplus extracted from the lands, the conditions were actually in place where a market system could generate such high profits.
C. The inadequacy of Marxist political sociology
It has been assumed that pre-capitalist modes of production political and class domination were undifferentiated. Even if the political interests of the dominant class are compromised, in the long run the state is still run in the interests of the economically dominant class.
A focus on the ways in which seemingly autonomous political structures and processes are invariable constrained to function to create or preserve the capitalist mode of production. Due to... hegemonic ideology, or, control of bourgeois personnel of strategic parts of state systems, the conditioning effects of economic structures and class struggles. Could serve the interests of capitalism the best when the ruling class is not the politically governing class (Poulantzas 1968)
Nowhere is it admitted that the state might act against the long run economic interests of the dominant class or act to produce a new mode of production. Remained frozen within the assumptions that political structures are determined by the economic.
Moore breaks with the Marxist tradition by analysing pre-capitalist agrarian states.
