Dennis Smith

Origins and Destinations

Barrington Moore Jr was born at Washington, D.C., in 1913. Having studied Greek and Latin at Williams College he subsequently worked for his doctorate in Sociology at Yale College. During the Second World War he was a political analyst in the Office of Strategic Studies and in the Department of Justice. Moore taught at the University of Chicago before moving to Harvard in 1948. Since 1951 he has been based at the Russian Research Centre in that university. His earliest books, Soviet Politics (1950) and Terror and Progress USSR (1954), were, as their titles indicate, studies of the development of the Soviet Union. In 1958 a collection of papers on methodological and theoretical issues appeared, entitled Political Power and Social Theory. Barrington Moore’s ambitious and important book, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, was published in 1966. Moore had been producing books and articles for a quarter of a century before its appearance. However, Social Origins quickly acquired a fame far beyond his previous work and guaranteed a ready audience for his subsequent writings, including the splendidly titled Reflections on the Causes of Human Misery (1972) and his most recent book, Injustice (1978).

Review article: Modernity, postmodernity and the new Middle Ages

I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives . . . The narrative function is losing . . . its great hero, its great dangers, its great voyages, its great goal. It is being dispersed in clouds of narrative language elements . . . Thus the society of the future falls . . . within the province of a . . . pragmatics of language particles. There are many different language games a heterogeneity of elements. They only give rise to institutions in patches local determinism. The decision-makers, however, attempt to manage these clouds of sociality according to input/output matrices (Lyotard, 1984: xxiv).

Die modernen Wurzeln von Baumans Postmoderne

Es ist schwer, mit Zygmunt Bauman Schritt zu halten. Gerade als dieses Kapitel geschrieben wurde, erschien ein neues Buch „The Individualized Society“ (Bauman, The individualized society, 2000b). Der Herausgeber beschreibt dieses vorlaufig letzte Buch wie folgt: „We are spurred into action by our troubles and fears; but all too often our action fails to address the true causes of our worries. When trying to make sense of our lives, we tend to blame our own failings and weaknesses for our discomforts and defeats. And in doing so, we make things worse rather than better. Reasonable beings that we are, how does this happen and why does it go on happening? […] (The) task of sociology is not to censor or correct the storys we tell of our lives, but to show that there are more ways in which our life storys can be told. By bringing into view the many complex dependencies invisible from the vantage point of private experience, sociology can help us to link our individual decisions and actions to the deeper causes of our troubles and fears – to the ways we live, to the conditions under which we act, to the socially drawn limits of our imagination and ambition. Sociology can help us to understand the processes that have shaped the society in which we live today, a society in which individualization has become our fate. And sociology can also help us to see that if our individual but shared anxieties are to be effectively tackled, they need to be addressed collectively, true to their social, not individual, nature“ (Bauman, The individualized society, 2000b, Buchdeckel).

Book Reviews : G.E. Cherry Birmingham: a Study in Geography, History and Planning: John Wiley & Sons, Chichester, 1994, pp. xiv + 254, £37.50, ISBN 0-471-94900-0

consensus over the requirements for sustainable urban development which is evident in Agenda 21, in World Health Organisation proposals, and in the work of the OECD, they argue that it will not be necessary to retreat from cities in order to achieve sustainability. Although there is less agreement on the specific means of achieving the objective than on the necessity to seek it, they draw evidence from a range of north European cities to demonstrate

Politics and Power

The two quotations, which have been deliberately run together above, come from the first chapter of Moore’s first major work, Soviet Politics — The Dilemma of Power (1950, p.1) and the last chapter of his latest book, Injustice (1978, p.469). Even though the composition of the latter took place almost three decades after the former, they might easily have come from the same paragraph. Although shifts in emphasis, tone and tactics in Moore’s work before and after Social Origins have been indicated in the last two chapters of this present book, the overwhelming impression is that Moore’s writing as a whole displays an impressive degree of thematic unity.

Terror and Justice

It is tempting to introduce the allegory contained in A Christmas Carol at this point. Dickens, like Moore, pays particular attention to the two moral evils of terrorising subordinates and failing to consider humanity ‘beyond the narrow limits of our money-changing holes’ (Dickens, 1843, p.25). Both writers are aware of the common failure to recognise that present structural constraints are to some degree a product of past choices. ‘I wear the chain I forged in life,’ said Marley’s ghost, ‘I girded it on of my own free will‖ (p.24). Both Moore and Dickens believe that the future may be influenced by choices made in the present in the light of knowledge about the costs and benefits of alternative courses of action.

Certainty and Choice

It is interesting to compare Social Origins with an earlier work on a similar topic by a different author which also received mixed reactions. One commentator described this earlier work as ‘a labyrinth without a clue, lacking all method’. In his use of sources the author ‘almost always mistakes his imagination for his memory’. Another critic, however, thought it ‘the best book that ever was written’ in its field. Its discussion of topics relating to slavery was ‘glorious’. The book being discussed was concerned with the historical origins and sociological characteristics of three major contemporary forms of government. Within it a special place was accorded to the British Constitution and an aristocratic component in British ‘decency’ and ‘moderation’ was identified. However, the larger purpose of the book was to find a rational explanation for the apparently chaotic diversity of political forms in terms of a limited number of causes and outcomes. A mixture of inductive and deductive analytical procedures was employed. The author’s intention was not only to ascertain and order facts but also to apply criteria of moral evaluation to human behaviour in the political sphere. He was able, for example, to provide a sociological explanation of the emergence of despotic regimes while also condemning the function played by terror within them. In the author’s opinion, while structural and historical factors limited the options available to political actors within these limits the moral responsibility for choosing among the options remained in human hands.

History and Truth

In this final chapter Moore’s standing as a historian and as a sociologist will be assessed with reference to a number of his contemporaries and, subsequently, his contribution to political theory will be considered in the light of the writings of some leading figures in this field.

Freedom and Necessity

Although Barrington Moore has been no one’s disciple or apologist, it is interesting to notice the interplay between his work and that of Herbert Marcuse, a contemporary to whom he often refers warmly in his books. Both men were employed by the US Government during the Second World War, Moore as a political analyst in the Office of Strategic Studies and in the Department of Justice, Marcuse at the State Department in the Office of Intelligence Research where he became Acting Head of the East European section. Marcuse was later employed until 1954 at the Russian Research Centre at Harvard, an institution to which Moore has been attached for much of his working life. Marcuse’s Soviet Marxism appeared in 1958, a few years after Moore’s own work on Russia. In some respects, also, the essays in Moore’s Political Power and Social Theory provide a response to suggestions made by Marcuse in another book, published three years previously, entitled Eros and Civilization. Similarly, Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man, which appeared in 1964, haunts the pages of Reflections ton the Causes of Human Misery as a ghost to be laid, albeit with civility. Both men had contributed with R. P. Wolff to a small volume on tolerance in the late 1960s and at about the same time Moore co-edited a series of essays in honour of Marcuse.1