Barrington Moore’s work is detail oriented with broad themes. As I believe several people will be writing about this topic I will try to avoid repetitive details as much as possible. Moore writes his work seeking to “understand the role of the landed upper classes and the peasants in the bourgeois revolutions leading to capitalist democracy, the abortive bourgeois revolutions leading to fascism, and the peasant revolutions leading to communism” In his preface Moore outlines what his work will consist of. He seeks to prove that social structure determines what path a nation travels. For examples, he uses Britain, France and the United States as capitalist democracies, Japan as a fascist dictatorship, and China as a communist regime. The first two chapters detail the experience of Britain and France. Moore attempts to show that even though France and Britain have similar democratic capitalist systems in place, they arrived to the same location via incredibly different paths.
He first analyzes the case of Britain. In short, he argues, property rights and a relatively safe and free roaming nobility class led to modern capitalism and democracy. The end of feudalism, expanding British markets and a long period of peace after the War of the Roses led to a large growth of the English merchant class. To emphasize this point, Moore opens not with the signing of the Magna Carta as the impetus for the birth of democracy but with the expansion of the English wool trade. I thought this was an interesting statement itself, since ever since elementary school the idea is drilled into one’s head that the Magna Carta was the only reason the world has democratic government in the present. By the end of the Middle Ages, as Moore points out, English traders have brought their wool supply across Europe. This allowed for various entrepreneurs to acquire wealth, purchase land, and move from place to place. The ability to own real estate gave rise to the concept of property value, allowing property to be bought and sold on an open market. For years the market for commodities and housing grew. The Civil War interrupted this new expansion of growth, but in the end actually helped solidify the transition to a capitalist democracy. As Moore states “The war itself eliminated the king as the last protection of the peasantry against the encroachments of the landed upper classes…local government, with which the peasants came directly in contact, was even more firmly in the hands of the gentry and titled aristocracy that it had been before.” The result was a powerful legislative body and a relatively weak executive. Moore summarizes that this lack of a powerful executive branch, which succeeded in preventing the ability for widespread suppression by the government, powerful economic bases coupled with high levels of entrepreneurial participation amongst the citizenry, and a relatively complacent peasantry led to the establishment of the capitalist democratic state England operates as today.
In Chapter Two, Moore analyzes the case of France. France, as Moore notes, is a unique case that puts a new perspective on England’s experience in that France and England both emerged in the modern world as a capitalist democracy but both took extremely different paths to get there. Whereas England’s experience was relatively non-violent and economically driven, France’s was much more based in heavy state involvement and bloodshed. As Moore writes, “we find in France of the Bourbon monarchy mainly a nobility living from what I can extract through obligations resting upon the peasants…In comparison with their counterpart in England during the eighteenth century, the French nobility lived very largely from dues collected in kind or in cash from their peasants.” The French monarchy relied on taxation of the peasant class for revenue and shunned their noble classes. This is essentially the direct opposite treatment the nobility received in England. In agriculture, the French found their economy centered in an identical staple crop, in this case wine instead of wool, however; in the French case, the wine crop had been severely devastated and ended up damaging the French economy in the long term. When the enclosure movement became a prominent force in France, the government began to interfere with the new system of property rights thus resulting in a dampening of economic opportunity. Essentially, Moore is attempting to display that in every area that England succeeded - by accident or intent - France failed. The French government took a heavy hand in domestic affairs, preventing private growth from flourishing as it had in England. The important lesson Moore draws is that this is not necessarily a bad thing, just much different. In fact, Moore argues that the revolution was necessary for a capitalist democratic state. He details each state of the revolution at length. To summarize, the monarchy continued its alienation of the noble class while continuing to place much of the state’s financial burden on the peasants. The peasants incited and drove the revolution and when the new establishment, Robespierre, took charge and failed to deliver any of the peasants’ demands, they began to revolt against him as well. The revolution, in short, was a struggle of the peasantry for land ownership and stability. Moore argues, “Without the revolution, this fusion of nobility and bourgeoisie might have continued and carried France forward into a form of conservative modernization from above, similar in its main outlines to what took place in Germany and Japan.”
Overall I thought the reading was interesting and relatively easy to follow and understand. Moore is clearly writing from a pro-capitalist standpoint, and his bias is quite apparent from the beginning. I would argue that a state that sanctions slavery and does not allow women to vote is far from what one could refer to as the foundations of democracy, but at least over the course of history he does seem to have a point of the gradual progression of power going from absolute rule to elites to the masses. I think reading the next several cases will provide a clearer picture of what he is trying to prove, as both of these cases were similar in their end result.
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