Social Origins Of Dictatorship And Democracy

This classic work of comparative history explores why some
countries have developed as democracies and others as
fascist or communist dictatorships. Originally published
in 1966 this classic text is a comparative survey of some
of what Barrington Moore considers the major and most
indicative world economies as they evolved out of
pre-modern political systems into industrialism. But Moore
is not ultimately concerned with explaining economic
development so much as exploring why modes of development
produced different political forms that managed the
transition to industrialism and modernization. Why did one
society modernize into a “relatively free” democratic
society (by which Moore means England)? Why did others
metamorphose into fascist or communist states? His core
thesis is that in each country the relationship between
the landlord class and the peasants was a primary
influence on the ultimate form of government the society
arrived at upon arrival in its modern age. “Throughout the
book there is the constant play of a mind that is
scholarly original and imbued with the rarest gift of all
a deep sense of human reality . . . This book will
influence a whole generation of young American historians
and lead them to problems of the greatest significance.”
—The New York Review of Books