Review: Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World

Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World by Barrington Moore Jr.
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In any preindustrial society, the attempt to scale bureaucracy soon runs into the difficulty that it is very hard to extract enough resources from the population to pay salaries and thereby make officials dependent on their superiors. The way in which the rulers try to get around this difficulty has a tremendous impact on the whole social structure. The French solution was the sale of offices, the Russian one, suitable to Russia's huge expanse of territory, was the granting of estates with serfs in return for service in tsarist officialdom. The Chinese solution was to permit more or less open corruption. Max Weber cites an estimate that the extra- legal income of an official amounted to about four times his regular salary, a modern investigator comes up with the much higher figure of some sixteen to nineteen times the regular salary." The exact amount will probably remain an historical secret, we may be content with the assurance that it was large.

Naturally this practice substantially reduced the effectiveness of control from the center, which varied a great deal at different historical periods. The officer at the lowest rung in the ladder, ad- ministering a hsien, ordinarily comprising one walled city and the surrounding countryside, was theoretically in charge of at least 20,000 people and often many more. As a temporary sojourner in the area, the usual term being about three years, he could not possibly get to know local conditions. If anything were to be done, it would have to be with the consent and support of local notables, that is, substantial landholding scholars, who were after all

The adaptability of Japanese political and social institutions to capitalist principles enabled Japan to avoid the costs of a revolutionary entrance onto the stage of modern history. Partly because she escaped these early horrors, Japan succumbed in time to fascism and defeat. So did Germany for very broadly the same reason. The price for avoiding a revolutionary entrance has been a very high one. It has been high in India as well. There the play has not yet reached the culminating act; the plot and the characters are different. Still, lessons learned from all the cases studied so far may prove helpful in understanding what the play means.

...
Here the Confucian theory of a benevolent élite has, under the pressure of circumstances, taken on a martial and "heroic" charac- ter. The combination is already familiar to the West in fascism. The resemblance becomes still stronger as we see the organiza-

tional form that this heroic élitism is supposed to take, namely the

....

Three features stand out in this brief review of Kuomintang doctrine as formulated by Chiang Kai-shek. The first is the almost complete absence of any social and economic program to cope with China's problems, and indeed a very marked ritual avoidance of the realities of these problems. The talk about "political tutelage" and preparation for democracy was mainly rhetoric. Actual policy was to disturb existing social relationships as little as possible. Such a real attempt policy did not exclude blackmail and forced contributions from any sector of the population that provided a convenient target. Gang- sters do the same thing in American cities, without any to upset the existing social order, upon which they actually depend The second feature, one may call the concealment of the lack of specific political and social objectives through somewhat grotesque efforts to revive traditional ideals in a situation that had for a long time increasingly undermined the social basis of these ideals. Since Professor Mary C. Wright has argued this point cogently and with abundant concrete evidence in The Last Stand of Chinese Conservatism, we need only remind ourselves here that this distorted pu- triotic idealization of the past is one of the main stigmata of Western fascism. The third and last feature is the Kuomintang's effort to re- solve its problems through military force, again a major character- istic of European fascism.

Catonism

https://www.jstor.org/stable/40241146

, attributed to the peasants, but finds a response among the latter because it provides an explanation of sorts for their situa- tion under the intrusion of the market. It is also quite clearly a body of notions that arises out of the life conditions of a landed aristoc- racy threatened by the same forces. If one glances at the major themes in the form of the aristocratic response that culminated in liberal democracy, one will notice that they also occur in Catonism transposed to a different key. The criticism of mass democracy, the notions of legitimate authority and the importance of custom, opposition to the power of wealth and to mere technical expertise all constitute major themes in the Catonist cacophony. Again it is in the way they are combined, and even more important the ultimate purpose, that makes all the difference. In Catonism these notions serve the ends of strengthening repressive authority. In aristocratic liberalism they are brought together as intellectual weapons against irrational authority. Catonism, on the other hand, lacks any concep tion of pluralism or the desirability of checks on hierarchy

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sharing power, it seems that the Catonist outlook on art merges with a general tendency noticeable in all regimes concerned with maintaining social cohesion, to promote traditional and academic art forms. There is, as has often been noted, a striking similarity be tween Nazi and Stalinist art. Both were equally strong in condemn ing Kunstbolsebewiewus and "rootless cosmopolitanism." Similar trends may be observed in Augustan Rome."

oppose. In sketching what finds approval under Catonist notions, it has already been necessary to mention what Catonist theories Concretely they are hostile to traders, usurers, big money, cosmo- politanism, intellectuals. In America Catonism has taken the form of resentment against the city slicker and more generally any form of reasoning that goes beyond the most primitive folk wisdom. In Japan it manifested itself as violent antiplutocratic sentiment. The city appears as a cancerous sore full of invisible conspirators out to cheat and demoralize honest peasants. There is of course a realistic basis for these sentiments in the actual day-to-day experiences of peasants and small farmers who are at a serious disadvantage in a market economy.

As far as feelings (so far as we really know them) and the causes of hatred go, there is not a great deal to choose between the radical right and the radical left in the countryside. The main dis- tinction depends on the amount of realistic analysis of the causes of suffering and on the images of a potential future. Catonism con- ceals the social causes and projects an image of continued submis- sion. The radical tradition emphasizes the causes and projects an image of eventual liberation. The fact that the emotions and causes are similar does not mean that the emergence of one or the other as a politically significant force depends on skills in manipulating

* See the excellent discussion in Syme, Roman Revolution, chaps XXVIII-XXIX, esp 460-468 on Vergil and Horace. Note also the disgrace of Petronious, the attitudes of Roman historians toward the artistic interests of Nero and Caligula. The fact that Stalinist art displays traits I have labelled as Catonist or deriving from Catonism may seem to cast severe doubts on the whole interpretation suggested here. But is it ridiculous to

suggest that socialism, especially under Stalin, borrowed and incorporated

some of the most repressive features of its historical antagonists?

...

of a great deal of talk about the need for a thoroughgoing moral regeneration, talk that covers the absence of a realistic analysis of prevailing social conditions which would threaten the vested inter- ests behind Catonism. Probably it is a good working rule to be sus- picious about political and intellectual leaders who talk mainly about moral virtues; many poor devils are liable to be badly hurt. It is not quite correct to assert that the morality lacks content; Catonism seeks a specific kind of regeneration, though it is easier to specify what Catonism is against than what it is for. An aura of moral ear- nestness suffuses Catonist arguments. This morality is not instru- mental; that is, policies are not advocated in order to make humanity happier (happiness and progress are contemptuously dis- missed as decadent bourgeois illusions) and certainly not in order to make people richer. They are important because they are supposed to contribute to a way of life that has somehow proved its validity in the past. That Catonist views of the past are romantic distortions goes


https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catonism

THE PROCESS OF MODERNIZATION begins with that fail. It culminates during the twentieth peasant revolutions century with revolutions that succeed. No longer is it possible to take seriously the view that the peasant is an "object of history," a form of social life over which historical changes pass but which contributes noth- ing to the impetus of these changes. For those who savor historical irony it is indeed curious that the peasant in the modern era has been as much an agent of revolution as the machine, that he has come into his own as an effective historical actor along with the conquests of

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