Pessimist's World

SOCIAL ORIGINS OF DICTATORSHIP AND DEMOCRACY by Barrington Moore Jr. 559 pages. Beacon Press. $10.

Most people would agree that mankind, despite painful lapses, has brought civilization a long way from the primordial rule of tooth and claw. Barrington Moore Jr. is not at all that sanguine. His view of civilization, in fact, is downright gloomy. It is Moore's thesis in this difficult and challenging book that modern man has yet to repeal his jungle past.

Moore, 53, a senior research fellow at Harvard's Russian Research Center and onetime analyst for the OSS, reached his conclusion after patient years of studying the structures--democracy, Communism, fascism--that mankind has erected, ostensibly to replace the tyranny of brute force. His first books focused on Soviet Communism as the newest and in some ways the most promising experiment in government. But he was soon disillusioned: Communism, he decided and said,* was all promise and no performance. In this book, which embraces all forms of government, he grants no better marks to democracy.

Peasants & Princes. At the historical level, Social Origins is no more than a consideration of the various routes by which some of the world's countries--England, France, the U.S., China, India and Japan--have climbed from farm to industrial cultures in the past three centuries. The transition, Moore says, was unavoidable. As the peasant farmer began to produce more than he and his family could eat, a lively host of predators--kings, princes, landlords, a new commercial class--contended for the surplus.

The competition took many forms, all capitalistic, and gave birth to many different forms of government. In 18th century England and France, budding capitalists strove with a waning monarchical power to establish democracy, or a working balance between the perquisites of government and the perquisites of merchant princes. In Germany and Japan, where the peasantry was too weak or disunited to resist, the same power struggle generated fascism--a conservative revolution imposed from the top. In China and Russia, political schemers carefully marshaled peasant discontent, smoldering over centuries, and used it to overthrow the old order --creating Communism.

Price oi Progress. Moore is less interested in the difference between the forms than in their similarities. Whatever industrialization led to, he says, it was born of human greed, and the installation cost was everywhere appalling. Where progress came slowly, as in the case of Japan, which has never had a revolution, its price was dissipated through long centuries of repression. India, a country still awaiting transition to the modern world, is still paying that price.

Where change comes quickly, as in bloody revolutions, the cost seems higher only because it is quickly met. The U.S. Civil War, which Moore terms a revolutionary victory of democracy (the North) over fascism (the South), took more than 700,000 lives but lasted only five years. England's serfs, who were the victims of that country's progress, virtually vanished in a century.

Noble Professions. Social Origins reduces civilization's form sheet to the same formula that governs the jungle: someone wants something and takes it at the expense of someone else--invariably the little guy, the helpless, the unendowed. Moore seems to see no evidence that the recipe has gone out of style. His book bears down on contemporary evidence, particularly the U.S. Negro's continuing struggle to collect the rights that the Constitution defined as his 177 years ago. Despite the black man's recent progress, Moore remains pessimistic. "At bottom," he says, "the struggle of the Negroes and their white allies concerns contemporary capitalist democracy's capacity to live up .to its noble professions, something no society has ever done."

* In Soviet Politics--The Dilemma of Power (1950) and Terror and Progress--U.S.S.R (1954).

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