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NOTES TO PAGES 17–22 281

Chapter 2
Barrington Moore, Perry Anderson and English social development

1 Preface to the first German edition of Condition of the Working Class in England,
in Marx and Engels, On Britain (FLPH ed. 1962). Cited below as OB.
2 Engels to Marx, 19 November 1844, OB, p. 533.
3 Marx, ‘The crisis in Britain and the British Constitution’ (1855), OB, p. 426.
4 There are different selections of the relevant items in OB and Surveys from Exile
(Penguin Marx 1973).
5 Engels, ‘On certain peculiarities of the economic and political development of
England’, OB, p. 529.
6 The most important items in the debate are: Anderson, ‘Origins of the present
crisis’, New Left Review, no. 23; Nairn, ‘The English Working Class’, New Left
Review, no. 23; Nairn, ‘The nature of the Labour Party’, New Left Review, nos. 27
and 28; E.P.Thompson, ‘Peculiarities of the English’, Socialist Register, 1965;
James Hinton, ‘The Labour Aristocracy’, New Left Review, no. 32; Anderson,
‘Socialism and pseudo-empiricism’, New Left Review, no. 35; N.Poulantzas,
‘Marxist political theory in G.B.’, New Left Review, no. 43. Also relevant are Perry
Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State (New Left Books 1975) and N.
Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes (New Left Books 1973), esp. ch. 4.
7 Barrington Moore Jnr, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Penguin
1967), p. 160.
8 For his choice see ibid., pp. viii–x.
9 ibid., p. xiv.
10 One wonders, in passing, how far this is a Marxist orthodoxy; evidently modern
social classes have shaped capitalism, but Marx was well aware of the role of old
or transitional classes, witness the key role of French peasantry in The Eighteenth
Brumaire.
11 Barrington Moore, Social Origins, p. 505.
12 How far Moore himself is a Marxist is an interesting if idle speculation which is
not taken further here. The curious might read the assessments of Genovese (a
Marxist) and Rothman (an anti-Marxist), Moore’s own reply to Rothman or the
very interesting recent ‘review of reviews’ by Wiener. The references are: Eugene
D.Genovese, In Red on Black (Vintage Books 1972) pp. 345–53; Stanley Rothman,
‘Barrington Moore and the dialectics of revolution’, American Political Science
Review, no. 64 (1970); Jonathan M.Wiener, ‘The Barrington Moore thesis and its
critics’, Theory and Society, no. 2 (1975). I am grateful to Keith McClelland for the
first two of these references and to Roger Grimshaw for the last.
13 Barrington Moore, Social Origins, p. 417.
14 ibid., p. 418.
15 ibid., p. 113.
16 Moore only hints at subsequent instabilities. His whole treatment (especially of
peasantry) is consonant with Class Struggles in France and The Eighteenth
Brumaire.
17 Cf. Barrington Moore, Social Origins, pp. 3–14, and Anderson, Lineages, pp.
113ff.