Page 50 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

INTRODUCTION 39

concepts is that he tends to employ them without an adequate critical exposition.
We shall see some of the consequences of this later.
It is clear, however, that Moore’s ‘modernization’ means more than
industrialization, or ‘the transformation from agrarian societies to modern
industrial ones’. It also involves the emergence of the nation state, ‘democratic’
or ‘totalitarian’. It necessarily brings fundamental changes in the position and the
relations of traditional social classes. Moore’s inclusion of China shows he has
more in mind than industry. For here is a society still hugely agrarian entering
the modern world presumably by virtue of the transformation of its rural
structure and the creation of a new form of state.
If modern societies are, in some ways, similar, modernizing routes have
differed greatly. It is the differences that interest Moore most. He is concerned to
identify the particular constellations of modernizing forces in each of the (large)
8
societies, European and Asian, that he chooses to study. From particular
histories he constructs three styles, or routes. France, England and America share
one common route: ‘bourgeois revolution’, capitalism, democratic political
regimes. Japan, Germany (sketchily portrayed) and Italy (very shadowy indeed)
form a second type. Here ‘modernization’ occurs through a ‘revolution from
above’, with no decisive break from the past generated by popular forces.
Instead, ‘modernization’ is enforced by long periods of conservative rule, allied
to capitalist business and culminating in Fascism. Russia and China, of course,
represent the non-capitalist adaptation, in which the main motor of a communist
transformation are late peasant rebellions.
The three routes are alternatives only in a limited sense. Moore is concerned
to show why each country took the route it did and not some other. He signals
points along the way where different paths seemed possible. He notes the
reactionary potential of Britain in the 1790s and the failed peasant rebellions of
French and German history. Yet once these moments pass, the outcome seems
heavily determined. The routes are also phases. They are grouped in time, and
missed opportunities are not recoverable. The route via bourgeois democracy is
essentially a first-phase modernization, a modernization of the pioneers,
unrepeatable elsewhere. If modernization is delayed, it may occur through
conservative rule in the late nineteenth century. Or it may occur through
Communism—a peculiarly late, telescoped form: perhaps the most likely
twentieth-century route?
Since Moore is only concerned with the key moments in modernization, his
individual histories have different temporal spans. One consequence of this is
that we learn little of the contemporary peculiarities of England, France,
Germany, the USA and Japan. A more serious criticism, addressed to the avowed
purpose, is that Moore’s method—a set of domestic histories over different
periods of time— allows no space for reciprocal reactions between states. How
far, for example, did the perpetual European rivalries affect domestic histories?
How does the larger imperial conflict bear on Moore’s themes? He argues that