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40 MOORE, ANDERSON AND ENGLISH SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT

late modernizers may in some sense learn from earlier cases, but this is a very
weak, idealist version of Marx’s ‘world-historical’ dimension.
Moore’s third concern is with the role of agrarian social classes in
modernization. His central thesis is that lord and peasant have played a major
part in determining routes into the modern world. Forms of agriculture and
landed social relations have been ‘decisive factors in determining the political
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outcome’. Throughout the book, often with great ingenuity, this thesis is pushed
as far as it will go. It is represented as a major revision of Marxist orthodoxy
which holds, according to Moore, that it is the new insurgent classes that have
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shaped the modern world. The most forceful formulation of this is in
connection with the radicalism of peasants and small producers which is
discussed in that odd, residual chapter, ‘Reactionary and revolutionary imagery’,
which stands in for a more organic treatment of culture and ideology. Moore
notes that ‘Marxist thinkers’ have often dismissed peasant radicalism, and that
anti-Marxists have often scoffed at this. He insists that peasants and artisans have
been the ‘chief social basis of radicalism’. He concludes that ‘the wellsprings of
human freedom lie not only where Marx saw them, in the aspirations of classes
about to take power, but perhaps even more in the dying wail of a class over
whom the wave of progress is about to roll’. 11
This passage illustrates Moore’s characteristic stance: his scholarly,
Marcusean pessimism, his dissociation from both ‘Marxist thinkers’ and their
obviously ideological critics, his half-break with American political science. It
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illustrates, too, the problem with the book: the necessary one-sidedness of the
thesis. For, of course, in the transition to industrial capitalism emergent and
residual social classes coexist. History will not be wholly determined by either.
So the danger with Moore’s thesis is that his preferred emphasis (on lord and
peasant) will seriously truncate his social histories, systematically demoting
working class and bourgeoisie. We will return to this problem later, but it is clear
that Moore is aware of the problem and has devised a solution, at least for the
bourgeoisie. This solution is the notion of the modernizing alliance.
We may now look, in broad outline, at Moore’s three routes. One way of
simplifying his very complex argument is to see him as using four sets of
determinations. These are:

1 the forms of agriculture
2 the inherited forms of the state
3 the nature of modernizing coalitions
4 the absence or presence of revolutionary violence.
By far the most important determinations are the agrarian modes of production
and their attendant social relations. There are two crucial dimensions: the
strength or weakness of the tendency towards commercialization and the form in
which it occurs. A strong and early commercial impulse has distinguished the
capitalist from the communist routes. This is so, Moore argues, because