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INTRODUCTION 41

communist revolution has depended less on an industrial proletariat than on
exploited peasant communities which have retained their internal cohesion, yet
face the strains of late modernization. And the peasantry’s communal institutions
survive best when the solvent of commercial agriculture is weak or absent—
hence the Russian and Chinese patterns. But the form of commercialization is as
important as the degree of penetration. Form distinguishes democratic and
reactionary routes within the capitalist family. The most favourable form for
capitalist democracy involves the elimination of peasantry by agrarian capitalist
enterprise (England); the least favourable is some ‘labour-repressive’ mode by
which peasant production is retained, the work-force held on the land and the
surplus extracted by highly coercive political means (for example, Eastern
Europe). ‘Labour-repressive’ modes have several effects inimical to democracy.
They preserve a peasantry which, this time with little political potential of its
own, may form a reservoir of popular anti-capitalism of a twentieth-century
Fascist type. They require a repressive state apparatus and an authoritarian and
militaristic political culture incompatible with bourgeois freedoms. They permit
a non-capitalist landed class to persist with a hold on state power and a
dominance in the landed/bourgeois alliance. They make this class dependent on
state power, bolstering a backward agrarian base. Presiding over a booming
capitalist agriculture with no ‘peasant problem’, nineteenth-century English
‘aristocracy’ could afford a Whiggish strategy; German junkers could not. One
wonders whether the distinction between ‘labour-repressive’ and other agrarian
modes can really be sustained, but these parts of the book are, to the non-expert
in peasantry, among the most interesting and convincing.
Moore’s second determination is the state, which is viewed not so much as an
independent factor, more as the product of social friction. Moore notes that all
his societies (except America) developed centralized governments in the
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sixteenth or seventeenth centuries. In democratic adaptations, however, central
government was tamed by alliances independent of royal absolutism or
bureaucracy. Ideally, as once more in the English paradigm, this should happen
only after monarchy has tamed the feudal lord and unified the nation. Unless
both processes occur a totalitarian outcome is likely. Moore pursues here a
familiar pluralist argument—democracy derives from a ‘balance’ of social forces.
But his version is characteristically subtle: balance must change in appropriate
directions over time (to monarchy and away again); the anti-absolutist forces
must be properly constituted (with capitalist elements predominant) and past
struggles may be exceedingly violent (the Puritan and French Revolutions).
The third distinguishing feature of the three routes is the strength of what Moore
usually calls, rather coyly, ‘town dwellers’. He identifies the class fractions of
the bourgeoisie as the main carriers of democracy and of liberal political notions.
So modernizing alliances dominated by the bourgeoisie favour democratic
solutions; reaction rests on the predominance of a non-capitalist landed class.
Moore registers ‘strong agreement with the Marxist thesis that a vigorous and
independent class of town dwellers has been an indispensable element in the