Barrington Moore and the Preconditions for Democracy

Anxiety about the conditions that promote stable, democratic political relations in the developing countries has been a major preoccupation of both politicians and academics for over a generation now. One manifestation of this concern is the emergence of a new field of inquiry — the study of development — in the social sciences. The conditions most often put forward for political democracy fall into two general and by no means unrelated categories — cultural institutions, or values, and economic development. Political sociologists generally focus on one category or the other. Some, like Harry Eckstein and S. M. Lipset, concentrate mainly on cultural variables, the ‘patterns of integration’ supposedly conducive to the development and maintenance of democratic or authoritarian polities. Those who focus upon economic growth seem to fall into two groups. One school of thought, well represented by Daniel Lerner, emphasizes that democracy, as we understand it, is the end product of the modernization process; and the implicit assumption is that it is the inevitable end product of this process. The other trend in modernization thought, represented most notably by Professor Barrington Moore, argues that political democracy is the result of only a certain type of modernization — namely, the Anglo-American bourgeois variety.