Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy

To understand the importance of different material conditions in England and France as central to the manner of alliances in the respective countries, it is important to understand Moore's overall approach to analyzing the emergence of modern political structures. His method is to look at the content of selected societies and to show how the specific content of land use and political affiliations can lead to a particular type of modern political development--democratic (in the case of America, England, and France), fascist (in the case of Japan and Germany), or communist (in the case of Russia and PRC). The controlling factor of investigation is the commercialization of agriculture, and this is explored in each country in connection with specific social fac

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ly ineffectual: "Unlike the French monarchy, the English crown had not been able to build up an effective administrative and legal machinery of its own that could force its will upon the countryside . . . Thus the chief consequence of the crown's [protective] policy was to antagonize those who upheld the right to do what one liked-and thought socially beneficial--with one's own property" (p. 14). The growth of this commercialist attitude just under the upmost classes conflicted with the traditional royalist-feudal-aristocratic attitude, although the real losers in the shift in attitude and concentration of capital and land were the yeoman peasantry, who were more or less destroyed as a class, victims of the change who experienced post feudal existence as the creation of the unlanded and oppressed working masses. No less significant was the fact that this mass of people was without power. Thus the lowest classes could not materially affect the character of class alliances in Britain. The change in attitude and the alliances formed at that second tier of society was so decisive in England as to result in the Civil War and the execution of Charles I as the last absolute English monarch. From Cromwell and Charles II onward, Bri
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2299
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)

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