The purpose of this research is to examine Barrington Moore's Social origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World with a view toward showing the extent to which different material conditions in England and France influenced the character of class alliances that formed in each country and eventually contributed to the emergence of industrial democracy in both. The plan of the research will be to set Moore's approach to comparative analysis in appropriate context, and then to show, by reference to Moore's examination of the French and English cases, how different structures of social-class alliance in each country led eventually to roughly the same result in social structure.
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 factors of organization or classes (aristocracy, peasantry, bourgeoisie, etc.). Moore looks for what is positively similar about commercial agriculture and about social structure across countries, then shows how agreements or disagreements in social factors and in the relationship of social classes to the phenomenon of commercial agriculture can result in similar political outcomes, even in the case of seemingly different societies. He also looks for elements of so...