This is a book about why people so often put up with being the victims of their societies and why at other times they become very angry and try with passion and forcefulness to do something about their situation. I his most ambition book to date, Barrington Moore, Jr explores a large part of the world's experience with injustice and its understanding of it. In search of general elements behind the acceptance of injustice he discusses the Untouchables of India, Nazi concentration camps, and the Milgram experiments on obedience to authority.

Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt

Politics & Social Sciences

Moore, Barrington, Jr.

Social Sciences

PALGRAVE~MACMILLAN

The intellectual scope and courage to contend with the largest puzzles of human existence and organization distinguish great social thinkers. Barrington Moore's Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy was a foundational work of historical sociology that influenced a generation of social scientists and, decades later, continues to be widely read and taught. Here, Moore takes up the same tools of historical comparison to investigate why groups of people kill and torture each other. His answer is arrestingly simple: people persecute those whom they perceive as polluting due to their "impure" religious, political, or economic ideas.
Moore's search begins with the Old Testament's restrictions on sexual behavior, idolatry, diet, and handling unclean objects. He argues that religious authorities seeking to distinguish the ancient Hebrews from competing groups invented, along with monotheism, the association of impure things with moral failure and the violation of God's will. This allowed people to view those holding competing ideas as contaminated and, more important, contaminating. Moore moves next to the French Wars of Religion, in which Protestants and Catholics massacred each other over the control of purity, and the French Revolution, which perfected terror and secularized purity. He then combs the major Asian religions and finds--to his surprise--that violent efforts to eradicate the "impure" were largely absent before substantial Western influence.
Moore's provocative conclusion is that monotheism--with its monopoly on virtue and failure to provide supernatural scapegoats--is responsible for some of the most virulent forms of intolerance and is a major cause of human nastiness and suffering. Moore does not say that the monotheist tradition was the primary source of Nazism, Stalinism, Maoism, violent Hindu fundamentalism, or ethnic cleansing in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, but he does identify it as an indispensable cause because it justified, encouraged, and spread vindictive persecution throughout the world.
Once again, Moore has drawn on his comprehensive understanding of history and talent for speaking directly to readers to address one of the most crucial questions about human past and future. This book is for anyone who has ever heard the word genocide and asked why.

Moral Purity and Persecution in History

History

Moore Jr., Barrington

World

Princeton University Press

Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World, by Barrington Moore, Jr. From the jacket flap: "Tracing the responses of landed aristocrats and peasants to the growth of industrial and commercial power in China, England, France, India, Japan, and the United States (and suggesting how Germany and Russia fit into the pattern), Barrington Moore transcends the usual ethnocentrism of Western scholarship in a way which makes significant global generalizations possible. "Exposing as superficial the common assumption that industrialization was the main cause of 20th century totalitarianism, Dr. Moore's careful, documented reassessment of modern political evolution offers scholars and students such important insights as: ... specific factors which have caused or prevented peasant revolutions; ... clarification of the intimate connection between revolutionary violence and the later success of gradual democratic reform; ... a forewarning that modernization without a successful revolution has generally led to fascism; ... a realization that the main revolutionary impulses have come not from social classes on the road to political power, but from those about to be driven off the historical stage; ... a new, comparative dimension for understanding the English and American civil wars within a revolutionary context. "In examining the factors which have led the major power centers of the world into one or the other of the three dominant political patterns of the 20th century (parliamentary democracy, fascism, communism), Moore provides a particularly engrossing treatment of India--where the issue is still in doubt. Indeed, in every chapter Moore's evidence and reasoning shake us out of passively accepting many political interpretations so fashionable today. There are times when Moore finds it essential to expose the conservative and distorting bias that often lies" etc.

Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World

Sociology

see notes for publisher info

Reflections on the Causes of Human Misery and Upon Certain Proposals to Eliminate Them

Beacon Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Moore, Barrington, Jr.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Moore, Barrington, Jr.