In any modern state, the systems of authority and inequality can largely be traced to two main sources: the set of political and social institutions, buttressed by cultural beliefs, that prevailed prior to industrialization, and the form of authority and social inequality that industrialization itself promotes. In this stimulating and suggestive survey, a renowned scholar uses a historical approach to describe and analyze the principal similarities and differences in the systems of authority and inequality in three powerful nations--the United States, the Soviet Union, and China--and explores prospects for a free and rational society in the foreseeable future. Moore concludes that the tyranny of socialism with its omnipresent bureaucracies, and the shortcomings of liberal capitalism with its widespread unemployment, have created a partial moral vacuum that is being filled by religious fundamentalism, chauvinism, and even terrorism.

Authority and Inequality Under Capitalism and Socialism: USA, USSR, and China (Tanner Lectures on Human Values)

Politics & Social Sciences

Moore Jr., Barrington

Politics & Government

Oxford University Press

Focusing on Brazil, this text covers issues such as: the legacy of colour; social realities; and diversions and assertive behaviour.

Privacy: Studies in Social and Cultural History: Studies in Social and Cultural History

History

Americas

Routledge

Examines the conceptions of privacy and private rights in the societies of classical Athens, fourth-century China, and the Hebrews of the Old Testament

Asia

Terror and Progress―USSR: Some Sources of Change and Stability in the Soviet Dictatorship (Russian Research Center Studies, 12)

Russia

Harvard University Press

Terror and Progress-USSR: Some Sources of Change and Stability in the Soviet Dictatorship (Russian Research Center Studies ; No. 12)

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

Moore, Barrington, Jr.

World

Princeton University Press

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

Sociology

Lane

Barrington Moore, Jr., one of the most distinguished thinkers in critical theory and historical sociology, was long concerned with the prospects for freedom and decency in industrial society. The product of decades of reflection on issues of authority, inequality, and injustice, this volume analyzes fluctuating moral beliefs and behavior in political and economic affairs at different points in history, from the early Middle Ages in England to the prospects for liberalism under twentieth-century Soviet socialism. The social sources of antisocial behavior; principles of social inequality; and the origins, enemies, and possibilities of rational discussion in public affairs―these are among the topics Moore considers as he seeks to uncover the historical causes of some accepted forms of morality and to assess their social consequences.
The keynote essay examines how moral codes grew out of commercial practices in England from medieval times through the industrial revolution. Moore pays special attention to conceptions of honesty and the temptation to evade that inform the volume as a whole. In the other essays, he considers particular political issues, viewing "political" in its broadest sense as an unequal distribution of power and authority that carries a strong moral charge. Free of preaching and advocacy, his work offers a rare reasonable assessment of the morality of major social institutions over time.

Moral Aspects of Economic Growth, and Other Essays (The Wilder House Series in Politics, History and Culture)

Business & Money

Business Culture

Cornell University Press

A distinguished contribution both to the understanding of Soviet society and to the development of a more mature social science.

Soviet Politics: The Dilemma of Power: The Dilemma of Power

Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt

First Published in 1978. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an Informa company.

Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt

Social Sciences

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