barrington moore, social origins of dictatorship and democracy (1966)preface and acknowledgments (xi-xix)(xi): animated by skepticism of thesis that "industrialism was the main cause of twentieth-century totalitarian regimes, because of the veyr obvious fact that Russia and China were overwhelmingly agrarian countries when the communists established themselves."
(xii-xiii): clarifying why these countries, in particular (and why not looking at small countries--there decisive influence comes from without).
(xiii): "The focus of interest is on innovation that has led to political power, not on the spread and reception of institutions that have been hammered out elsewhere..."
(xiii): very much a Weberian, ideal-type-ist, comparative approach, rather than a search for real abstractions. but perhaps the book itself is evidence that the difference between these two need not be so large?
(xiv): explorer is to native as sociologist is to historian!? a bit odd, this.
(xiv-xvii):
KEY,
central theses--"...one may discern
three main historical routes from the preindustrial to the modern world.
- "the first of these leads through what I think deserve to be called bourgeois revolutions... A key feature in such revolutions is the development of a group in society with an independent economic base, which attacks obstacles to a democratic version of capitalism that have been inherited from the past. Though a great deal of the impetus has come from trading and manufacturing classes in the cities, that is very far from the whole story. The allies this bourgeois impetus has found, the enemies it has encountered, vary sharply from case to case. The landed upper classes... were either an important part of this capitalist and democratic tide, as in England, or if they opposed it, they were swept aside in the convulsions of revolution or civil war. The same thing may be said about the peasants. Either the main thrust of their political efforts coincided with that toward capitalism and political democracy, or else it was negligible. And it was negligible either because capitalist advance destroyed peasant society or because this advance began in a new country, such as the United States, without a real peasantry."
- "...the second route has also been capitalist, but culminated during the twentieth century in fascism... I shall call this the capitalist and reactionary form. It amounts to a form of revolution from above. In these countries the bourgeois impulse was much weaker. If it took a revolutionary form at all, the revolution was defeated. Afterward sections of a relatively weak commercial and industrial class relied on dissident elemetns in the older and still dominant ruling classes.. to put through the political and economic changes required for a modern industrial society... Industrial development may proceed rapidly under such auspices. But the outcome, after a brief and unstable period of democracy, has been fascism."
- "The third route is of course communism, as exemplified in Russia, and in China. The great agrarian bureaucracies of these countries served to inhibit the commercial and later industrial impulses even more than in the preceding instances. The results were twofold. In the first place these urban classes were too weak to constitute even a junior partner in the form of modernization taken by Germany and Japan... And in the absence of more than the most feeble steps toward modernization a huge peasantry remained. This stratum, subject to new strains and stresses as the modern world encroached upon it, provided the main destructive revolutionary force that overthrew the old order..."
- "Finally, in India we may perceive still a fourth general pattern that accounts for the weak impulse toward modernization. In that country there has been neither a capitalist revolution from above or below, nor a peasant one leading to communism. Likewise the impulse toward modernization has been very weak. On the other hand, at least som eof the historical prerequisites of Western democracy did put in an appearance... [T]his case stands somewhat appart from any theoretical scheme that it seems possible to construct for the others..."
(xvii):
KEY, IN SUM--"To sum up as concisely as possible, we seek to understand the role of the landed upper classes and the peasants in the bourgeois revolutions leading to capitalist democracy, the abortive bourgeois revolutions leading to fascism, and the peasant revolutions leading to communism.
The ways in which the landed upper classes and the peasants reacted to the challenge of commercial agriculture were decisive factors in determining the political outcome."
(xvii): you have some elements of reaction in the progressive examples, and vice-versa--thus, we have empircally-based general categories that transcend particular cases. moreover, there is invariably an element of contingency in the argument.
PART ONE: REVOLUTIONARY ORIGINS OF CAPITALIST DEMCORACYChapter One, England and the Contributions of Violence to Gradualism (3-40)I. Aristocratic Impulses behind the Transition to Capitalism in the Countryside (3-13)(3): "The focus in this chapter will be on the particular and very significant part that the classes in the countryside played in the transformation to industrialism."
(4-5): from the
1300s, he's arguing, we see the growing importance of commerce in countryside and in towns--and thus, the "dismounting of feudalism and its replacement by England's relatively weak version of royal absolutism."
(5): increasing importance of the wool trade in the
Late Middle Ages (1300-1500), oriented to markets in the Italy and the Low Countries
(5): and the Black Death in 1348-1349 and demographic collapse, which gave an impetus to peasant rebellion.
(5): this chapter focused on the upper classes; by
the late 1300s and the 1400s, especially, feudalism was in decline--it had "become parasitic, deriving its strength from the maneuvers of powerful magnates and the countermoves of the monarch."
(5-6): The
Wars of the Roses (1455-1485) marks this process, the weakening of the landed aristrocracy and the emergence of the Tudor dynasty.
(6): Henry VIII, the second of the Tudor Kings, breaks with the Catholic Church without
supporting the Protestant Reformation--confiscation of the onasteries, etc.
(6-7):
important,
in sum: (1) ROYAL PEACE, AND (2) WOOL, combining in a specific way--"Combined with the continuing stimulus of the wool trade, the Tudor peace generated a powerful stimulus to the growth of a commercial and even capitalist outlook in the countryside." [quoting Tawney--
the Tudor victory had "made the command of money more important than the command of men... [This change]... marks the transition from the medieval conception of land as the basis of political functions... to the modern view of it as an income-yielding investment."--BUT is this sufficient? hypothetically it could have happened at any time, no? isn't it question-begging?]. "
The key to the English situation is that commercial life in both town and countryside during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries grew up mainly though not entirely in opposition to the crown."
(8-9): thus, economic individualism was not simply the preserve of Adam Smith and the bourgeoisie; enclosing landlords, too, "provided at least as important a breeding ground..."
(9):
enclosures, key--"propelled by the prospect of profits to be made either in selling wool or by leasing their lands to those who did and thereby increasing their rents, the lords of the manors found a variety of legal and semilegal methods to deprive the peasants of their rights of cultivation in the open fields..."
(10):
key--"...a change from the feudal seigneur who was at worst a lawless tyrant to an overlord who was closer to an acute man of business exploiting the material resources of the estate with an eye to profit and efficiency..." These habits existed, too, in the
yeomen--the upper ranks of the peasantry, and the chief force behind small enclosures; analogy drawn to kulaks.
(13):
important, comparative point--"Thus in England the chief carriers of what was eventually to be a modern and secular society were at this time fundamentally men of commerce in both the countryside and the towns.
In sharp contrast with what happened in France, these men pushed forward mainly on their own instead of under the umbrella of paternalist royal patronage."
(14): the Crown, Charles I, had started to antagonize commercially-minded elements in the countryside and the town (unlike in France, power had always been delegated to the gentry in the countryside; so the Crown's meddling was impositional). this was, of course, setting the scene for the First Civil War.
II. Agrarian Aspects of the Civil War (14-19)(14-16):
summary of these trends: "
in the light of this general background there would seem to be little reason to question the thesis that commercially minded elements among the landed upper classes, and to a lesser extent among the yeomen, were among the main forces opposing the King and royal attempts to preserve the old order, and therefore an important cause, though not the only one, that produced the Civil War... From the gentry as a class, then, came the main representatives of a decisive historical trend modifying the structure of English rural society... Thus under the impact of commerce and some industry, English society was breaking apart from the top downward in a way that allowed pockets of radical discontent produced by the same forces to burst temporarily in the limelight [
this has interesting implications--more radical elements doing the dominant oppositional classes' handiwork; and for 1848, since it sheds light on potential cleavages in the alliance].. In this process, as the old order breaks up, sections of society that had been losing out due to long-run economic trends come to the surface and do much of the violent 'dirty work.' of destroying the ancien regime..."
(16): act of beheading the King, for example, was a popular demand rooted in the desires of 'urban journeymen and peasants' (in the Army); a preponderance of the poorer gentry amongst the regicides.
(17): modernizers and traditionalists, too, not always opposed--certainly, for example, united in their fears of the 'lower orders.' even amongst the gentry, of course--"One would scarcely expect men of substance to have an easy conscience about kicking over two of the main props, king and church, that supported the social order." [again, the ghosts of 1848]
(17):
important, certainly--"the policy of the leaders of the rebellion was clear and straightforward. They opposed interference with the landlord's property rights on the part of the king and on the part of radicals from the lower orders" [abolition of the Star Chamber, 'the main royal weapon against enclosing landlords' -- the peasants, clearly, are being marginalized]
(18-19):
important--"In economics the Civil War did not produce any masive transfer of landed property from one group or class to another..."
but it was, certainly, a revolution--"its revolutionary consequences were deep and lasting in the area of law and social relationships. with the abolition of the Star Chamber, the peasants lost their chief protection against the advance of enclosures..."
(19): this is a
critical point (leveled against the critics of those who label the Civil War a bourgeois revolution)--the fact that landed elites were still in command of the state apparatus after this, and even after 1832, does not mean this wasn't a bourgeois revolution. precisely because, as we have seen, of the increasing commercialization of countryside... "The aristocratic order survived, but in a new shape, for money more than birth was now its basis. And Parliament itself became the instrument of landed capitalists... "
(20):
in sum--"while the original impulse toward capitalism may have come from the towns far back in the Middle Ages, it proceeded on the land as strongly as in the cities... both the capitalist principle are directly antithetical to... : divinely supported authority in politics, and production for use rather than for individual profit in economics.
Without the triumph of these principles in the seventeenth century it is hard to imagine how English society could have modernized peacefully--to the extent that it actually was peaceful--during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries..."
III. Enclosures and the Destruction of the Peasantry (20-28)(20): enclosures after the Civil War as legal, and historically-significant form of violence (this was not the landed aristrocracy against independent peasants; but landed capitalists against peasantry). either way, moreover, "
the enclosures were the final blow that destroyed the whole structure of English peasant society embodied in the traditional village."
(21-22): speaking, here, of a decline in the 'openness' of local government to the peasantry, after the Glorious Revolution [we must ask, then, about the general thesis of the book--increasing democratization? clearly this is presented as a blip, but we can't leave its significance under-interrogated...].
(22): the anti-democratic writ of Parliament, as property triumphed over the peasantry in matters of enclosure.
(22):
key--"The outcome of the Civil War itself, in sharp contrast to that of the French Revolution, was to strengthen greatly the position of the landed upper classes."
(23): 1688 to the end of the Napoleonic Wars (ca. 1815) as the "golden age of the great landed estate" (some technological improvement, in fertilizer, new crops, crop rotation; but also the simple efficiency of economies of scale)
(24): the rural capitalist, he's noting, is fairly divided into two:
- the big landowner (who did no work himself, though looked at the figures--his contribution was legal and political, arranging the enclosures);
- and the large tenant farmer (whose contribution was economic, the real pioneers of agricultural development).
(25): enclosures gathered considerable force by
1760--surged forward during the Napoleonic Wars, only to die out after
1832.
(26): "the intrusion of commerce into a peasant community generally sets in motion a tendency toward the concentration of land in fewer hands..."
(26-28):
key,
enclosures--graphic, moving account of the disintegration and suffering of the peasant communities (some stayed on land to be rural laborers; others migrated to the cities in search of work)--"
it seems quite clear that when the common fields disappeared and a new economic system began to win out in the countryside, the old peasant community finally gave way and disintegrated... the enclosures greatly strengthened the larger landlords and broke the back of the English peasantry, eliminating them as a factor from British political life."
(29):
amen--"That the violence and coercion which produced these resluts took place over a long space of time... must not blind us to the fact that it was massive violence exercised by the upper classes against the lower." [this is critical, as it contains a larger point about modernization and its relationship to violence--reminds me of Chris Harman's comment on Stalin; all the violence of modernization condensed into a few, exceptionally brutal years]
IV. Aristocratic Rule for Triumphant Capitalism (29-39)(29): when considering the 'peaceful transition' to parliamentary democracy in the 19th century, we would do well to remember the violence that scarred the 17th and 18th centuries.
(29):
consequence one--"
perhaps the most important legacy of a violent past was the strengthening of Parliament at the expense of the King" [bequeathed an institutional mechanism for settling conflicts of interest]
(30): "the strong commercial tone in the life of the landed upper classes... also meant that there was no very solid phalanx of aristrocratic opposition to the advance of industry itself... the most influential sector of the landed upper classes acted as a political advance guard for commercial and industrial capitalism."
(30):
consequence two--"
the other main consequence was the destruction of the peasantry. It meant that modernization could proceed in England without the huge reservoir of conservative and reacitonary forces that existed at certain points in Germany and Japan... And it also of couse meant that the possibility of peasant revolutions in the Russian and Chinese manner were taken off the historical agenda."
(31): the French Revolution induced a period of reaction, in England--only to be lifted with the Battle of Waterloo.
(32): what was
key re: the rise of the commercial classes in the 19th century, in England, was that "the road had been smoothed for them... under the leadership of the landed classes." [contrast with Prussia, where the State had to establish a uniform legal system, currency, etc.] "... The absence of a strong monarchy resting on an army and a bureaucracy, as in Prussia, made easier the development of parliamentary democracy... "
(32):
important--"In the meantime the landed gentry and those above it in the social scale retained a firm hold on the levers of political power... [With reform bill of 1832, and the striking down of Corn Laws in 1846, he writes]
The landed upper classes suffered no disaster, but they learned the limits of their power."
(34):
key--comparatively mild treatment of the Chartist movement (
1838-1848), down to
three factors [in Germany, on the other hand, the bourgeoisie leaned on the aristocracy and the State, to protect them against popular discontent]
- strong current of opinion in favor of doing something to alleviate mass distress--devotion to idea of libery [possibly a question-begging explanation, but ok]
- lack of a strong repressive apparatus
- a favorable economic turn and poor-friendly legislation took the steam out of the movement
(35): "In England the landed interests to some extent engaged in a popularity contest with the bourgeoisie for mass support..."
(35): "Thus
the theme of diehard opposition to the march of democracy is a rare and minor current among the landed aristocracy of England in the nineteenth century. One cannot find in English history the counterpart to... German conservatives ['take ten men and shoot the Reichstag!']"
(35):
very KEY; reason for lack of conservativsm/reaction--"One of the reasons why such a scene seems incongrous in England... is that, unlike the Junkers, the gentry and nobility of England had no great need to rely on political levers to prop up a tottering economic position..."
(36): "In the nineteenth century, as in earlier periods, the lines between wealthy nobility, gentry, and the upper reaches of business and the professions were blurred and wavering."
(37):
key-- "In nineteenth century Prussia the members of the bourgeoisie who became connected with the aristocracy generally absorbed the latter's habits and outlook. Rather the opposite relationship held in England." [this is his answer--and see below--to the puzzle that their seemed to be more osmosis between the two classes in Prussia, than in England]
(37): important, larger point--"
Men who hold power do not necessarily exercise it simply in the interests of the class from which they arise, especially in changing situations."
(38):
key, divergent paths of England and Germany in late-19th Century--an agricultural depression in the aftermath of the Civil War (the availability of American grain, by steamship), "seriously commenced to erode the economic base of the landed upper strata." Roughly the same thing happened in Germany. BUT: there, Junkers used the State to preserve their position, forming a "united agricultural front" with peasant proprietors and even industrial interests around a program of imperialism and reaction; in England, on the other hand, "...agriculture was allowed to commit decorous suicide... The economic base had shifted to industry and trade."
(39):
in sum--"...what factors stand out as responsible for England's progress toward demcoracy? Those inherited from a violent past have already been mentioned: (1) a relatively strong and independent Parliament; (2) a commercial and industrial interest with its own economic base; (3) no serious peasant problem." Other factors are specific to the 19th century... the landed upper classes absorbed new elements into their ranks... it was possible because the economic position of the governing classes eroded slowly... [furthermore], there is no reason to deny the historical significance of moderate and intelligent statesmen."
Chapter Two, Evolution and Revolution in France (40-110)1. Contrasts with England and their Origins (40-45)(40):
key, enormous differences with England, he's noting at the outset--
- whereas in England you had an independent landed gentry, in France they were appendages of the Crown;
- whereas in England they adopt commercial agriculture, in France they live off what they can extract from the peasantry;
- whereas in England they respond to the rise of the manufacturing classes by becoming capitalists themselves, in France they are destroyed by the Revolution.
- whereas in England the peasant problem disappeared, in France it persisted and was consolidated gradually both before and after the Revolution.
(40): Thus, why was there similarity? This is the puzzle of the chapter. "
Since without the Revolution it is most probably that there would have been no similarities," this is his focus.
(41): "the French nobility lived very largely from dues collected in kind or in cash from their peasants." [features emerge by the
late 1300s and
during the 1400s]
(41): they were located in law, and dependent on the peasantry--these two facts "were to distinguish the French nobility from the English gentry for the remainder of its history."
(41-42): "at quite an early date the peasantry had managed to escape from personal servitude...by the time of the Revolution," de facto property rights. [this is not explained, at all]
(42): in fact, precisely because they lacked an independent economic base (a la the gentry in England), the feudals also
slowly lost out to the Crown (and the growing Royal Bureaucracy). this was encapsulated in the "long reign of Louis XIV (
1643-1715).
(42-43): even if this fact let urban wealth intrude into rural areas, the basic form of wealth accumulation in the countryside remained the collection of wealth (not production for market)
(43):
key--"France did not undergo an extensive enclosure movement. By and large, the large proprietor was interested in preserving peasant tenures because they provided the basis of his existence. Only in the latter part of the 1700s did the situation begin to change."
(43-44):
important--in the course of the 1500s and afterward, "the king consolidated and extended his authority..." at the expense of the nobility [he deprived them of judicial functions, raised soldiers and taxes on their lands, intervened in their affairs, and forced them to submit to his Parlements]. This, again, culminated in Louis XIV. King had to ensure loyalty of nobility, though, which he did through the Church and War.
2. The Noble Response to Commercial Agriculture (45-56)(45): until the opening decade of the 1700s, there certainly was a weak impluse toward commercial agriculture in France [limited markets, mostly in wheat--problem was to feed those who didn't grow, which was a small problem].
(49-50): crux of the matter, it seems: [after a lengthy discussion of the wine trade,] "The monarchy wanted a prosperious nobility as a decorative adjunct to the crown... But the crown did not want the nobility to establish an independent economic base that could enable it to challenge royal power." [I'm worried we're verging on a tautology here--no independent economic base is supposed to explain strength of monarchy; so how can strength of monarchy also explain no independent economic base?]
(50): "...successful commercial farming for the high aristocrat involved a temporary escape from French society." [mention of Haiti]
(51): "All these facts indicate that the cultural and legal barriers were becoming much less important during the 18th century." [in other words, this is not where we want to look if we want to understand the weakness of commercial agriculture]
(52):
yes, a critique of Weber that parallels the charges leveled by Ellen Meiskins Wood--"Those who follow Weber, especially those who speak in terms of some abstract drive for achievement, neglect the importance of the social and political context in which such changes manifest themselves. The problem is not merely whether French rural nobles tried to run their estates efficiently...
The key question is whether not in so doing they altered the structure of rural society in a way similar to what took place in those parts of England where the enclosure movement was strongest. The answer to this question is simple and decisive.
They did not. Those nobles who represented the leading edge of commercial advance in the French countryside
tried to extract more from the peasants."
(53): discussing Toulouse, where despite production for market, there was no real technical innovation--"the nobles used the prevailing social and political framework to squeeze more grain out of the peasants and sell it." [again, worried about a
tautology--isn't the lack of an economic base meant to explain that social and political framework?]
(53-54): explaining the land tenure situation, as it differs from England; but I must say, I don't fully follow...
(55):
in sum, though: "In contrast to England, commercial influences as they penetrated into the French countryside did not undermine and destroy the feudal framework. If anything they infused new life into old arrangements, though in a way that ultimately had disastrous consequences for the nobility...
Essentially what the landed proprietor possessed were certain property rights, whose essence were claims, enforceable through the repressive apparatus of the state, to a specific share of the economic surplus..." [if run like this, the tautology fades, I think--but do need to think through this, some more]
(56): "In England the fusion between countryside and town was in the main directed against the crown... In France the fusion took place through the crown with very different political and social consequences."
3. Class Relationships under Royal Absolutism (56-62)(56-57): in the 1600s, the French bourgeoisie was not the spearhead of modernization; instead, "it was heavily dependent on royal favor, subject to royal regulation..." [like Tokugawa Japan or even Akbar's India]
(57): thus, under Louis XIV, "the impulse toward establishing the bases of a modern society... came much more from the royal bureaucracy than from the bourgeoisie. That, however, was scarcely the deliberate intention of the crown. At the same time its real function... was to maintain order, supervise the economy..."
(57-58): like other agrarian bureaucracies, it was confronted with a limited source of surplus, like elsewhere (partial solution was to sell positions in the bureaucracy)
(58):
regardless--"French society of the 1600s and 1700s presents us with an illuminating mixture of competing trades that scholars sometimes regard as characteristically Western and characteristically Oriental: feudalism, bourgeoisie, and bureaucracy." [an admirable universalism]
(59): "...the sale of offices was at the root of the king's independence of the aristocracy, of any effective control by a parliament. It was the key prop of royal absolutism. At the same time the practice undermined the king's independence [since it made office a piece of property]"
(60):
key--had the effect of steeling the bourgeoisie to stand with the State against feudal elements; but also of converting bourgeois elements into feudals. ".
..The system diverted energy and resources from commerce and industry."
(62-63): why didn't such a pervasive monarchy, then, pursue the path of a Germany or Japan--a "conservative path to modernization"? he isn't providing the answer now, only suggesting that "agrarian problems played a very important part in bringing about this result."
4. The Aristocratic Offensive and the Collapse of Absolutism (62-70)(63): the last half of the 1700s saw "a penetration of commercial and capitalist practices into agriculture." [a brief enclosure movement]
(64):
crucial: the method of surplus-extraction (and the political apparatus that corresponded), in France, was simply different than in England [in France, feudal; in England, commercial]
(64):
interesting that, right here at one of his most concretely Marxist moments, he is pushing back against caricatured Marx--"...any notion that the economic substructure somehow automatically determines the political superstructure, can lead one astray. The political mechanism was decisive..." [as was, then, the effort to smash it]
(64):
key--enclosure movement in France more of a government move than in England, where it was indigenously actualized by gentry. "
Hence capitalism was seeping into the French countryside... in the form of feudalism through the seignoral reaction, in the form of an attack on feudalism, and... through the officially sponsored enclosure movement. More rapid penetration had to await the measures of the Revolution..." [
critical--
all of this, though [increased feudal dues, enclosures], had the critical effect of turning the peasantry against the established order--this encouraged the unity of the Third Estate]
(65): this negative response, of course, is why "the most prosperous peasantry in Europe could become a major force for revolution."
(66-67): it was not that the nobility was closed (he's providing examples of bourgeoisie incorporation), that explains the Revolution.
(67):
important--it is the case that in England this fusion took place against the king. In France, it was the monarchy that turned commoners into landed aristrocrats.
(67-68): concomitant to all this, there was expansive growth in commerce, and trade [embodied in proposals made by Turgot, which had the effect of antagonizing the sans-culottes by liberalizing grain market]
(69):
KEY--"As it came to France, capitalism often wore a feudal mask... The demand for property rights within the prevailing system was very strong, as the sale of offices and the seigneurial reaction demonstrates. Capitalism... permeated the ancien regime..
Partly for this reason the radical thrust behind the Revolution, based on the sans-culottes and sections of the peasantry, was explicitly and strongly anticapitalist."
5. The Peasants' Relationship to Radicalism during the Revolution (70-92)(70): "only when popular grievances could coalesce even briefly with those of more powerful groups would they help to bring the monarchy crashing down..."
(70-71):
important--in the absence of commercial revolution (or manorial reaction), "many French peasants had become in effect small property owners." [though, he notes that, in some places families without land may have been anywhere from 20 to 70% of the rural population."]
(71):
two major demands, amongst poorer peasantry
- land
- preservation of specific village customs that served their interests
(72):
important--"the political consequence was a split within the peasantry and a very marked disintegration of the peasant community... the situation of the rural poor drove many toward violent egalitarian theories. for them, modernization meant mainly that the prosperous peasants were blocking them from dividing up the land... [Thus]
there were at least two peasant revolutions, that of the peasant aristocracy and that of the larger and more diffuse majority..."
(73): for the upper ranks of the peasantry, on the other hand, discontent was a product of a fact of "possessing the land without really owning it... Mainly wanted to eliminate the arbitrary aspects of the feudal system that had been increasing in the last years..."
(74-75): the
impulses giving rise to the Revolution in this context: decreasing duties on British manufactures, natural disasters, reactionary pressure of stratum of nobility [others were quite willing to compromise], etc.
(75): summer of 1789, then, sees a series of peasant uprisings
(75-76):
important, no bourgeoisie on the barricades--"full-scale violence [actually] frightened the bourgeoisie, who retreated into the arms of the nobility"
(76): with the storming of the Bastille, major traits of the radical elements in the French Revolution
- the fear of counterrevolutionary plots
- defensive uprising amongst the masses, mainly artisans and journeymen
- will to punish and destroy enemies
(77):
KEY, feudalism dismantled, thanks to the peasantry and in three phases--the Revolution, itself, of course, can be thought of as three journees--three popular upheavals. "The main impulse behind each surge came from the Parisian sans-culottes. Each surge succeeded as longa s it could draw on active support from the countryside. When this support dried up,... the impulse behind the radical revolution petered out, and its urban remnants were easily repressed.
It is fair, therefore, to hold that the peasantry was the arbiter of the Revolution, though not its chief propelling force... and largely responsible for what in retrospect seems the most important and lasting achievement of the Revolution, the dismantling of feudalism." - storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789
- storming of the Tuileries on August 10, 1792, which led to the execution of Louis XIV
- uprising on May 31, 1793, which led to the reign of terror and Robespierre.
(78): the death certificate of the ancien regime delivered in August 1789 -- but, of course, up to more radical phases to make this complete (and, as he notes citing de Tocqueville, here it was simply continuing the work of the royal absolutism).
(80): 25th of August 1792, feudal dues disappeared; 28th of August, villagers receive back commond lands
(81-83):
important, peasant radicalism, in the form of 'loi agrarire': equal distribution of lands, making the Commune uncomfortable, it seems (splitting the ranks) [March 1793 the death penalty decreed for preaching it!] -- all this, he's saying, a response to the intrusion of capitalism into the countryside.
(84):
yes, the spectre of 1848, again--"...the bourgeois revolution needed the help of the radical revolution, as we have seen with the events of July 14 and August 4..." [of course!] This, even though "the two were fundamentally incompatible due to incompatible attitudes toward property..."
(86):
critical, effects and context of the third uprising--"...both the rural and the urban radicals shared a common hostility at this point to the rich who were profiting from the Revolution and to the unfettered workings of the market... To sum up the meaning of the uprising..., the bourgeois revolution had been pushed sharply to the left under radical pressure and forced to shed the moderates (arrest of 32 Girondins), while the urban radicals and the peasants were still marching together..." This was the 'heroic' and 'desperate' time of the Revolution, led by the Committee of Public Safety (my understanding--you had the Constituent Assembly until 1791; the Legislative Assembly until the second uprising; and the Commune, until now)
(88):
key, running into trouble--for the wealthier peasants -- as producers -- the system of price controls implemented in the third phase was oppressive, and they evaded it (even though the high, unregulated price of wheat had enabled the uprising, in the first place). Thus, the radical phase of the Revolution was "in many places an outright attack on the substantial peasants... worst of all, townsmen... were its main agents in the countryside..."
(89):
in sum--"The obvious and decisive fact of the radical phase is this: the urban sans-culottes had been able to push the Jacobin leaders into policies that saved the Revolution
but at the cost of turning the peasants against it... To the extent that these conditions prevailed elsewhere in the countryside [high price of bread relative to wages], they alienated radical support from the Revolution and dried up the sources of rural radicalism"
(90):
important--Ventose decrees, Robespierre and Saint-Just realizing that they needed to make concessions to the peasantry. Alas, "it would have been very difficult to meet the expressed desires of the poorer peasants without putting a spike into the wheels of the bourgeois and capitalist revolution...
Thus during the radical phase the needs and aspirations of the urban sans-culottes finally came into direct and open conflict with all sections of the countryside..."
(91):
key--against the Marxist argument that the bourgeois revolution could not follow the radical revolution this far, Moore attributes the failure of the radical revolution to the tension that his policies brought them into conflict with the countryside--and in a way that aggravated the misery of the city-dweller.
(92): "No matter how radical the city was, it could do nothing without the help of the peasants. The radical revolution was over." [I need to sharpen my understanding of what exactly led to this fall-out; what I have culled from this chapter seems a bit confused...]
6. Peasants against the Revolution: The Vendee (92-101)(92): from 1793 to 1796--the "only major peasant uprising against what is loosely called the Left" (calling for restoration of King, what have you)
(92):
key, there is actually no paradox here: "
the main thrust of the counterrevolution was anticapitalist against the merchants and manufacturers in nearby towns and those scattered through the heart of the Vendee itself... Resembles the great peasant upheavals that were the main popular force breaking apart the old regimes of Russia and China before the communist victories..."
(93):
importantly--"The counterrevolutionary area was one where commercial agriculture had not penetrated..." But this, he is suggesting, is not an answer. Instead, something more specific is needed. His best guess is not the lightness of burden, nor the myth that these peasants lived amongst the nobility, but that "
the leading peasants in the areas that were to become counterrevolutionary already had some of the major benefits of private property (because these were areas where enclosures had taken place)." Led to a "stubborn individualism--"in many instances a man would not see his neighbors for long stretches of time. "
...What might be expected to happen if the Revolution failed to abolish rents and took more taxes out of the peasants than had been the case under the old order? What if the Revolution promoted a substantial bourgeois land grab? Finally, what if the Revolution came as a wholesale attack on peasant society? These are things that did happen."
(98):
key, then--"What mattered most in the specific conditions of the Vendee was the attack on the clergy because it was part of a general offensive: economic, political, and social at once." So things like the reorganization of local government, the seizure of church properties, etc. (which had led to a very large bourgeois land grab).
7. Social Consequences of Revolutionary Terror (101-108)(101): writing, now, against the impulse to regard the Terror "as a daemonic outburst of mob violence..." Certainly, there was much that was indiscriminate (the 1792 September Massacres, for example).
(103-104): roughly 30,000 to 40,000 victims of revolutionary repression--"Yet in assessing it, one has to keep in mind the repressive aspects of the social order to which it was a response.
The prevailing order of society always grinds out its tragic toll of unnecessary death year after year... [T]o dwell on the horrors of revolutionary violence while forgetting that of normal time is merely partisan hypocrisy." [and this is just as true in China, India, etc.]
(104): reminder that the radical arm of the revolution was a negative, defensive reaction to the bourgeois revolution ("the steady spread of capitalist figures..." / the free market in grain, etc.).
(105):
KEY POINT--you could not have had a peaceful transition, had the conservatives smothered the Revolution successfully, as you 'did' in England after the civil war. "The underlying social structure of France was fundamentally different and hence ruled out the kind of peaceful transition... that England experienced in the 1700s and 1800s."
(105):
key--addressing himself to the question of whether it was, or was not, a bourgeois revolution: "To deny that the predominant thrust and chief consequences of the Revolution were bourgeois and capitalist is to engage in a trivial quibble... [Certainly, he agrees that the bourgeoisie were not protagonists, themselves, BUT] That the ultimate outcome of all the forces at work was a victory for an economic system of private property and a political system based upon equality before the law... are truths undeniable even if they are familiar." [see also pg. 109]
(105): Bourbon Restoration recovered half of the property lost during the Revolution!
(106):
key,
and in sum--"...the destruction of the political power of the landed aristocracy constitutes the most significant process at work in the course of French modernization. Ultimately it is largely... traceable to the response of the French nobility to the problems of agriculture in an increasingly commercial society. Royal absolutism was able to tame and control an aristocracy that had difficulty in establishing an independent economic base." [this eliminated, he's adding, the threat of right-wing authoritarianism]
(107):
key--it also created "small-peasant property," with ambiguous consequences--"the experience of requisitioning, the attempt to place ceilings on the prices of grain, and the encouragement given to small holders and agricultural workers during the radical phase... turned the upper stratum of the peasants decisively against the Republic." [there is more, certainly, that needs to be said about the divisions in the peasantry; why are we so concerned, after all, with the upper peasantry, given their limited numbers?]
(107-108): some provisional reflections on revolutionary and reactionary tendencies of peasantry, but nothing conclusive beyond these few generalizations about the 19th and 20th centuries in France
- influential peasants are not concerned about democracy; they want guarantees of property and social position
- continued advance of capitalism threatens small peasant property
8. Recapitulation (108-110) [
excellent summary, consult if necessary]
(108): again, a summary--Revolution was imperative, precisely because the ancien regime stood in the way of democratization; this was not the case in England, where you had a landed elite that were quite bourgeois ("part of democracy's entering wedge")
(110): in tracing the end of the French revolution, he speaks about how the Jacobin need to get food to urban areas and revolutionary armies broke the alliance with the richer peasants. but i am confused, perhaps because of poor comprehension: why did the poor peasants leave this alliance? or, differently put, why was the counterrevolution successful--did it have the backing of poor peasants?
Chapter Three, The American Civil War: The Last Capitalist Revolution (111-158)1. Plantation and Factory: An Inevitable Conflict? (111-114)(111): In America, of course, no well-entrenched agrarian society, of either feudal or bureaucratic forms. (1) Rather, "commercial agriculture" was important from the very beginning. (2) No political struggles, then, between a monarch and a landed aristocracy. (3) No massive class of peasants, comparable to Europe or Asia.
(112):
key, a revolution not motivated by desire to cast off economic fetters--"The conclusion... amounts to the statement that the American Civil War was the last revolutionary offensive on the part of what one may legitimately call urban or bourgois capitalist democracy. Plantation slavery in the South... was not an economic fetter upon industrial capitalism. If anything, the reverse may have been true... But slavery was an obstacle to a political and social democracy." [but hang on, there is a point about technical inefficiency of slavery, owing to the low cost of labor, and whatever else--but let's watch this proceed]
(112): rightly passing over the American Revolution, which "did not result in any fundamental changes in the structure of society."
(114): to the question of whether there was some inherent contradiction between the industrial capitalism of the North and the plantation economy of the South, "we can answer.. with a provisional negative: there is no abstract general reason...
Special historical circumstances... had to be present in order to prevent agreement between an agrarian society based on unfree labor and a rising industrial capitalism." [here he is making a comparison to Germany, where advanced industry got along well with highly repressive forms of rural labor (even if the Junker was not a slave-owner)]
(115): BUT--"if the conflict between the North and South had been compromised, the compromise would have been at the expense of subsequent democratic development in the United States..."
2. Three Forms of American Capitalist Growth (115-131)
(115): By 1860, there were three different forms of society in the US:
- cotton-growing South;
- the West, a land of free-farmers;
- and the rapidly industrializing Northeast.
(116): "Between 1815 and 1860 the cotton trade exercised a decisive influence upon the rate of growth in the American economy. Up until about 1830 it was the most important cause of the growth of manufacturing... By 1849, 64% of the cotton crop went abroad, mainly to England. From 1840 to the time of the Civil War, Great Britain drew from the Southern states 80% of all her cotton..."
(116): "In Southern society, the plantation and slave owners were a very small minority. By 1850, there may have been less than 350,000 in a white population of six million... only a small minority owned most of the slaves... [
7% owned 75%!]"
(117): "...the smaller farmers in the South by and large accepted the political authority of the big planters..."
(117-118): "Slavery was almost certainly not on the point of dying out for internal reasons...
If slavery were to disappear from American society, armed force would be necessary..."
(118): Emancipation Proclamation (1863) only emancipated slaves in areas where the North had no jurisdiction!
(118): "These considerations point strongly toward the conclusion that slavery was economically profitable."
(119): Slavery shifting to the "low South", and West (not in the tobacco growing areas, after 1850). This shift was of course threatening the balance of slave states and free states (Missouri coupled with Maine)
(121):
key--but even if running a plantation was a capitalist task, the Southern plantocracy was not bourgeois--not opposed to hereditary privilege, and not based in town life. "
Here was a real difference and a real issue."
(123):
key-- "It is almost impossible to speak of purely economic factors as the main causes behind the war, just as it is impossible to speak of the war as mainly a consequence of moral differences over slavery. The moral issues arose from economic difference.
Slavery was the moral issue... Without the direct conflict of ideals..., the events leading up to the war... are totally incomprehensible" [but what do we make of the hollowness of the Emanicpation proclamation? the notion that Lincoln was willing to save the union, alone?]
(124): after the 1830s, the North became a manufacturing center--the American Economy as a whole was less depndent on a "single agricultural staple." Cotton ceased to dominate the Northeast.
(125): regardless, though, it certainly wasn't Northern business interests behind the war--they "were very far from bellicose advocates of a war of liberation or even war for the sake of the union."
(127): the conflict comes, then, over the supply of labor to Northern Capitalists--"Perhaps more than any other factor, these trends set the stage for armed conflict and aligned the combatants in such a way as to make possible a partial victory for human freedom."
(128-129):
key--the West is an important part of this story--"From the 1830s onward, there was a gradual redirection of Western produce toward the Eastern seaboard" [made possible by transportation revolution].
As a result, he's arguing, "The outlook of the early individualist and small-scale capitalist, characteristic of the Northeast, spread to the dominant upper stratum of the Western farmers." This, he's suggesting, produced a fear of competition from slavery.Similarly, Southern planters see this new strata as a threat.
(130): this was the underpinning of the bargain that brought Lincoln to office, in 1860--"business was to support the farmers' demand for land, popular also in industrial working-class circles, in return for support for a higher tariff."
(131):
interesting--"Here energies that in Europe would have gone into building trade unions... went into schemes providing a free farm for every workman whether he wanted it or not. The actual effect of the Westward trek... was to strengthen the forces of early competitive and individualist capitalism by spreading the interest in property." [this was more a myth than reality--speculators had their hands on it, and maybe some of the more wealthy, enterprising workers]
(131): "The link between Northern industry and the free farmers ruled out for the time being the classic reactionary solution to the problems of growing industrialism..." It also brought the country towards civil war.
3. Toward an Explanation of the Causes of the War (132-140)(132-133): no obvious, 'mortal' conflict in economic terms, between the two systems
(134):
important--"In addition to the conflict between free farmers in the West and the plantation system, about
the strongest case one can make in strictly economic terms is that for the South secession was not an altogether unreasonable proposal mainly because the South did not need much that the North really had to offer."
(134): other than economic answers, historians have given three explanations
- a moral conflict over slavery--but this elides the fact that North never took a radical position on slavery
- the blunering of politicians--but this is unhhelpful
- push question back to why political machinery for consensus broke down
(136-137):
executive (re)summary of the argument--"...The fundamental issue became more and more whether the machinery of the federal government should be used to support one society or the other..."
(140): alternative way of framing it: causes for unity were being undermined--"it is difficult to find a case in history where two different regions have developed economic systems based on diametrically opposite principles and yet remained under a central government that retained real authority in both areas... Cohesive forces appear to have been weak..."
(140-141): there was also, he's arguing, neither (1) a strong working-class in the North, nor (2) threat of foreign power which could bind North and South together under a common banner (Germany 1871, Japan 1868 are said to have been examples of this)
(141):
in sum--"...[T]he ultimate causes of the war are to be found in the growth of different economic systems... Two further factors made compromise extremely difficult. The future of the West appeared uncertain in such a way as to make the distribution of power at the center uncertain... Secondly... the main forces of cohesion in American society... were still very weak."
4. The Revolutionary Impulse and its Failure (141-148)(141): Unlike the French Revolution and, partly, unlike England, there was no real "radical upsurge" during the Civil War [here we need 'Black Reconstruction' and the others--the 'new' histories of the Civil War, even if the kind of argument Moore is making is still defensible (no artisans, sans-culottes, though?)]
(142): slave outbreaks had no political consequences? To the DuBois!
(141-145):
Thaddeus Stevens and Radical Republicans provided the revolutionary impulse that did exist, intending to wage 'progressive capitalism's' war on the 'baron and serf' slavery (combination of workers, industrialists, and some railroad interests at its height, in
1865-1868). The South were to be treated as a 'conquered people', and their society reconstructed (land reform, land confiscation, 'forty acres and a mule').
(146-147): The 1867 reconstruction acts floundered, though, because "influential Northern sentiment was in no mood to tolerate an outright attack on property... The failure of land reform was a decisive defeat and removed the heart of the Radical program."
(147): In the absence of this radical reconstruction, there was a move towards a new form of labor--not wage labor (which didn't work, when attempted first), but
sharecropping.
(148): this didn't enrich the planters, but it did have the effect of making the South more of a one-crop economy than before (as everyone was pressed to grow cash-crop)
(148):
key--of course, 1876 marks the return to normalcy--as elite moderates make an alliance across battle lines (Hayes-Tilden), and occupational regime is finally dismantled. "...the classic conservative coalition was possible. So came Thermidor to liquidate the 'Second American Revolution'"
5. The Meaning of the War (149-155)(149-152):
War gave a massive boost to industrial capitalism through permitting policies that would never have been tolerated, without it (high tariffs, end of slavery, subsidies, national banking and currency system). At the same time, this was not why the war happened, again--industrial capitalism did not necessarily have to regard plantation slavery as an obstacle; slavery was an obstacle to the establishment of democracy, however (and democracy is not a prerequisite of industrial capitalism--Germany, Japan).
(152): "Slavery was a threat and an obstacle to a society that was indeed the heir of the Puritan, American, and French Revolutions."
(153): "Striking down slavery was a decisive step, an act at least as important as the striking down of absolute monarchy in the English Civil War and the French REvolution..."
PART THREE: THEORETICAL IMPLICATIONS AND PROJECTIONSChapter Seven, The Democratic Route to Modern Society (413-432)(413):
again,
three routes to the modern world
- the route of the bourgeois revolution
- capitalist road without a revolutionary surge (German and Japanese examples)
- the communist road
(414): presentation of these as "successive historical stages," but it's unclear how and why, at this stage.
(415): Western feudalism predisposed societies toward the parliamentary path, because of certain institutions it contained--"immunity of certain groups from the ruler, conception of right of resistance to unjust authority." [come on, though, this is quite unconvincing--reading into the relationship of lord to vassal the modern concept of the contract?]
(416): Marx's concept of an oriental despotism that coordinates the irrigation system he finds unconvincing, though it can be a starting point.
(417): as regards the process of modernization, "
one point is clear:" persistence of royal absolutism or a hulking bureaucracy is not favorable to democracy. At the same time, they were important to 'checking' the nobility.
(417): a decisive precondition, too, "has been the emergence of a rough balance between the crown and the nobility... The pluralist notion that an independent nobility is an essential ingredient in the growth of democracy has a firm basis in historical fact." [but what about France?]
(418): but the nobility does need a bourgeoisie--if it seeks its freedom outside of this alliance, democracy is not the result (Russia as an example of this)
(418):
ok--strong agreement with the "Marxist thesis that a vigorous and independent class of town dwellers has been an indispensable element in the growth of parliamentary democracy."
(419): furthermore--"among the most decisive determinants influencing the course of subsequent political evolution are whether or not a landed aristocracy has turned to commercial agriculture, and if so, the form that this commercialization has taken."
(419): European feudalism had
three main divisions of land. Japan showed resemblances to this arrangment; some similarities in India. China was not like this.
- the commons
- the land owned by feudal, worked by peasant
- peasants' own plots
(419-420): there were
three main responses to the advance of commerce in the towns, and demands of absolutist rulers for more taxes.
- English landed aristocracy turned to commercial farming, moving peasants of the lands.
- The French landed elite left the peasants in possession--intensification of the old arrangement (I think). [this led to democracy only because of the Revolution, remember--it could equally have led to the German path]
- In E. Europe you had the manorial reaction--E. German Junkers reduced free peasants to serfdom, and a similar process was at work in Russia (though for political, and not economic reasons).
(420-421): here he is making explicit that the problem is really one of
the "form of commercial agriculture," and not simply the fact (or non-fact) of commercialization.
(421-422): a 'cultural' explanation is quite unconvincing, he's arguing. agreed.
(422):
important--"Where it has been possible for landlords to make use of the coercive apparatus of the state in order to sit back and collect rents, a phenomenon found widely in Asia and to some extent in prerevolutionary France and Russia, there is clearly no incentive to turn to less repressive adaptations."
(423): there are therefore at least
three major variables:
- the relationship of the aristocracy to the monarchy
- the response of the aristocracy to commercialization
- the relationship of the landed upper classes with the bourgeoisie
(424): there is the classic rural-urban cleavage, and then there are class divisions within each--so there are a wide variety of permutations of alliances, with varying outcomes (in Tudor and Stuart England, a vigorous alliance)
(424): and here's an
odd, contingent point, that throws the comparisons into doubt, I feel -- one that opens into the question of the 'permanent revolution', though: "the English bourgeoisie from the 17th through much of the 19th century had a maximum material stake in human freedom
because it was the first bourgeoisie and hand not yet brought its foreign and domestic rivals to their full powers."
(426): again, England and the US (for different reasons) were the only countries to escape the peasant question (he attributes the "instability of French democracy in the 20th century to this fact").
(426): the role of violence--the English Civil War, the French Revolution, and the American Civil War
(427): provided the distinctions between the cases remain clear, "it is necessary to group revolutions by the broad institutional results to which they contribute."
(428):
KEY, Barrington Moore against the classic concept of the
bourgeois-democratic revolution--"..this meaning of the bourgeois revolution is such a simplification as to be a caricature of what took place. To see that it is a caricature we need only recall
- the importance of capitalism in the English countryside, which enabled the landed elite to control the political machinery
- the weakness of any purely bourgeois impulse in the French case, and the importance, therefore, of radical elements; and the continuation of the peasant economy into present-day
- the fact that plantation slavery was an obstacle to democracy, certainly, but not so much to capitalism.
(430): "in a word, the landed upper classes either helped to make the bourgeois reovlution or were destroyed by it."
(430): once more, an
executive summary of FIVE conditions (looking at these, through India):
- first condition is to develop a balance, in order to avoid too strong a crown or too independent a landed aristocracy.
- a turn toward an appropriate form of commercial agriculture either on the part of the landed aristocracy or the peasantry.
- weakening of the landed aristocracy, if not commercial
- prevention of an aristocratic-bourgeois coalition against peasants and workers (typical when the bourgeoisie is weak, and the basis for authoritarianism)
- a revolutionary break with the past
Chapter Eight, Revolution from Above and Fascism (433-452)(432): in Germany and Japan, you have capitalism in agriculture and industry, but no popular upheaval
(434-435):
critical distinction, labor-repressive labor system vs. market labor system--the crux of his distinction between the English example (and the West of the US) and the Japanese, German, Russian, and even French cases is the form of surplus extraction. in the latter case, a reliance on a 'labor-repressive' system (rather than the labor market) to ensure an adequate labor force and adequate surplus ties the landed aristocracy to the State apparatus. [this is precisely where Skocpol pushes back--to her, the distinction between the two on the basis of their political implications is not admissable; it is rather another way of assessing the claim about the strength of the central bureaucracy]
(436): this seems deeply
problematic--from the subordination to the House of Hohenzollern in the 1600's and 1700s, he's reading ideas of subordination to a central institution that he links to fascism! too ambitious, and he immediately acknowledges this. so where does it leave the claim?
(437-438):
interesting, citing Marx and Engels on the German 1848--a bourgeoisie which was to weak to rule, and for the right to make money threw in its lot with the landed aristocracy and the royal bureaucracy (this will not, though, bring fascism in and of itself, just a
conservative modernization from above--that only happens under the inability of these democracies to cope and to bring about fundamental structural changes). If this coalition is wanting, he adds, you move towards Russia and China.
(438): and what he's noting about fascism, let us remember, is the significant role of the landed elite (made possible by the failure of peasants to band together with urban strata)
(438-439): discussing the rationalization of the new order in Germany and Japan in the 1800s, which had already been done, in England and France, under royal absolutism.
(440): the State, obviously, was critical for incipient industrialization, and the taming of the labor force (but this is perhaps where the contrast with the other examples becomes blurred, a la Skocpol's claim?)
(441): raising the question of
the autonomy of the State structure, which is posed, though unclearly, here--it must be able to "free itself from the influence of both extreme reactionary and popular or radical pressures in the society, something that can happen rather more easily than simplified versions of Marxism would allow us to believe."
(442): ultimately, though, these regimes are in a bind, because modernization will require changes in social structure, which they want to stabilize. the answer to this, he's arguing, is militarism.
(443): drawing parallels between McCarthyism and the situation in England, during and after the Napoleonic Wars.
(444): this is the real question--why did England, in its reactionary phase during the Napoleonic Wars, not launch itself onto the reactionary path of a Germany or Japan--the answer,
critically, was
the relative weakness of the repressive apparatus, in England. [one thinks Skocpol will pick up, right here; whereas for Moore this pushes the question back]
(445): he's playing with the 'fascist' possibility in the Russian case, but for me this is revealing how undefined the term itself has been, till this point.
(446): again, this needs lengthy interrogation--"...the Russian peasants were revolutionary and eventually the major force in exploding the old regime."
(446): Fascism and the Subcontinent
(447-8):
Fascism, a provision definition--"Fascism is inconceivable without... the entrance of the masses onto the historical stage. Fascism was an attempt to make reaction and conservatism popular and plebian... [It] stressed not only the inevitability of hierarchy, discipline, and obedience, but also positied that they were values in their own right... Another feature was the stress on violence...
Plebian anticapitalism thus appears as the feature that most clearly distinguishes 20th century fascism from its predecessors, the nineteenth-century conservative and semiparliamentary regimes..."
(448-449): Fascism and the peasantry--most successful in appeal to the peasant whose holding was relatively small and unprofitable for the particular area in which it existed" [the 'little fellow'--seduced by the romantic image of an idealized peasant. though, it goes without saying, this was only ever an ideological justification, rather than a policy pursued by the Nazis]
(450-451): example of Japan, Italy--same pseudoradical and propeasant features, though in the latter especially, this was entirely opportunistic and ideological (policy catered to big agriculture, after Mussolini took power)
Chapter Nine, The Peasants and Revolution (453-583)(453): "The process of modernization begins with peasant revolutions that fail. It culminates during the 20th century with peasant revolutions that succeed." [catchy -- but the first part is not clear]
(453): recovering the peasant as a subject of history, after he/she had been dismissed
(453-45 ): we want to understand what triggers peasant revolutions, and why. at this stage, certain theories can be dismissed:
- not simple deterioration of living, owing to impact of commerce and industry (think India--even if there have been upheavals)
- not a threat to peasant existence (i.e. enclosrues)
- where nobility lives amongst peasantry, less likely? (no, look at Russia)
- landless labor, large rural proletariat--but this doesn't explain the Russian Revolution, or even the Chinese Revolution, really
- religion? but it's always wielded by upper classes, interpreted differently by lower classes
(457): rather, he's arguing, we ought not to focus on the peasantry--we need to think about the upper classes (peasant rebellions typically take on the character of the social structure that animates them--restore the Good Tsar, dynastic change, etc.)
(459): the
general hypothesis--it is society's with a central authority that are more vulnerable to rebellion; but where regulation is diffuse (i.e., the caste system), rebellion is less likely. [this is useful, because England and France seem to fit the model, too, though he doesn't acknowledge this in the same way...]
(459-460): if landed elites take up commercial agriculture, the more limited the rebellion
(462): discussing the context leading up to the Peasant War in Germany--enserfment was the response, there, to the rise of an export market in grain
(466): the aristocratic victory in the Peasant War, he's arguing, foreclosed the possibility of liberal democracy emerging (since, presumably, it consolidated a labor-repressive system of surplus extraction)
(467): English squire vs. German Junker
- the former turned to commercial agriculture, destroyed the social organization of the peasantry through enclosures--no peasant war
- the latter turned to serfdom in the face of the export trade--faced with peasant war
(467-468): a
definition of modernization, from the perspective of the peasantry
- production for the market
- peace and order over a wide area; the creation of a strong central gov't
(468-75): argument is that
three things seem important, re: peasant rebellion
- character of link to the overlords (landlord, priest)--when strong, chances of rebellion are feeble
- class divisions within the peasantry
- and degree of cohesiveness within the peasantry [he is also making a distinction between revolutionary and conservative forms of solidarity--the latter is, in the main, a modern phenomenon (this is the context of Marx's comment on the peasantry being a 'sack of potatoes'--it's the effect of commerce, industry and a capitalist legal framework, at least in part, which encourages competition between households in a village]
(470-471): subjective interpretation of exploitation as a cause is clearly tautological; so an objective explanation is demanded.
(477-478): "
To sum up, the most important causes of peasant revolutions have been the absence of a commercial revolution in agriculture... and the concomitant survival of peasant social institutions into the modern era... Where the peasant community survives, as in Japan, it must remain closely linked to the dominant class in the countryside if revolution is to be avoided."
(479): "By themselves peasants have never been able to accomplish a revolution. On this point the Marxists are absolutely correct, wide of the mark though they are on other crucial aspects. The peasants have to have leaders from other classes..." [And anyway,] "peasant revolts have been repressed far more often than they have succeeded."
(481): noting that artisans and journeymen played a much more important role than Marxist theory might lead us to believe (this is Craig's intervention, as well, but there it is 1848 under scrutiny)
(481): deeply unsatisfactory account of the Russian Revolution
--
(1) there is a preliminary problem in the opposition of democracy to communist dictatorship, but we will keep this on the shelf for when the concepts are elucidated further.
(2) the question-begging character of the argument, which almost inheres in its Weberian set-up. we can always, it seems, push the chain of causality back. our task is to think through when this is useful, and when it is not. (example of impulse given by wool trade, in 1300s/1400s England--can we not ask to have this pushed back, further? or is it simply a contingent factor?)
(3) obvious problem in Russia's case was that the peasantry did not, in the slightest, 'lead' the revolution. it will be interesting to see how he justifies the claim that they constituted the decisive revolutionary impulse; it is, certainly, more defensible, but still requires some reconciling to the larger narrative of Bolshevik triumph.
(4) cleavages in the revolution; poorer elements doing dirty work. one can see why this might culminate in 1848, and 'permanent revolution'
(5) increasing lack of democracy in the aftermath of the civil war, for the peasantry (pg. 21)
(6): Stalin as condensation of the typical violence, rather than atypical, which is inherent in the path of modernization.
(7) the critique of Moore that the German and Japanese examples are disingenuous, because their fascist 'phases' were temporary, raises the more fundamental question, i think, of what in each example we can treat as a true 'characteristic', and what we treat as 'temporary'. this is, of course, fundamental--the balance of contingency and theory is the challenge of any good history.
