Barrington Moore Jr.

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

From:          "Steve Rosenthal" <smrose@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To:            PROGRESSIVE SOCIOLOGISTS NETWORK <psn@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date:          Tue, 19 Oct 1999 21:25:48 +0000
Subject:       Barrington Moore, Jr.
Priority:      normal
Reply-to:      smrose@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

The Sept., 1999, issue of Contemporary Sociology includes a review
of a festschrift for Harvard sociologist Barrington Moore, Jr.,
titled "Democracy, Revolution, and History, edited by Theda Skocpol,
George Ross, Tony Smith, and Judith Eisenberg Vichniac.  The review,
written by John Walton, appears on pp. 597-98.

As a former student of Barrington Moore, Jr., who was not invited to
contribute to the festschrift, I ask PSN'ers to indulge me while I
engage in a few sociological and political reminiscences.

I studied with Moore for two years while I was a graduate student at
Harvard from 1963 to 1965.  I took his courses in comparative
historical sociology and social theory.  His courses were my first
serious introduction to Marxism.  Much of the material he presented
in these seminars would appear in 1966 in his "The Social Origins of
Dictatorship and Democracy."  My first semi-professional publication
was a review of that book in Monthly Review in 1967.

When I entered the Ph.D. program in Sociology at Brandeis University,
I continued to take independent studies courses with Moore at
Harvard.

Moore's theory courses challenged students to think in a way that
graduate sociology courses today rarely do.  His comparative
historical sociology courses required a vast amount of reading and
exposed me to a serious study of non-European society for the first
time.  And on top of all this, Moore invited me and my wife to visit
him on his yacht off the coast of Bar Harbor, Maine.  We still have a
photograph of my wife at the helm of the yacht.

But that is only the beginning of this reminiscence.  In 1967 I began
to make the painful but essential transition from a Marxist
intellectual to an activist.  Compelled to do so by the war in
Vietnam and the anti-racist and anti-sexist movements of the 1960s,
many of Moore's students became active in SDS and other movement
organizations.

In 1969, the student movement reached a climactic moment at Harvard.
 The Harvard Administration brought in the Cambridge police to break
up a large sit-in.  The cops beat and dragged the students out of
the building, as hundreds watch in horror and amazement.  The next
day an SDS-led strike shut down the University.  The "worker-student
alliance" caucus, led by the communist Progressive Labor Party,
comprised much of the leadership of the strike.

Very few Harvard faculty even grudgingly supported the student
strikers.  Barrington Moore, Jr., criticized the strike as an attack
on the university, on academic freedom, and on free speech.  He
regarded the strike as a terrible blow against what he regarded as
the only institution devoted to intellectual freedom.

Moore was wrong about the university and about Harvard.  Harvard, for
example, collaborated with McCarthyites in purging communist and
pro-communist faculty during the early 1950s.  Harvard had
significant ties to the war machine that was responsible for the
Vietnam war. Harvard's Russian Studies program, from which I received
my masters degree, was partly funded by the CIA, which subsidized
books published by its affiliated faculty.

Harvard, like all universities, was no ivory tower, in which
students and faculty were free to shop in the free marketplace of
ideas.  Moore himself was excluded from Talcott Parsons' Social
Relations Department, because Moore did not share Parsons'
functionalist paradigm celebrating American capitalism.

As I lived and learned, I figured out that Barrington Moore, Jr.,
did not really change much in 1969.  His Marxian (not Marxist)
analyses in his seminars and books were consistent with his
opposition to the anti-racist, anti-imperialist activism of the
student movement.  Moore believed that bourgeois democratic
revolutions in countries such as the U.S., Britain, and France paved
the way for democarcy in those countries.  The absence of such
revolutions, he argued, led to fascism in Germany and Japan, and to
communism in Russia and China.  Moore shared with liberals
opposition to both fascism and communism.  His analysis treated
fascism not as an outgrowth of the contradictions of 20th century
monopoly capitalism, but as the unfortunate consequence of
capitalism's failure to uproot feudalism completely.  Thus, for
Moore, the solution to the problems of the 20th century was not to
end capitalism, but to make the world more fully capitalist.

Moore was also a close friend of Herbert Marcuse, whom I met through
Moore.  The two of them shared a broad ignorance of the history of
the working class in the U.S. and a lack of appreciation for the
achievements of working class movements everywhere.  Although both of
them made trenchant critiques of American society, they were
academic intellectuals who chose to remain extremely isolated from
working class movements.

I dropped out of graduate school in 1968 for a year and one-half and
worked in factory jobs.  I learned many things that I could never
have learned in a Moore seminar or a Marcuse book.  Black and white
workers taught me a great deal about exploitation and racism.  When I
began teaching college at Boston State College in 1970, my working
class students taught me a whole lot more about the working class.

I'm certainly not surprised that I was not invited to contribute to
the Barrington Moore, Jr., festschrift.  Theda Skocpol certainly
knows me well enough to know that she and I profoundly disagree with
each other.  She is a reformist supporter of the Clinton
administration.  Her main works celebrate the bourgeois state as a
vehicle of progressive reform and dismiss Marxist ideology as an
insignificant aspect of revolutionary change.

I will readily acknowledge that she was not only the more successful
protege of Barrington Moore, Jr.  Ultimately, she was also more
faithful to his sociological orientations than I have been.
Nevertheless, I am grateful that I had the opportunity to study with
Barrington Moore, Jr.  He opened doors for me to places where he
chose not to go himself.  I hope all of us will have students who go
farther than we have.

Steve Rosenthal

Louis Proyect

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