Barrington Moore Jr.

Barrington Moore Jr. was an American sociologist whose Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (1966) became one of the founding texts of comparative historical sociology. Comparing the long-run political development of England, France, the United States, China, Japan, and India, he argued that a society's route into the modern world, whether toward liberal democracy, fascism, or communist revolution, was shaped chiefly by the changing relationship between the landed aristocracy, the peasantry, and the emerging commercial and industrial classes during the transition out of agrarian society, encapsulated in his often-cited line that no bourgeois, no democracy. His insistence on grounding large-scale theoretical claims in deep comparative historical case studies set a methodological model that shaped later historical sociology, including the work of Theda Skocpol.