Social Origins: Marxist Analysis

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Barrington Moore explanatory narrative puts class struggle at the heart of his political explanations for a modernizing world – he does a creative Marxist analysis and breaks free from the strand of cultural obsession that dominated his time. He wisely chose economic explanations of modernization instead. He presents a structural narrative, generalizable, just enough - “That is exactly what I shall try to do now, to sketch in very broad strokes the main findings in order to give the reader a preliminary map of the terrain we shall explore together.” (pg. xi). His case selection spreads three continents, and his use of comparative historical method continues to inspire a unique class of defining scholarship. Although a lot has changed in the scholarship on democracy (with increasing stress on role of actors, leadership and resurgence of political culture ) since the time Social Origins was published (Shin 1994), it still remains widely influential …show more content…

It is important to discuss here the most important outcome of Social Origins -the exposé of hard costs of modernization that the poor always bear in resorting to any one of the three routes, and in the case of India the cost of peaceful change through a “fourth

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