Barrington Moore Jr.

Barrington Moore Jr. (1913 to 2005) was an American political sociologist. He is best known for Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, published in 1966, a comparative study of modernization in Britain, France, the United States, China, Japan, Russia, Germany and India. The book makes a neo-Marxist argument that class structures and class alliances at particular points in time account for the kinds of social revolutions that did or did not occur, putting some countries on a path to democracy and others on a path to authoritarianism. In 1965 he co-wrote A Critique of Pure Tolerance with Robert Paul Wolff and Herbert Marcuse.