Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy

"No, it’s totally inadequate I’m afraid. It doesn’t do it justice at all. You have to put Moore in the frame with another Harvard economic historian at the time, Alexander Gerschenkron. Gerschenkron wrote about the importance of timing in industrialisation. If you look at any standard model of trade and development, there is no timeline in it. Gerschenkron looked at this and said that couldn’t be true. He argued that if you were the first country to industrialise, such as Britain, you changed the game for everybody else that came later. If you are the United States and you industrialise on a continent-wide basis and in relative isolation, when you become integrated in the world economy – as it did in the nineteenth century – your integration into that is going to change the dynamics of the system for everybody else. If you’re Japan and you’ve been living behind a paper screen for 300 years and the Americans show up as they did with modern naval warfare in the 1870s, you basically say “we need to industrialise and do it right now” and you go on an industrialisation spurt faster than anyone has done in human history. So the game changes depending on when you’re integrated into the world economy and on what terms. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter This is the insight that Moore takes, not regarding economics but regarding dictatorship and democracy. The early countries are stable democracies because they had no competition. That’s why they had a bourgeoisie that was able to grow and adapt and do a deal with the landed upper classes. He argues that you only get democracy when you do two things: you get rid of your landed upper classes and turn your peasants into workers, or into at least profitable agriculturalists. Without these two things, you always have bases of reaction that stop you moving forward. The later you industrialise, the bigger the role for the state. Why is this? Well, think about Japan. If Japan wanted to build its first steel mill in 1880 – something Britain had already been doing for almost 100 years – they would have had to import all the latest equipment. This costs an absolute fortune. They would also have to trial and error it until they get it right – which might involve sending people abroad to learn new skills. They would need a boatload of cash to do this. The risk involved in this would defeat any individual entrepreneur. Only by the socialisation of risk through state co-ordination does it make sense for these countries to attempt this. The first country to actually do this wasn’t Japan, it was Germany. If you look at the German industrial structure, you notice a company like Siemens was founded in 1856 and is still very large and powerful today. Many large German companies you have today were founded in the nineteenth century. They survived two world wars, partition, and they are still around. Why is this? It’s because you have this relationship between big state, big finance and big industry working as a corporatist set up. That is also the model the Japanese took. Of course in moments of stress, these very hierarchical states are prone to capture by the military. That’s why you get fascism and dictatorship. Why do you get Stalinism and Maoism? Because you are taking peasant agricultural societies, with very low levels of capital, and you are trying to integrate them into the world economy, or at least modernise them in record time so they can survive against the capitalist economies. How do you do that? You do it with an enormous amount of brutality. That is, to me, one of the most powerful stories."