Reply To Rothman

Barrington Moore

American Political Science Review, 1970, vol. 64, issue 1, 83-85

Abstract: Stanley Rothman is laboring under a series of misapprehensions. What appears to give them some minimal coherence is evidently the curious conviction that in criticizing Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy he must cope with the work of a disillusioned former fellow-traveller. In discussing my alleged fundamental assumptions, toward the end of his essay, Rothman asserts:Moore's writing indicates that he is one of that generation of scholars to whom the Soviet Revolution once represented the hope of a radical transformation of mankind. Disillusioned by the results of that Revolution, he has now, with the mellowing of the Soviet regime, been able to justify his earlier enthusiasm for it by arguing that it has been no more repressive than other alternatives. (31,506.)Upon reflection I think I am entitled to take this as a compliment to my efforts at critical detachment. In my books on the Soviet Union I must have restrained my hostility to the point where my critic could succeed in discovering what he takes to be evidence of enthusiasm. At any rate, his discovery is a completely original one!After this discovery Rothman goes on to attribute ideas to me that he probably got from reading the works of my very good friend, Herbert Marcuse. For example, so far as I remember, I have never used the expression “non-repressive society,” which has become in a way Professor's Marcuse's trade-mark. (“Less repressive” is quite another expression, which I do use.) Nor did I use the expression “free non-repressive society,” preferring to say “free and rational society,” on the page cited by Rothman in this same paragraph. Indeed, to continue examining this passage as an example of Rothman's criticism, I have never been sanguine about “revolutions in the third world as embodying hope for the future” of mankind, much as such revolutions against American attempts to prop up various forms of political landlordism do seem to me justified. But perhaps Rothman is simply mixed up, because I doubt very much that either Marcuse or I would ever speak about “the goal of a compulsionless society!”

Date: 1970
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