The Making of the Modern World: the Historical Sociology of Barrington Moore

Abstract

One of the central contributions made by historical sociologists to comparative sociology has been to trace the several routes by which societies have entered the modern world. Sociology as a discipline emerged in the context of what Polanyi (1957) called ‘the great transformation’ which accompanied the spread of the market economy and which undermined explanations of traditional social arrangements as ‘natural’ phenomena. To those living through this great transformation, the emerging industrial societies of the nineteenth century were clearly different from anything that had gone before, but several of the classical sociologists were careful to distance themselves from the then popular idea of social evolution following a single pathway of development. Marx, for example, insisted that his ‘historical sketch of the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe’ should not be interpreted as ‘a historic-philosophical theory of the general course fatally imposed on all peoples, whatever the historical circumstances in which they find themselves placed’ (1982, pp. 109–10). Weber’s strictures against theories of progress were even more severe, and his scepticism is well captured in his observation that ‘Thus far the continuum of European culture development has known neither completed cyclical movements nor an unambiguously oriented “unilinear development”‘ (quoted in Gerth and Mills, 1970, p. 51).