Three Paths to Modernity: A Comparative Study

Three Roads to Modernity

1. Capitalist Democratic Road

• Identified in the UK, France, and the USA.
• The peasant question is solved as the peasantry is quickly and efficiently absorbed by the new economic system.
• Steps: enclosure, new technology, industry (normally starting with mining and textiles).
• In these three countries, there is a bourgeoisie that controls the industrialization process.
• This way, they become firstly economically wealthy and then politically powerful (need of political power to consolidate economic power).
• Finally, the landed aristocracy branched out to the bourgeoisie.

This is clearly reflected in the voting power. Initially, only the aristocracy could vote, but gradually the right to vote began involving those who were gaining power until everybody acquired voting as a universal right. According to this model, the bourgeoisie uses democratization as a tool in its power struggle with the aristocracy, depriving and demining its power and co-opting the working class. They unite the action of the three classes: marriage into the aristocracy and involvement of lower classes in the workforce and education. The danger of this upbringing of the lower class is that they can go against the bourgeoisie using the tools they have given them, resulting in the fight for communism. This can only be solved with the welfare state.

2. Capitalist Reactionary Road: Germany and Japan

Instead of a conflict, there is a conservative alliance between the middle class and the landed aristocracy because of a common interest against the existence of a well-aligned land-owning peasantry who resist change. This way, the peasant question is not solved, and the aristocracy does not lose power, so the values of the aristocracy remain very important in society. The state is captured by the two upper classes' conservative alliance, becoming very strong and authoritarian. The aristocracy remains very active in the army, and it controls state jobs. These two groups, united, conduct modernization through a revolution from above. For example, the unification of Germany (1871), a large unified state, provides a strong army, a single market, and a single tax space (economic and military efficiency).

3. Communist Road: USSR, China

Modest industrialization, never enough to absorb the millions of peasants, who were living as serfs, opposed to both other classes. Therefore, the peasant question can never be solved. Weak middle class and a very powerful extensive aristocracy that shares power with royalty. Communist revolution to benefit the landless peasantry without private property to free them from the other classes.

Anomaly

Moore does not find a conclusion to the situation in India, which did not fit in any road or model because of the caste system and British colonial rule. But he takes as examples that break the modernization theory rules India and Indonesia. India is the largest democracy while the poorest country in the world, and Indonesia is the largest Muslim democracy in the world, even though it is not a wealthy nation.