Moore, Barrington, Jr. 1913–2005

OBITUARY NOTICE—See index for CA sketch: Born May 12, 1913, in Washington, DC; died October 16, 2005, in Cambridge, MA. Sociologist, political theorist, educator, and author. An important political sociologist by all accounts, Moore was a retired senior research fellow at Harvard University's Russian Research Center, where he studied how history, economics, sociology, and other factors influence the political course of nations. A 1936 graduate of Williams College, he went on to earn a Ph.D. from Yale University in 1941. He then was hired as a research analyst for the U.S. Justice Department, and, not long after the United States entered World War II, was assigned to work for the Office of Strategic Services—forerunner of the CIA. After the war, Moore was on the faculty of the University of Chicago for three years. In 1948, he joined the Russian Research Center, remaining there until his retirement in 1979. Not surprisingly, his first publications focused on the Soviet Union, including Soviet Politics: The Dilemma of Power (1950) and The Strengths and Weaknesses of the Soviet System (1952). Moore believed that to understand the politics of a nation, one had to take a multidisciplinary approach; politics, he felt, did not exist in isolation from history, economics, and other factors. He laid down his ideas in what is considered to be his most groundbreaking and highly influential work, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (1966), which has become a standard college text and is still in print. Many other highly praised works followed, including Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt (1978), Authority and Inequality under Capitalism and Socialism (1987), and Moral Purity and Persecution in History (2000).

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Independent (London, England), November 17, 2005, p. 59.

New York Times, October 22, 2005, p. B14.