Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy

Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (1966) is a book by Barrington Moore Jr.

The work studied the roots of democratic, fascist and communist regimes in different societies, looking especially at the ways in which industrialization and the pre-existing agrarian regimes interacted to produce those different political outcomes. He drew particular attention to the violence which preceded the development of democratic institutions.

Initially, Moore set out to study a large number of countries, but reduced his number of cases to eight. The book took more than ten years to write.

It is a cornerstone to comparative historical analysis in social science.