[Coffee workers walking along a path through the fields. 1939.
John Phillips. Life]
Barrington Moore, Jr. was “old school.” Professor Moore went to private schools as a youth, graduated from Yale, and never fought for tenure at Harvard because he lived on inherited wealth. He spent half of each year sailing, taught only two classes per year, and required anybody wanting to take one of his courses to first demonstrate that they could write decent prose.
Charles Tilly, Columbia University, Canadian Journal of Sociology Online January 2006:
At Harvard, Moore was reluctant to take on the routine administration and petty politics of university departments; only late in his career did he move from lecturer to professor. Meanwhile he spent most of most summers on his yacht, sailing out of Bar Harbor [...]
His closest friends (and most frequent guests on his yacht) were typically intellectual radicals such as Herbert Marcuse and Robert Paul Wolff. When Moore worked, he went at it with ferocious energy, never publishing until he had gotten the argument more or less right. [..]
After earlier books on Russia, totalitarianism, and contemporary politics, Moore turned to an even larger polemical task: an effort to discredit the tracing of 20th century forms of politics, especially totalitarianism, to the effects of industrial capitalism. He proposed instead to demonstrate the agrarian origins of contrasting 20th century political systems, especially what happened to landlords and peasants as agriculture commercialized.
Of course Marxist analyses of the transition from feudalism to capitalism provided an intellectual context for Moore’s effort. But Moore spurned Marxist reductionism, or any other reductionism. Speaking of the French nobility’s drive to regain autonomy during the later 18th century, for example, he remarked that French aristocrats had employed state-backed political means to extract income from peasants, and in that regard differed from the hands-on economic management and local political power of their English counterparts. “It is also at this point,” he remarked: "that any simplified version of Marxism, any notion that the economic substructure somehow automatically determines the political superstructure, can lead one astray. The political mechanism was decisive, and the peasants at the time of the Revolution revealed sound".
This line of analysis set many of Moore’s students and admirers off on the search for “political mechanisms” that interacted with economic transformation and affected its outcomes.
Social Origins revivified a comparative-historical sociology that had languished as social scientists turned away from grand schemes of human evolution. It did so not by legitimating new forms of cosmic speculation, but by demonstrating the value of close, critical, comparative syntheses using material drawn from other people’s historical research. The book completed, Moore displayed intellectual self-abnegation few others would have managed: he suppressed chapters on Germany and Russia that had circulated for years in dittoed, repeatedly rewritten, drafts. He explained that the chapters were no longer essential to his argument, since other scholars had recently published excellent syntheses concerning the two countries.
Skocpol recalled that Moore conducted class in a “Socratic-totalitarian” manner, cold-calling students and moving on abruptly if he deemed their answers less than satisfactory.
Moore was an avid sailor and, according to Walder, would spend around six months per year living alone on his sailboat, which was docked in Maine.
Moore was also known to invite his favorite few students to his house to dine with him and his wife, Betty, a few times a year.
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