Here again, history has not lived up to expectations. Even if we ignore the persistence of inequality in the United States and western Europe, the coexistence of industrial development with many features of "traditional" social organization, in a fully developed country like Japan or in many of the developing countries elsewhere in the world, tends to undermine the assumption that industrialization and democracy go hand in hand. Forced to admit that economic development can take place under reactionary regimes, "without a popular revolutionary upheaval," Barrington Moore and other neo-Marxists have argued that a unilinear model of development has to give way to a more complex and flexible model. In opposition to "simplified versions of Marxism," they have called attention to the "Prussian road" as an alternative to the road followed by England, France, and the United States. "Conservative modernization" nevertheless remains an aberrant pattern, in their view. The lingering influence of structuralist habits of thought betrays itself in this formulation, since a deviant pattern of development implies a normal pattern—a revolutionary seizure of power by groups formerly dispossessed, as opposed to a "revolution from above." It was because Germany and Japan never enjoyed the advantages of a bourgeois revolution, according to Moore, that they had to modernize under autocratic regimes and eventually developed into full-blown military dictatorships. The moral is clear: instead of deploring revolutions in developing nations, instead of siding with the forces of order, Americans should support revolutionary movements as the only alternative to the repressive pattern of development sponsored by right-wing regimes. "For a western scholar to say a good word on behalf of revolutionary radicalism," Moore writes

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progress, painstakingly weighing gains against losses. "There is little energy of character, but customs are mild and laws humane.... Life is not adorned with brilliant trophies, but it is extremely easy and tranquil.... Genius becomes more rare, information more diffused.... There is less perfection, but more abundance, in all the productions of the arts." Confessing that the "sight of such universal uniformity saddens and chills me," Tocqueville quickly added that in all likelihood it is "not the singular prosperity of the few, but the greater well-being of all that is most pleasing in the sight of the Creator and Preserver of men." Democracy may be "less elevated," but it is "more just." The specific content of these judgments concerns us less than the assumption behind them, that of an inescapable necessity.

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