Pathways to Dictatorship and Democracy: Indonesia and Barrington Moore*

As I began writing about the rise of Soeharto’s New Order regime in Indonesia in the early 1970s, my discovery of Barrington Moore’s seminal work, The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, opened a door into a world beyond the modernisation theory associated with the Cold War. As a result, my analysis was increasingly framed within the general proposition that the path to the modern world was forged in conflicts over power and wealth among forces engendered within the evolution of capitalist society. Two central arguments emerge. First, modern capitalist society in Indonesia was shaped, not by a bourgeois revolution from below or by a revolution from above driven by a centralised administrative state or by the universal forces of market efficiency, but by and within a system of oligarchic domination embedded in a rentier state. Second, this was a system of rule that could not be changed at will by technocratic fiat, institutional reform, or economic crises because it constituted a social order with its own powerful vested interests able to colonise and harness democratic and market institutions.