[JCA] Pathways to Dictatorship and Democracy: Indonesia and Barrington Moore*
.
Source: Journal of Contemporary Asia | Published: 2026-10-01
Category: 정권·선거 변동 | Keywords: democracy, indonesia
Pathways to Dictatorship and Democracy: Indonesia and Barrington Moore, published online on 16 July 2026 in the Journal of Contemporary Asia, arrives at a moment when the durability of authoritarian and hybrid political economies across Southeast Asia is once again under close scrutiny. Written by Richard Robison of the Asia Institute at the University of Melbourne, the piece is a Commentary contributed to the journal's "Looking Back, Going Forward" series, in which editorial board members and invited scholars revisit the intellectual influences that shaped their careers. Robison, a veteran analyst of Indonesian political economy since his early work on the rise of Soeharto's New Order regime in the 1970s, uses the essay to explain how his encounter with Barrington Moore's 1966 classic, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World, redirected his scholarship away from the modernisation theory dominant during the Cold War. That such a retrospective is being published now, amid renewed global debate over democratic backsliding and entrenched elite capture from Southeast Asia to Eastern Europe, underscores why a framework built on historical class conflict still commands attention among scholars of development.
The substantive argument of Robison's article is that Indonesia's trajectory toward a modern capitalist society cannot be explained by any of the three classical pathways Moore identified — bourgeois revolution from below, conservative revolution from above led by a centralised administrative state, or peasant-based social revolution. Instead, Robison traces a distinct fourth pattern: the consolidation of oligarchic domination embedded within a rentier state. He recounts how Indonesia's post-independence decade of "fitful liberal-style democracy" gave way to power being seized by nationalist politicians and the officials of a sprawling bureaucracy, including the military, producing the system of state-managed capitalism that Sukarno codified in the concepts of "Guided Democracy" and "Guided Economy." Robison stresses that Indonesia's landowning classes were fragmented and had long been co-opted by Dutch colonial rule, leaving them a marginal force in shaping the country's political and economic evolution — a direct contrast to the landed-elite dynamics central to Moore's European and Asian case studies. He further notes that a small but influential core of middle-class liberals embedded in the bureaucracy and professional classes was never able to impose a liberal agenda on the authoritarian order that followed, a finding that complicates modernisation-theory assumptions about the democratising role of an emergent bourgeoisie.
The article situates this Indonesian case within a much broader arc of political-economic debate stretching from the 1950s to the present, explicitly engaging the literature that Moore's work helped generate, including the Dobb (1947) and Brenner (1977) debates on the transition to capitalism, and later confronting the market-oriented, neo-liberal doctrines that found practical expression in the IMF and World Bank agendas of the 1990s, referencing Williamson's 1990 formulation and the World Bank's 1991 policy stance. Robison's section headings — among them "The New Order and the Rise of Capital," "Bringing the STATE Back in," and "Neo-Liberalism and the 'End of Politics': Is the Moore Thesis Redundant?" — trace how successive waves of state-centred developmentalism and then market liberalisation each failed to dislodge oligarchic power in Indonesia. This connects directly to wider regional patterns documented across ODA and political-economy scholarship, where structural adjustment and governance-reform agendas promoted by multilateral lenders have repeatedly underestimated the capacity of entrenched elites to colonise the very institutions, democratic and market alike, that reform programs were designed to install.
For researchers and practitioners in development and civil-society studies, the policy implications are significant. Robison's treatment of the 1997–1998 Asian financial crisis under the heading "False Turn: Economic and Political Crisis, 1997–1998," and his subsequent discussion of "The Failure of Reformasi and the Resurgence of Oligarchy," argue that neither acute economic shock nor formal democratic transition was sufficient to dismantle Indonesia's oligarchic order. This has direct bearing on how donor institutions and civil-society organisations design governance and anti-corruption interventions: if oligarchic capitalism, as Robison contends, constitutes "a social order with its own powerful vested interests able to colonise and harness democratic and market institutions," then technocratic fiat and institutional reform alone — the standard toolkit of much ODA-funded governance work — are unlikely to produce durable change. The article's final analytical question, posed under the heading "Does Oligarchy Require Authoritarian Rule?", is especially relevant to contemporary Indonesia, where formally democratic institutions have persisted since Reformasi even as oligarchic power structures identified by Robison in the Soeharto era appear to have survived and adapted.
Robison closes by affirming what he terms the continuing salience of the Barrington Moore thesis, arguing that while Indonesia's specific pathway does not match any of Moore's original categories, Moore's underlying method — treating the structures and contests over social power as the proper unit of analysis — remains indispensable for understanding why particular forms of capitalism prove resilient even through the most traumatic political and economic crises. For scholars of ODA, civil society, and global political economy, the article is a reminder that a 1966 work of comparative historical sociology continues to generate testable propositions about contemporary Southeast Asian political economy, and it invites further comparative work asking whether Indonesia's rentier-oligarchic pathway is a regional outlier or a pattern recurring elsewhere in post-colonial states where fragmented landed classes and co-opted bureaucracies similarly failed to produce a liberal-democratic bourgeoisie.