Moral Purity and Persecution in History

175 Pages·2000·3.808 MB·English

by  Barrington Moore, Jr.

Moral Purity and Persecution in History
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Moral Purity and
Persecution in History
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B M , J .
ARRINGTON OORE R
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY
Copyright © 2000 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton,
New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, Chichester, West Sussex
All Rights Reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Moore, Barrington, 1913–
Moral purity and persecution in history / Barrington Moore, Jr.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-691-04920-3 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Purity (Ethics)—History. 2. Persecution—History. I. Title.
BJ1533.P97 M66 2000
323.44'2'09—dc21 99-048668
This book has been composed in Baskerville
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R1997) (Permanence of Paper)
http://pup.princeton.edu
Printed in the United States of America
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
TO MY STUDENTS
AND MY TEACHERS
ASHORE AND AFLOAT.
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Contents
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Preface ix
CHAPTER1
Moral Purity and Impurity in the Old Testament 3
CHAPTER2
Purity in the Religious Conflicts
of Sixteenth-Century France 27
CHAPTER3
Purity as a Revolutionary Concept
in the French Revolution 59
CHAPTER4
Notes on Purity and Pollution in Asiatic Civilizations 105
Epilogue 129
Notes 135
Index 151
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Preface
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T
HISBOOKexamines when and why human beings kill and tor-
ture other human beings who, on account of their different re-
ligious, political, and economic ideas, appear as a threatening
source of “pollution.” What the polluting ideas were and are is
of course a major aspect of the problem. They change over time.
Yet this book is in no sense a work of intellectual or religious his-
tory. Instead it seeks to find out in what kind of a context this
complex of ideas and action occurs. The complex itself one can
easily recognize as a militant or very violent movement on be-
half of moral purity. There is a good case for calling these move-
ments against pollution attacks on moral impurity. Indeed, in
this book moral impurity receives far more attention than its
opposite. It is also rather more interesting. Still, impurity is im-
possible without purity.
That such movements have scarred the twentieth century and
are well on the way to wounding the twenty-first is so obvious as
scarcely to require comment. They were central to Fascism, Com-
munism, and the imperial patriotism of Japan prior to its defeat
in the Second World War. Since then they have cropped up, so
far, in a relatively nonviolent form in the Christian right and in
the Le Pen movement in France, and in a more violent form in
Islamic movements and various others. These movements were
the stimulus for writing this book. But they are not its topic.
Instead, this book seeks at least limited answers to two sets of
general questions, those of time and place. How far back in time
do we find a search for moral purity with a powerful component
of violence? The Old Testament, the subject of the first chapter,
is an obvious answer. The Old Testament records the invention
of monotheism and the bloody struggles that accompanied its
spread and establishment. Monotheism, in the straightforward
sense of belief in one God and only one God, was apparently in-
vented only once in human history. It necessarily implies a mo-
nopoly of grace and virtue to distinguish its adherents from sur-
ix