Barrington Moore Jr. is a Lecturer in Sociology at Harvard University and Senior Research Fellow for the University's Russian Centre. He was educated at Williams College, where he took a degree in Greek and Latin, and at Yale University where he gained a PhD in sociology. His book Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy received the Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award in political science and the MacIver Award in sociology. He is also the author of Soviet Politics: The Dilemma of Power, Terror and Progress: USSR, Political Power and Social Theory and, with Robert P. Wolff and Herbert Marcuse, A Critique of Pure Tolerance. His most recent book, Reflections on the Causes of Human Misery and upon Certain Proposals to Eliminate Them, was given the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award of Phi Beta Kappa.

• Part 1 The Sense of Injustice; Chapter 1 Recurring elements in moral codes; Chapter 2 The moral authority of suffering and injustice; Chapter 3 The rejection of suffering and oppression; Part 2 An Historical Perspective; Chapter 4 Chapter 5 German workers in the revolution of 1848; Chapter 6 Social and cultural trends before 1914; Chapter 7 Militance and apathy in the Ruhr before 1914; Chapter 8 The reformist revolution 1918–1920; Chapter 9 The radical thrust; Part 3 General Perspectives; Chapter 10 The German and Russian revolutions: some comparisons; Chapter 11 The suppression of historical alternatives: Germany 1918–1920; Chapter 12 Repressive aspects of moral outrage: the Nazi example; Chapter 13 Moral relativism; Chapter 14 Inevitability and the sense of injustice; Chapter 15 Epilogue: reciprocity as fact, ideology, and ideal;