Moore Jr., Barrington Jr., The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World , London, Allen Lane, 1967 Chapter 6 ‘Democracy in Asia: India and the price of peaceful change’ argues that Gandhi was ‘the spokesman of the Indian peasant and village artisan’ (p. 178) and comments critically on Gandhi’s desire to return to ‘an idealized past’ of the village community purged of untouchability, and failure to challenge interests of landed aristocracy.