Mann, the United States, and the World

Michael Mann, a sociologist of class and nation-states in modern Europe, has written a monumental four-volume account of global history that every historian of the United States should read. The first volume of The Sources of Social Power, which examines world history up to the middle of the eighteenth century, was published in 1986; volume two, which covers the period between 1760 and 1914 and provides the keystone for the four-volume set (and, analytically, is the jewel in the crown), appeared in 1993. Mann then took a hiatus of sorts, at least from his magnum opus, and did not produce the third and fourth volumes until 2012. He kept himself busy between the publication of volumes two and three, however, by writing insightful books about U.S. foreign policy, fascism, and ethnic cleansing.¹

Mann has had an eclectic career, in disciplinary terms part historical and part sociological, and his eclecticism is reflected in The Sources of Social Power. He has focused on various aspects of culture, ideology, religion, economics, governance, and political thought in a wide variety of social and national contexts. He has an undergraduate degree in history and a doctorate in sociology, both from Oxford; yet despite this Oxonian pedigree, his own social background was modest. After his doctorate, Mann taught in some of the leading sociology departments in Britain, first at the University of Essex and, then, the London School of Economics. In 1986—the same year the first volume of The Sources of Social Power appeared—he moved to the University of California, Los Angeles, where he has remained ever since. Mann’s life experience, then, has been in various social and national settings, but his worldview is fundamentally rooted in the ideas of British social democracy and labor politics, and to a lesser extent, American liberalism.²

The four volumes of this work reflect Mann’s diversity of training and interests. They exhibit a high degree of sociological theory yet are readable to historians with no formal training in sociology. They are global histories that are nonetheless rewarding to historians grounded in a particular national or regional context, such as the United States. Mann is able to achieve this accessibility first and foremost through a breathtakingly wide comparative dimension, which enables him to draw out the relevant and revealing similarities and differences of empires and states.

Mann’s typologies of power are thorough and at times convoluted, but they are for the most part digestible and eminently sensible, and he does the reader a great service by reiterating them in the introduction to each volume. It is best to think of Mann’s schema for various types of power as having two levels. On the first and grandest level, he identifies four main types of power—ideological, economic, military, and political (IEMP)—that have been present throughout history, from the ancient world to the present. The second level consists of three subordinate modalities of power, each of them dichotomous: distributive and collective power, which distinguishes between consensus and coercion; authoritative and diffuse power, which distinguishes between the source of power and whether it emanates from a specific locale or is systemic and undirected; and, finally, extensive and intensive power, which distinguishes between the projection of power outwards from the state and the mobilization of power within. These categories will be familiar to sociologists, but in a work of such historical range and scale, Mann’s exegesis of various forms of power and how they are exercised and deployed is in itself a valuable contribution for historians, who tend not to...