Mann, Michael

Michael Mann is our Max Weber. For one thing, he equals the great German sociologist in range and in command of the historical record. For another, he argues—indeed demonstrates—that social life can only be understood once attention is paid to the interaction of different types of social power. Furthermore, he extends Weber: He adds military power to the political, economic, and ideological types distinguished by his predecessor and goes beyond him in a series of middle range theoretical contributions all his own. Finally, he replaces the rather decisionistic, implicitly authoritarian politics of Weber with modern social democratic principles—in part taken as sociology, in part as prescriptions that he has sought to justify.

Mann was born in 1942 to a lower middle-class family. He attended Manchester Grammar School and then studied history at Oxford—where a lifelong commitment to socialist values was made, interpreted at the time in the form of loyalty to the British Labour Party. He became a sociologist by accident, but his political values can be seen in the fact that his first three books—Workers on the Move (1973), Consciousness and Action among the Western Working Class (1973), and The Working Class and the Labour Market (coauthored with Bob Blackburn in 1979)—concentrated on the class presumed by Marx to be the agent of a new world. Mann's democratic instincts produced a very convincing picture of the realities of working-class life—as an attempt to manage the complexities of an unfair environment, subject to force and fraud but rarely indoctrinated into any dominant ideology, and essentially without an alternative ideology of its own. There is a sense in which this general view undermines hopes for socialism; certainly Mann's empiricism made him a somewhat marginal figure on the British Left.

These early books appeared whilst Mann lectured at Essex University. Thereafter he moved to the London School of Economics and in 1986 to the University of California, Los Angeles, where he has remained. It is in the latter institutions that his major work has appeared. The Sources of Social Power, vol. 1, From the Beginning to 1760 AD (1986) was extremely well received (albeit the fact that it is an account of “the rise of the West” is likely to lead to it being ever more criticized), not least since its theoretical contribution necessarily stood out clearly, given the sheer range of material covered. The Sources of Social Power, vol. 2, The Rise of Classes and Nation-States, 1760–1914 (1993) had less success, perhaps because Mann's relentless empiricism produced an account of great complexity. His initial plan to have a first volume on power in agrarian societies followed by a second dealing with power in industrial societies had clearly fallen before the discovery that economic change did not necessarily create movement in other realms. Mann will give us a new volume on power in the twentieth century, but three books will appear before he completes his principal work (with a fourth volume on social theory still being a possibility). Fascists (2004) and Murderous Ethnic Cleansing (2004) from a pair examining the horrors of the twentieth [Page 469]century by means of very detailed case studies. Both books are made striking by his insistence on understanding the motivation of people whose actions he loathes; he is particularly impressive in demonstrating that fascism had genuine moral appeal. The material in these books will certainly be used in the third volume of his major work, as will that in a series of essays that doubt the extent of globalization of the world—that is, that argue that geopolitical frames and national interests retain considerable power to structure our future. Incoherent Empire (2003) is a political intervention deeply critical of American foreign policy.

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