The Sources of Social Power: Volume 4, Globalizations, 1945-2011

Sources of Social Power #4

by Michael Mann

Distinguishing four sources of power ideological, economic, military, and political this series traces their interrelations throughout human history. This fourth volume of Michael Mann's analytical history of social power covers the period from 1945 to the present, focusing on the three major pillars of postwar global order: capitalism, the nation-state system, and the sole remaining empire of the world, the United States. In the course of this period, capitalism, nation-states, and empires interacted with one another and were transformed. Mann's key argument is that globalization is not just a single process, because there are globalizations of all four sources of social power, each of which has a different rhythm of development. Topics include the rise and beginnings of decline of the American Empire, the fall or transformation of communism (respectively, the Soviet Union and China), the shift from neo-Keynesianism to neoliberalism, and the three great crises emerging in this period nuclear weapons, the great recession, and climate change.

Genres: History, Sociology, Politics, World History, Nonfiction

496 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.

Michael Mann is a British-born professor of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Visiting Research Professor at Queen's University Belfast. Mann holds dual British and United States citizenships. He received his B.A. in Modern History from the University of Oxford in 1963 and his D.Phil. in Sociology from the same institution in 1971. Mann is currently visiting Professor at the University of Cambridge.

Mann has been a professor of Sociology at UCLA since 1987; he was reader in Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science from 1977 to 1987. Mann was also a member of the Advisory Editors Council of the Social Evolution & History Journal.

In 1984, Mann published The Autonomous Power of the State: its Origins, Mechanisms, and Results in the European Journal of Sociology. This work is the foundation for the study of the despotic and infrastructural power of the modern state.

Mann's most famous works include the monumental The Sources of Social Power and The Dark Side of Democracy, spanning the entire 20th century. He also published Incoherent Empire, where he attacks the United States' 'War on Terror' as a clumsy experiment of neo-imperialism.

Mann is currently working on The Sources of Social Power: Globalizations, the third volume in the series. [wikipedia]

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.

Reviews

[Yotpseudba · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wanted to wait until i had finished all books in the series before making my review, so that i could evaluate the series as a whole rather than by volume. I will let this last volume stand for that. It has taken a little over a year of on-and-off reading in between other books to finish it. Given the series is over 2500 pages all together, it isn't surprising that it has taken so long. The work outstrips Weber's opus by 1000 pages and is a near parity with all three volumes of Capital. Yet as voluminous as the series is, the topic it attempts to cover is more than its match: over 10,000 years of human political development, from hunter-gatherers to the global financial crisis. This ambition is a major source of both the series' strengths and its weaknesses. Yet, as you can see, i gave it top marks, so i think it is tilted in favour of the former.
Broadly, the conceit of the series is to examine the development of social power through it's 4 main variants: Military, Political, Economic, and Ideological (the 'IEMP model'). Each of these sources of social power are purported to be distinct, having their own special characteristics which distinguish them. But this is somewhat an inaccurate picture, as what is really being examined is how these 4 sources of social power affect political development—how economic, military, ideological, and political changes effected state development. The strength of this conceit is that, in combination with the longue durée developmental approach (as Mann notes, to follow the cutting edge of social power), it allows one to disentangle the relative importance of different causal forces on political change at different times. A good example of this is how changes in military power spelled the fall of feudalism and rise of absolute monarchy. But this conceit is only strongly felt in the first volume, as the series strays further and further from the initial premise as it progresses. However, this isn't a bad thing, as the second volume introduces one of the most insightful analyses of industialisation and political modernisation that i've read. Mann forgoes the 'cutting edge' case selection for a more classical comparative approach, which remains for the rest of the series. Mann's main innovation in volume 2 is his theory of political polymorphous crystallisation. This is an interesting synthesis of structural analysis and path-dependence, showing how, given different initial positions, the same broad structural changes produced different state 'crystallisations'. The strength of this analysis lies in the exhaustive attention of class composition, state revenues, civil organisations, religions affiliations, elite solidarity, ethnic composition, and much more, which very convincingly explains outcomes as disparate as the character of working class movements to the success or failure of revolutions and even the causes of world wars. In the course of the series, most of the key topics of historical political science/sociology are discussed, which is itself remarkable.
Yet, given that it addresses so many topics, covers so long a period, there may be a worry that it is as wide as an ocean but as deep as a puddle. A more appropriate analogy would be a half-finished painting: certain areas have a great amount detail, while others are just blocked in, and others still are merely the initial sketches. The overall picture is there, but it is incomplete. Certain topics and time periods occupy hundreds of pages of dense analysis, while others barely stretch 30. One can't really blame Mann for this, as human power is limited, and the literature nearly limitless. And it is undoubtedly better to have a patchwork of brilliance than a consistent but shallow work. This issue of inconsistent attention especially haunts the last two volumes, where major social upheavals get less that adequate coverage: I think Fascism gets 1 chapter, The Soviet Union 2, and China 2 also, despite the fact these represented the 'cutting edge' of social power relations of their day. I was really looking forward to getting an analysis of the rise of Fascism on par with Mann's attention to Bismark's Germany, or of the party-state and socialist planned economy with the British party-system and industrial relations, but nothing of the sort was forthcoming. Yes, Mann has a separate book on Fascism (which i hope to read at some point), but one can't help but feel disappointed in their treatment. The hidden compliment in this complaint, of course, is that the previous analysis was so good that its future absence is sorely missed.
There is also the problem of structure alluded to earlier—namely, that the series doesn't really follow one. There is a progressive decline in adherence to the initial promise as the volumes progress. This is to be expected, given that the last 2 volumes were written 30 years after the first 2. Yet, there are further problems with consistency. Like many macro sociologists, Mann introduces a plethora of definitions and categories to guide and structure his investigation. He, however, is not a strict systematiser, and these categories/definitions often bear no relevance to future discussions. For example, power is defined as the means by which a group seeks to attain their desired ends. This is then partitioned into three dichotomous subtypes: Distributive vs Collective, Extensive vs Intensive, and Authoritative vs Diffused. Yet, while the initial definition and these further divisions are interesting and illuminating categories, they are barely ever used. At least not explicitly. While reading authors like Weber or Marx, i kept author-dictionaries handy due to just how fastidiously they stuck to their definitions; with Mann, i found the notes i made on these definitions gathering dust (quite literally, as i hadn't touched them since i wrote them down a year ago!). Avoiding systematising isn't a bad thing, but it does perplex me why they were kept in when they are mostly irrelevant to the analysis.
Yet, for all that, i still hold the work in incredibly high esteem. When it is at it's best, it is an exemplar of social science scholarship. Having read many mediocre works in the field, it is stuff like this that reminds me why i love political science and sociology so much. I can recommend the first two volumes unreservedly, and if you like them enough the last two as well. It is the best work of political sociology i have read since Economy and Society, and well deserving of it's place beside it.

[Lasse Laitinen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read most of this book, in bits over a long period time. That is slightly reminiscient of this title as well: Mann covers "the globalizations" in systemic chunks, such as the USSR or class conflicts in the US 1945-70. The chunks are big, but the closer one gets to the present, the more one wants a truly comprehensive, global approach.

Anyway, the four stars that I give are well-earned also from a global perspective. There are many books out there, which cover the whole world and focus on important global phenomena, but in the end they're either long lists of global trends or just trumpet the writer's favourite key phenomenon that is supposed to explain and forge global change best. In contrast, Mann applies his power source analysis across the societal reality and times, attempting to provide insight and explanations without being one-eyed or too generalizing.

Mann has his own biases, but far more often do his analyses provide refined perspectives for an open-minded reader. This book isn't mind-blowing, but it occupies a research field where the selection of books should be far more numerous.

[Ken Muldrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the fourth and final volume of Michael Mann’s epic, The Sources of Social Power, he addresses the global order that arose out of World War II and how that distribution of social power has evolved to shape the world of the present. Here at last we get to see how his model of the four interacting sources of social power, ideological, economic, military, and political, fit with our lived history. The model does not disappoint. Mann is at the top of his game in this volume as he clearly demonstrates the irreducible complexity of human social organization that can only be generalized so far before the explanatory power is lost to oversimplification. His model, largely based on institutions that are common to all civilizations, allows a relatively simple mapping to the way we understand the power structures within our present world without losing the ability to describe cultures with vastly different organizational priorities. The major theme of this volume is to understand how globalizations—the extension of distinct power relations across the globe—impacted the sources of social power. Politically, the dominant effect was the reflection of power as nation-states butted up against each other—blowback. Economically, the dominant effect was growth, but described growth rather than explained because the impact of technological innovation remains poorly understood. The use of ideological and military power were both in sharp decline over this period.

In the postwar global order, we find the end of colonialism, leaving behind neither economic development nor cultural artifacts: the colonists came to plunder, not to build. The only colonies that thrived were white settler colonies that depended on disease and genocide to exterminate the native populations. On balance, colonial empires benefitted a very few while imposing misery on many. The American empire relied on gunboat diplomacy rather than colonization, with occasional wars of conquest to install a client regime. Although constantly justified using the rhetoric of freedom and democracy, the American empire was almost entirely focussed on defending capitalism and the sanctity of private property. In addition to the extensive military power of this informal empire, the U.S. also maintained economic and ideological pillars of social power in the service of empire. The economic pillar centered around the Bretton Woods system that set up the U.S. dollar as the world reserve currency to prevent large-scale capital movements in Europe, following the war, so that European governments could impose taxes sufficient to rebuild their infrastructure. The Marshall plan disciplined the European economies to be committed to markets with progressively lower tariffs as rebuilding proceeded. The ideological pillar rested on saving the world from the Soviet threat of world communism. The United Nations was set up to help keep world peace but could never be up to the task as no powerful nation state was willing to cede power to any other entity. The U.S. set itself up as a world sheriff but it was never able to subvert its own interests (and especially the interests of its elite who wished to profit from the work and resources of other nations) to the greater good. Only MAD (mutually assured destruction) prevented any more large-scale wars from breaking out.

Within the U.S., WWII and the cold war fractured the New Deal, but the pent-up consumer demand from wartime, combined with Keynesian counter-cyclical economic policy and the full-on welfare state for returning GIs produced 30 years of prosperity. The U.S. establishment used this period to launch an ideological offensive to convince Americans that prosperity resulted from unregulated markets, that poverty was due to moral weakness, and that organized labour was communist, the greatest evil in existence. This version of American Exceptionalism became accepted as the story of America, despite being obviously wrong at every level.

American blacks were not brought along in the tide of prosperity that followed the war. Even returning black GIs were prevented from taking advantage of welfare programs because the institutions that provided education, mortgages, and employment simply refused to allow them access. However, the decline in cotton production forced many rural blacks to move to the cities where they were able to become educated and organized. Once they began to believe that conditions could be changed and that redress was possible, they became committed to ending the old way of living. It was largely through their own actions, using illegal but morally righteous protest where they set themselves up for severe beatings and even killings (they did not lack for courage), that they were able to bring about change. Northern whites began to see that the system of institutional racism could only be supported through state-sponsored violence and they finally decided that they could no longer live in this way. Using economic and political pressure on the South, the U.S. finally granted civil and political citizenship to all members of society. Racism wasn’t eliminated, but it was substantially reduced. The struggle continues today.

American empire in the East, during the cold war, started out with imperial wars driven by anti-communist hysteria. Local elites were the easiest to deal with but they were always hard-core authoritarians. Nevertheless, the American worship of private property trumped any faint support for democracy so the wars were fought to install lazy, elitist thugs to create a single state and society in the Southern part of a single land. The U.S. deluded itself into thinking that they were engaged in military battles against international communism rather than political struggles against anti-colonial nationalism, and so made error upon error. After spending immense sums and killing hundreds of thousands, the U.S. finally withdrew from aggressive military adventures in the East; an incredible waste of lives and money but no more dominoes fell. Once that happened, the U.S. became an economic hegemon in the region, spurning democracy but assisting capitalism. The numerous economic miracles led to the industrialization of former colonies, slowly improving the lives of workers.

In the American hemisphere, the U.S. relied on low-cost “sons of bitches” and covert operations to control South and Central America. The slightest hint of redistributive policies was enough to bring the gunboats in and, if necessary, install a new “son of a bitch” as a U.S. proxy. The people of the region overwhelmingly wanted to improve the lot of poor people by taking unused land owned by obscenely wealthy elites and allowing peasants to live by subsistence farming. The U.S. universally crushed any such attempts through terrorism, torture, and economic embargoes. Again, American empire was strongly negative for the masses of people in the hemisphere. A similar approach to the Middle East led to spectacular blowback.

In the 1980s, neoliberalism took root, a utopian ideology built on the fantasy that economic markets were not only self-regulating, but that they would lead to an optimal organization of society for prosperity and happiness for all. Despite the absurdity of every single premise, this ideology still maintains an iron grasp over the world’s wealthy elite. Markets, of course, are neither natural nor self-regulating; states are necessary for markets so that rules, norms, contracts, property relations, and regulations can be enforced so that markets will be predictable and efficient. The idea that markets would abolish social power was equally ridiculous; they would merely redistribute power, and not in an equable fashion. The neoliberal ideal pushed the boundaries of private property into the realm of corporate entities, insisting that ownership by shareholders was absolute, and that the only purpose of a corporation was to derive value to its shareholders; workers were told to buy shares if they wanted to join society. There was a mad rush to privatize the public sphere, under the guise of efficiency but really just to further erode the notion of collective goods while enriching the elite. Similarly, the drive to enable financialization of the economy was pursued under a guise of efficiency while the driving force was always, and only, redistribution toward the wealthy. These policies were pursued internationally, as well, using the World Bank and the World Trade Organization to force poor nations into debt peonage for the benefit of wealthy capitalists who wished to raid poor nations for their labour and resources.

Having traced the failures of the American Empire, Mann turns to the Soviet and Maoist alternatives. The Soviet Union had utterly stagnated by the 1980s; citizens were resigned to static lives in which the complete absence of organizational innovation was institutionalized. When Gorbachev experienced the plenty of a Canadian supermarket, he resolved to introduce market reforms to achieve an equable but prosperous society. His commitment to justice led him to introduce political reforms at the same time and though he always made the right choice morally, once other actors began to amass the political power of a rising populace, events overtook his ability to control the transition. Western neoliberals, understanding nothing but supremely confident of their utopian vision, provided some of the worst advice the world has ever seen, and it was followed with disastrous results. China, on the other hand, avoided the stagnation of Soviet-style socialism but foundered on the dynamism of Maoism—the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Following Mao, China embarked on economic reform while maintaining a commitment to political stasis, eventually finding prosperity with state-capitalism. The government retains strict control over macroeconomic direction but leaves the details to the market, allowing individuals to get rich without the necessity of private property.

Although Mann dealt with revolutions in previous volumes, he put off formulating a theory of revolution until this final volume. As with his model for social power, he refuses to oversimplify in the service of a compact theory that predicts revolution from first principles. Revolutions are highly contingent events and both insurgents and state functionaries draw lessons from previous attempts. Nevertheless, he does generalize to find that most revolutions result from class struggle linked to authoritarian regime defeats in wars. Revolutions do not happen in democracies where dissent can be channelled into political change.

Mann returns to the American Empire at the turn of the 21st century now that the U.S. has no serious military or economic rivals. The U.S. imposes economic imperialism on the rest of the world through dollar seignorage: with the U.S. dollar serving as the world reserve currency, the only use that other countries can make of surplus U.S. dollars is to invest in U.S. goods and services. The U.S. then uses the wealth produced by this arrangement to fund its vast military, utterly dominating the globe with the threat of violent force. With American foreign affairs almost exclusively controlled by the President, the American people have almost no influence on what the U.S. does with its global dominance. Instead, influential elites, such as the American Neocons, are able to mobilize American military force for projects that are utter folly, such as burning down the Middle East with the expectation of it being reborn in the American Image. Hundreds of thousands dead and millions displaced, the people and policies completely discredited with failure, but still no easy way for America to withdraw without losing face. The U.S. does not now bring order and stability to the world, in fact it brings political disorder and economic disarray.

Mann closed with a discussion of a recent global crisis, the Great Neoliberal Recession, and a rising global crisis, climate change. The former is a result of the failed Neoliberal project but the redistribution to the wealthy that has been facilitated by that project means that weakened governments (also due to Neoliberalism) have become captured by the wealthy so that reform is difficult and slow. The same process of regulatory capture has prevented the world from responding to the coming crisis of climate change despite decades of early warning by scientists (who have little to no social power in Mann’s model, and also, apparently, in reality). The 20th century’s great success stories, citizen rights, capitalism, and the nation-state, are now the major obstacles to avoiding catastrophe. Citizens of rich countries must forego some of the luxuries that they have struggled to obtain, the autonomous power of capitalism must be curtailed, and the autonomous power of nation-states must also be surrendered to the global good in order to successfully keep climate change from destroying civilization. There is currently no great social movement that can bridge this gap, and thus no solution on the horizon unless a technological innovation miraculously appears.

This brings Mann’s overview of social power to a close and yet, in the present moment, right here and now, one can’t help but wonder if there are matters arising that call for an extension to his model. The U.S. is leading the charge, but all through the West we see the rise of populist movements that are manifestly not driven by ideology. In fact, this new tribalism almost seems like an anti-ideology: a hermetically sealed information environment that prevents ideas from being spread by monopolizing attention with rapidly changing missives of disinformation designed to stoke and maintain outrage. Whereas ideology implants the large-scale worldview that serves as a lens to filter and shape all incoming information, this new approach is able to bypass the need for seeding and developing a controlling narrative of how the world works by providing control at the source of information. Seemingly a knife-edge approach due to the enormity of the task of fully dominating the sensory landscape at population scales; yet monopolistic social media empires seem to be able to manage it. The true worth of sociological theory is how useful it is for understanding the present, and here Mann seems to be not quite up to speed (why no, I don’t think it is me who is not up to speed, thank you for asking). I do hope he adapts his model to account for the immense social power enabled by the technology of social media, there are few people alive who are better suited to making sense of the present insanity (as I write, a pillow salesman is hunkered down in the White House with the president of the United States planning an armed insurrection).

[Qing Liu · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good work. But never expected five years ago that one day I would read such kind of grand narrative

[Meero-slaw · Rating 5 out of 5]

A tour de force of the analysis of developments in the world post-WWII until today. Historical sociology at its best, among other things explaining the roots, symptoms and likely consequences of the current crisis of democratic capitalism. One of the most important book I have read on what is going on in, broadly speaking, human matters.