Michael Mann’s two-volume bonanza, published in a span of a few months, is significant for several reasons. It is, as many reviewers have noted, one of the most ambitious attempts to analyze the expanse of European—and in the later volumes, world—history within a single conceptual framework. In many ways, it might appear the kind of scholarship more in line with the intellectual culture of the nineteenth century, rather than the hyper-specialized ethos of academe today. But in fact it is the last of several extremely ambitions projects that were launched in the 1970s, all of which were geared to generating new frameworks for social and historical analysis. Mann published the first volume of his project in 1986, around the same time as similarly ambitious endeavors were underway by Anthony Giddens, W.G. Runcimann, Ernest Gellner, and others.^{Footnote 1}

The backdrop to all of these projects was the deep, albeit temporary, influence of Marxist theory in academic circles, particularly among students and freshly minted Ph.D.’s who had been radicalized by the movements of the time. It was an index of this radicalization that, even though Marxism did not sweep aside all other theoretical frameworks, it motivated a number of projects that were intended either explicitly as alternatives to historical materialism—as in the case of Giddens—or less so, as with Mann and perhaps Runciman. Those other projects were either completed by the end of the 1980s or were abandoned. Mann’s is the one that has taken longest to reach fruition, and is without doubt the most successful.

Of course, Marxist theory no longer exercises the influence it did when Mann launched his project. But it continues to lurk in the book’s arguments as a kind of interlocutor. It would be fair, then, to step back and take measure of the project as a whole, to see if it has been successful in generating an alternative historical sociology, a framework, or a theory, capable of making sense of historical change. But the constraints of a review essay force more limited goals upon us. I will therefore confine myself to these final two volumes—no mean task in itself, but something less than what Mann’s prodigious efforts deserve. Given the extraordinary range of issues that the volumes tackle, I will focus on the themes that are and have been fundamental to the project as a whole—Mann’s distinctive claims about the sources of power in society and how their interaction might explain the trajectory of historical change.

History slows down for Mann as the modern era unfolds. Whereas the first volume covered more than a millennium, and the second one around one and a half centuries, the final two volumes together examine just the twentieth century. But it is significant that while it has become something of a convention to describe the latter as “shorter” than ten decades—its bookends being the First World War and the collapse of the Soviet Union—Mann implicitly rejects this convention. In his hands, the twentieth century takes on a longer span, now commencing with the onset of the Great Depression of the 1870s and perhaps ending with the Great Recession of 2008. Volume Three focuses on the decades up to end of World War II, while the final volume covers the period from the Cold War to Obama. Not only does the historical clock run slower, Mann’s global compass also expands. Whereas the first volume was basically confined to the European story, Mann now takes on a truly global analysis at the end of his project. There can be no accusation of parochialism or Eurocentrism for the final stage of Mann’s project.

The decision to redefine the twentieth century as stretching back to 1870 is eminently sensible. It is true that the War in 1914 can be seen as the pivot for the ensuing decades. But Mann quite correctly notes that while this makes some sense descriptively, it is analytically misleading. The War was itself a consequence of the myriad structural shifts in the global economy and geopolitics that occurred after 1870, and if the aim is to understand its origins—not simply to describe them—then the analytical canvas must be stretch back another five decades or so. The trigger for much of what followed in the 1870s was the onset of a slowdown in economic growth, which, with some hiccups and partial recoveries, continued into the early years of the 1900s. On one side, this global recession accelerated the drive for empire by the European Powers and, with that, it rekindled geopolitical rivalries. Alongside that, however, was an equally significant development in the economic sphere, which has now come to be known as globalization. As the nineteenth century wound down, the world was far more integrated than it had been a mere five decades prior, both economically and politically. Hence, the odds of local conflicts spilling over into global ones had greatly expanded.

At one level, Mann’s challenge is to analyze how these processes came together to trigger the War, and then to follow the course of events as the twentieth century unfolded. But the analysis itself has to be an expression of the underlying theory of power for which Mann has become well known. As he reminds us in Volume III, he argues for four distinct sources of power as the drivers of historical change: economic, political, military and cultural (Volume III: 5-16). He presents these as being independent of one another, each imposing its own stamp on social outcomes. The payoff from Mann’s framework is supposed to be its greater flexibility, its relative immunity to a one-sided focus on any particular source, and hence its greater openness to the complexity of social dynamics. Mann lists and describes each power source, but does not commit to any kind of systematic interaction between them. And of course, this is what is important about his project. Marxists, for example, also agree that each of these is distinguishable from the others, and that it will imprint its own peculiar stamp on social processes. But in the Marxist framework, the economic domain functions with a dynamic all its own, and it limits the range of operation of the other three. For Mann, his assertion of the potential independence of each from the other is critical to maintaining the distinctiveness of his argument.

At times, this leads to a tendency toward laundry-list explanations. For example, Mann lists six distinct causes as the factors underlying the American preference for informal empire in the twentieth century (Volume III: 91-92). It might be true, of course, that there really were this many independent causes working together to produce the effects he wishes to explain. But one sometimes wishes that he would try to sift between them, teasing out how they interacted, or perhaps be a little more discerning about their actual significance. It is hard to avoid the impression that the openness of the framework sometimes leads to an excessive credulity toward claims made by other scholars about the importance of their chosen causal factor.

But while Mann sometimes leans too far in the direction of causal pluralism, what truly stands out in the two volumes is something quite different. As one reads his analysis of the critical developments—the onset of empire, the outcome of the First World War, the descent into revolution in the decade that followed, the rise of the welfare state, World War II, the Cold War, the onset of neoliberalism and then the crisis of 2008—it slowly emerges that of the four sources of social power, it is three of them that seem to be operative in most cases, and of those three, one in particular has a salience all its own.

Of the four, ideological power largely recedes into the background in Mann’s analysis, even though it is billed as sharing equal status in the theoretical framework. Thus, the American thrust toward empire is explained either by geopolitical rivalries or simply through the pursuit of profit (Volume III: 84, 85, 94); European advantage over the rest of the world is not attributed to superior culture of civilization, but to greater military power and economic progress (ibid.: 23, 48); nationalism, the great ideology of the twentieth century, was more an expression of militarism than its cause (ibid.: 165), and so on. Even where Mann does give a nod to ideology, it is more as an expression of interests than a force that overturns or negates them. So it happens that justifications for empire on the grounds that it was motivated by high ideals are dismissed as “interests wrapped up in ideals” (ibid. 85); in the case of revolutions, where Mann observes that ideology and passions played a crucial role, they act more to express the interests of the actors, and the outcomes themselves are explained by reference to structural and organizational variables (Volume III: 174-180; Volume IV: 252-253). These are all examples where ideology could be a good candidate as putative cause; in other issues Mann examines where it would be of dubious relevance—like the onset of the Great Depression in 1929, or the collapse of 2008, or the failure of the Soviet model—where it is rightly absent altogether. If we take a sweep of the volumes together, it is striking how Mann comes across as a quite committed materialist. He even rejects—again, to his credit—the idea so popular among sociologists, that neoliberalism took root and gained hegemony because of the popularity of free-market ideology. For Mann, it had more to do with the growth and political muscle of the financial sector, which turned economic policy toward its own interests (Volume IV: 146-154).

The demotion of ideological power as a driving force is interesting, and takes Mann some distance away from the culturalism that is so dominant among social theorists today. That distance becomes even greater when we consider how he deploys the other three factors in his framework—economic, political and military. Mann cautions at the outset that military dynamics do not operate as systematically or as consistently as the other two (Volume III: 12). It is both less rule-bound and, more importantly, it “plays a more intermittent temporal role in human societies,” though it does exercise an explosive force in political affairs (ibid.). This means that it can intervene in social affairs, but it does not consistently direct them, which amounts to something of a demotion in his framework. But even more important is Mann’s resort to the concept in his empirical analyses. It turns out that the outcomes in military conflict tend to reflect other, deeper advantages more often than not—they do not compensate for a disadvantage in other domains, but reflect their greater force. Hence, Europe’s military advantage over the colonial world was itself a reflection of its economic advantage (Volume III: 26). Even more importantly, in the two watershed military conflicts of the twentieth century, the World Wars, it was not the greater internal cohesiveness brought on by democracy, or greater nationalism that allowed Britain and its allies to win, but their economic advantage, which ultimately allowed them to produce their way to victory. Mann observes quite pointedly that it was the side with the greater economic resources that won out (Volume III: 156-157; 166). On this account, military power turns out to be parasitic on economic might.

If we turn now to political power, Mann makes an interesting move. It has been routine since the 1980s, mainly owing to the enormous influence of Michel Foucault, to locate power outside what conventional social science had taken to be its locus—the state or class relations. Power is now taken to be everywhere, as a force present in every social relation or, as the jargon goes, in the interstices of the social. For theorists who abide by this orientation, there is no question of politics or political power being located in any one source, or being anchored in any particular resource base. One might have thought that Mann, having committed himself to politics being an independent source of power, might have veered in this direction. But, somewhat surprisingly, Mann locates political power in one particular institution, the state (Volume III: 12).

This immediately brings up the question of whether the state functions as an autonomous force, with its own bases of power and hence of autonomy from what rival theories might offer as a constraint, namely class structure or the economy. Here again, one might have expected Mann to insist on the state’s autonomous power—a position with which he has been identified in the past (Mann 1984). But again, he surprises us. In discussing the nature of the state’s power and its relation to social actors, he expresses his agreement with the Marxist proposition that, within capitalism, states have to operate within the limits imposed by the structural power of the capitalist class. The mechanism by which this power is exercised is by capitalists’ monopoly over investment, which induces state managers to check every policy proposal against the need to maintain the confidence of the investor class (Volume III: 14). Mann immediately qualifies this admission by warning that, even though capitalist interests set the limits on state action, his emphasis will be on the room for maneuver within them, and on their variability (ibid: 14-15). He implies that this focus on variations is a departure from what he takes to be the Marxist view. But the emphasis on variations is a gloss on the Marxist view, not a departure from it. It amounts to the proposition that class interests limit the range of options for the state, while political contestation and institutional contingencies select from within those options. This is more or less what structural Marxists have proposed as the core of their theory of the state.

Hence, even while Mann continues with his boilerplate commitment to four independent sources of power, the actual explanatory work is not apportioned equally among them. Either in the abstract delineation of their functioning, as with the description of political power, or in the place they occupy in his concrete explanations, the framework is heavily weighted toward the materialist end, and within that, toward class and the economy. This shows up in the key phenomena that he analyzes. We have already seen that he locates the motivations for empire mainly in economic pursuits and understands Western hegemony to be a consequence of its military and, more importantly, its economic superiority. When Mann turns to more properly political events, we see the looming importance of class structure and class struggle. Consider for example three of the central phenomena he ventures to examine: the waves of revolutions across the twentieth century, beginning with the Russian Revolution; the rise of the welfare state; and the success of the civil rights movement in the United States. In all of these, Mann’s explanation turns out to rest pretty firmly on class dynamics.

In his analysis of the Russian revolution, and the failure of parallel events in Germany, Mann’s begins by endorsing Lenin’s brilliant aphorism, that “only when the ‘lower classes’ do not want the old way, and when the ‘upper classes’ cannot carry on in the old way—only then can revolution triumph” (Volume III: 167-168.) This commits him to the view, first, that revolutions are structural in origin. They are not brought about by ideological shifts per se, though some kind of ideological articulation is critical to their success. Second, Mann affirms that the structures that matter most are classes and class relations. Subordinate classes make revolutions, but they do so only when ruling classes find that their cohesiveness and their normal sources of dominance are falling apart. There is, in other words, a crisis of the political order, which has to occur in addition to lower-class mobilization.

Mann demonstrates this in a tremendous summary analysis of the Russian revolution, and an equally illuminating discussion of the failed German revolution in 1918-1923. In both cases, what put revolution on the agenda was the intensification of class antagonism, brought on by the War. But a crucial reason as to why the Romanovs were overthrown in Russia, while Germany survived, was that the German ruling class managed to maintain its cohesiveness, while the Russian did not (Volume III: 198). Hence, while mobilization from below is necessary for the overthrow of the social order, it cannot succeed unless there is also a breakdown up above. This is explicitly a class-based, structural theory of revolution. And it is to Mann’s credit that, instead of repeating the tired nostrums about Lenin’s Jacobinism, he enshrines the Russian into the ranks of structural theorists of revolution.

The same emphasis on class structure is found in Mann’s discussion of the other important revolutions in the twentieth century, and in his account of the American civil rights movement. One might have expected his account of the latter to rest more centrally on ideological factors. And indeed, Mann does insist that emotions and moral commitments played an important role here, one that went beyond “framing” the issues (Volume IV: 79). The suggestion is that this movement was fuelled by moral reasoning and values in a way, or with a force, that was not as powerful in the other movements he discusses. But it is not clear why we would want to attach greater valence to ideology or normative commitments in this case than, say, in the Russian Revolution. Mann is quite right that emotions and passions were central to the American case—but would they have been any less important in Russia, or Iran in 1979? It is difficult to see how a case could be made for this, or what the evidence would be. It seems more prudent to agree that moral passion is a critical part of any successful social movement, but to then treat the commitments that it generates as a constant—a background condition that is present in any revolution, but which cannot itself explain the latter’s success, since it is also present in all the cases of failure. Mann seems to agree with this, and returns to the pivotal role of class mobilization and breakdown of the dominant order. Hence, while he gives a nod to moral passions, he returns to his Leninist formulation—the movement succeeded “when the dominated race could no longer wish to carry on in the old way and the dominant race could not do so” (Volume IV: 80).

All this sounds very much like a Marxist account and, indeed, in his summary statement, Mann observes that his theory of revolutions “is recognizably Marxian in emphasizing class struggle” (Volume IV: 253). But he thinks that this only amounts to a minor instance of agreement, since in his theory, “neither the macroeconomic fortunes of capitalism nor the microrelations of production mattered greatly to revolutionary outcomes” (ibid.). So, presumably, a properly Marxist account would have to emphasize one or both of these factors, in addition to the Leninist ones. But what would it mean to stress these factors, over what Mann has already agreed to? After all, if class conflict was a driving force in the revolutionary upheavals, then it had to have been based, at the very least, in the micro-level facts about dominance and exploitation—and indeed, Mann agrees that it was. What else should we be expected to find for the analysis to warrant a Marxist label? Mann suggests that a Marxist account would have had to show revolutions occurring “at particular points in economic cycles or through the expansion of the capitalist world system” (ibid.). But I do not know of any Marxist who has insisted that revolutions can only be explained by reference to these two factors; nor do I know of any recognizably Marxist account that has tried to defend them. Mann seems to be setting up a straw man here to distance himself from it. At the very least, we can agree that what Mann has presented is some variant of a Marxist theory of revolutions, even if it is not as orthodox as he thinks it would have to be.

The emphasis on class structure and struggle also undergirds Mann’s analysis of social democracy. On this subject, there is by now a massive literature insisting on exactly the view that one might have expected Mann to endorse—that the welfare state was the creation of the state acting autonomously, driven by committed bureaucrats or politicians, often against the objections of the capitalist class. But Mann endorses the class-based power resources theory instead, as developed by Walter Korpi and others. Even more, he overlays this account on top of a structural-Marxist theory of the state. In brief, Mann sees the rise of the welfare state as largely the result of class-based movements, both in the United States as well as in Europe. At the heart of these mobilizations was the working class and its organizations, sometimes in alliance with farmers. Mann avers that this was the engine that drove the whole process. He is aware that a considerable literature views state managers and experts as being the protagonists in this drama, but Mann clearly sides against this view. It is not that experts and bureaucrats were irrelevant, but that they operated within a space that was opened up by the class movements. As Mann explains, “the main causal arrow went from popular pressure [...] to the hiring of experts” (Volume III: 259; 260-263). Experts were called upon to draw up plans and strategies that served the ends of the actual protagonists—labor and farmers on one side, and business on the other.

Mann not only locates the source of welfare state expansion in the labor movement; he also qualifies the view that employers played a central role as promoters of welfare, and hence as partners in its expansion. He agrees that businessmen did participate in policy formation, not just in the US but also in Europe. But this was typically a response to the labor movement—it was not as initiators for reform. Employers did not create the coalitions for reform, but joined them or agreed to them once it was clear that they could not push these calls off the agenda. Politicians played some role in persuading them to join the coalition, since this was a way of keeping the movements within acceptable bounds, while also avoiding a cascading decline in business confidence. At the same time, once they took the helm in crafting or supporting the policies, capitalists were able, with the collusion of state managers, to blunt their radical edge, and to make them more acceptable to the business community (Volume III: 310-311). Hence, the driving force behind the rise of social citizenship was class struggle, and the recognition that “the masses were onstage and had to be placated”. The reason it required mass struggle at all was that capitalists wielded the greatest power and states had to acquiesce to the importance of business confidence; but that same power also worked to keep the gains of labor within the bounds of the economic system. Politicians worked assiduously with employers to measure that whatever changes were made were still acceptable to the latter, all in order to maintain business confidence.

If Mann’s tilt toward economic and class analysis structures those parts of his books where one might have expected a greater emphasis on culture or ideology, it is not surprising to find him offering class analysis where it is less controversial. Hence, in his excellent analysis of the spread of American hegemony and the onset of the Cold War, Mann again locates the engine in the search for profit and the consolidation of capitalist property relations across the world—not, as is conventional among American historians, in the defense of democratic values or the desire to spread liberty. Indeed, it is worth noting that among the most admirable of Mann’s traits is his quite open contempt for the West’s imperial ambitions, and his disdain for all the intellectual attempts to provide them with a moral veneer. Some of the best parts of both volumes are his discussions of the actual policies carried out by England and the United States within their colonies and zones of influence, where, as Mann shows, imperial power relied primarily on coercion and violence. And again, in his analysis of the turn to neoliberalism and the descent into crisis in 2008, it is, as I observed earlier, the transformations in the economy and the growing power of banking capital that figure prominently—not changes within the economics profession or the spread of neoliberal ideas or the growing influence of individualism, all of which have become favorites among sociologists.

To anyone who has followed the trends in social theory over the past generation, the arguments that Mann advances in these two volumes cannot fail to elicit a tremor of excitement. A project that was advertised at its inception as an alternative to class analysis has, in its final stages, transmuted into a qualified endorsement of that very approach. It is quite possible that Mann himself may not agree with this assessment. In his own summary statements, he continues to profess fidelity to the four sources of power, and to distance himself from Marxian theory. And it is certainly true that his work issues some striking challenges to some versions of class analysis, both conceptually and empirically. But the differences no longer seem as noticeable as the congruities, particularly in the final two volumes. Even more, when considered against the backdrop of reigning fashions in sociology—with its seemingly irreversible slide into culturalism and institutionalism, its turn away from power and interest as the pivots for political conflict and its relentless provincialism—Mann’s actual argument seems more a cousin of Marxism than an alternative to it.

This raises some interesting questions for sociological theory as it is practiced today. Mann’s project has been widely hailed as perhaps the most ambitious work of historical sociology over the past generation. It began, as I noted at the outset of this review, as one of a cluster of works that sought to engage, and even to run against, Marxian social theory. During its gestation period, sociology has moved very far from its dalliance with class analysis in the 1970s, perhaps one reason why Mann’s professed desire to elevate culture and politics to co-equal status with economic mechanisms has generated such a positive response. But if my interpretation is correct, then historical sociology has come full circle, as it were. Though born of an ambition to critique, and even supplant, class analysis, it has, in this instance, reaffirmed the centrality of class and economic power. It now remains to be seen if the discipline, and the broader intellectual culture, will pay heed.