These sentences are to be found in the abstract of an article published in this journal by a young and relatively unknown British sociologist. In 1977 some readers of the Archives Européennes de Sociologie were probably surprised by the self-confidence of this author who obviously did not shy away from going into battle against all the relevant theoretical approaches of his time. Whether most of the readers took the author’s intentions seriously, however, may be doubted because the article entitled “States, Ancient and Modern” quite extensively dealt with bygone historical eras which seemed not to be particularly relevant to sociological debates. And as the author’s productivity in the late 1970s and early 1980s—at least as measured in terms of the number of publications—was not very impressive anyway, it is unlikely that many thoughts were wasted about all that.

1984, again in the Archives, another article by the same author was published, “The Autonomous Power of the State: its Origins, Mechanisms and Results.” Although it dealt with seemingly remote topics again—its strong focus on military affairs, in particular, seemed to be quite odd—, most readers should by now have understood that the enormously systematic article must have been written by a highly original scholar who for good reasons was willing to break with many of the central assumptions and premises of sociology. This turned out to be correct indeed, because this paper became the basis of the theoretical chapters of The Sources of Social Power. Volume I. A History of Power from the Beginning to A.D. 1760 published in 1986, a book which made its author, Michael Mann, famous almost over night.

Mann did not make it easy for the increasing number of his admirers. In the very first sentence of this book he announced the publication of two more volumes which should continue his story of power up to the present. These volumes, however, took him a long time to write—understandably given the amount of historical material he had to deal with. Volume II: The Rise of Classes and Nation-States, 1760-1914 was published in 1993 before the project of “The Sources” was temporarily stopped. Mann obviously decided to postpone the last volume in order to prepare it more thoroughly. Within only three (!) years he published three major monographic studies which all dealt with constellations of power and the history of violence in the 20^th century: The Incoherent Empire (2003), a book about the United States’ failed attempts to rule and stabilize the world; Fascists (2004), a sociology of fascist movements and regimes mainly between the 1920s and 1940s which not only analysed the Italian and German cases but also the movements in Romania, Hungary, or Spain; and The Dark Side of Democracy. Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (2005) about the genocidal effects of settler colonies in America and Australia in the 18^th and 19^th centuries as well as about the more recent events in Armenia at the time of the First World War or in Yugoslavia and Rwanda in the 1990s.

Readers might have asked themselves how all this material would fit into the last volume of The Sources when Mann’s analysis of fascism alone required more than 400 pages. But such a question obviously did not bother Mann. And rightly so! The story of The Sources is now finished. 19 years after the publication of Volume II the successor volume is now available—although it is not one volume but in fact two! In agreement with Cambridge University Press Mann decided to split the 1,000-page manuscript and publish a third and fourth volume. In 2012, and within only a few months of each other, both The Sources of Social Power, Volume III: Global Empires and Revolution, 1890-1945 and The Sources of Social Power, Volume IV: Globalizations, 1945-2011 came out. These volumes are to be reviewed here by contextualizing them within Mann’s overall project.

In the new volumes Mann basically uses the same terminological and theoretical instruments which he had already developed in the late 1970s and early 1980s. This is important because all concepts and theories emerge in a particular historical context—and it is this very context which not only explains their peculiar form but also their (historically changing) cogency. The design of Mann’s tools was clearly shaped by the 1970s.

1. Mann was socialized in the tradition of British Weberian Marxism and thus had a keen interest in questions of class and political power. On the one hand Weber and Marx meant that Mann was not at all prepared to accept a Parsonian reading of Weber’s work and thus to overemphasize the role of ideas and values. On the contrary, Mann’s focus has always been on the—as one might call it—material hardware of social order and thus on the real interests that keep such orders alive. But Marx and Weber also meant that Mann refused to accept the economic determinism which was so prevalent in the Marxian debates of the 1970s where social phenomena were often exclusively interpreted as dependent on economic relationships. Thus, Mann tried to follow a line which he described as “organizational materialism.”^{Footnote 1} Mann, for example, was certainly interested in belief systems and ideas—the “I” in his famous iemp-model stands for “Ideology” and thus was explicitly constructed for the purpose of studying ideas. But Mann’s method of analysis did not primarily focus on the peculiarities of ideas, their form, their contested nature, and their change. He was much more interested in ideas as tools for organizing people and for making them act collectively! The dizzy heights of intellectual and cultural history were not his métier as he made clear again even quite recently: “I later grew also to dislike strong versions of the rival, cultural turn.”^{Footnote 2} Mann put some distance between himself and those currents within the humanities and the social sciences which became so fashionable right at the time when he started his huge project. At the same time Mann tried to get rid of any deterministic temptation, and this, of course, was the decisive reason for developing his IEMP-Model at all. It is a “model” to analyse social reality and not, as has always been emphasized by Mann, a theory.^{Footnote 3} That means, Mann used it in order to demonstrate how ideological (I), economic (E), military (M) and political (P) networks of power are related to each other in a particular historical context. His empirical questions often were: which of these four networks dominate in a specific era or in a specific region? Do these different power networks overlap or is their geographical outreach rather different?

This understanding of power shaped his overall narrative. As he made clear, he was not going to tell the story of everyone and everything; his endeavour was also not a systematically comparative one although he certainly included many comparative chapters in the volumes still to come. His main ambition was rather to follow the “leading edges” of power, i.e. to look into spectacular increases and grand accumulations of power. More profane, he was very much interested in the rise and fall of states and empires thereby (deliberately or not) relying on a medieval Christian motive^{Footnote 4} which in the 1980s was still rather persuasive: the Westward drift of power! “It is not a history of any single social or geographical space. As such enterprises generally do, mine starts with the general conditions of Neolithic societies, then centers on the ancient Near East, then gradually moves west and north through Anatolia, Asia Minor, and the Levant to the eastern Mediterranean. Then it moves into Europe, ending in the eighteenth century in Europe’s westernmost state, Great Britain. […] Such a method is in a sense unhistorical, but its jumpiness is also a strength. Power capacities have developed unevenly, in jumps.”^{Footnote 5} Mann obviously had a clear guideline in order to structure world history theoretically.

2. In some sense Mann’s IEMP-model was far ahead of its time because it offered sociology a perspective which became fashionable only much later by the so-called “spatial turn”.^{Footnote 6} The spatial caging of populations and the beginning of state- and empire-building in ancient Mesopotamia or Egypt due to geographical peculiarities as analyzed by Mann (see Volume I of The Sources of Social Power) demonstrated in a most vivid manner the importance of space in the production of social order.^{Footnote 7} One should add that Mann’s influential distinction between “despotic” and “infrastructural” power is also based on this spatial logic because infrastructural power is above all dependent on technological tools designed to control larger areas. And last but not least, this very spatial perspective allowed Mann to get away from the often naïve and anachronistic use of the term “society” which always evokes the picture of a unified and homogenous modern nation-state. He could show that social orders have always been messy and that societies as well-ordered entities have rarely ever existed.^{Footnote 8} Using the IEMP-model Mann made clear what a peculiar structure the modern European nation-state really was and how different pre-modern and today’s supranational structures looked and look like.

3. Volume II: The Rise of Classes and Nation-States, 1760-1914 (1993) mainly dealt with class formation and state-building in the long 19^th century. In a highly innovative way Mann brought together two topics which up until then had been analyzed separately: he could demonstrate how the state itself has shaped class formation, i.e. how the emergence of centralized state structures had a growing impact (via taxes, military conscription, etc.) on individuals and groups. As a result, the state became the most important focus of demands of these actors who had to organize in order to defend their interests. Thus, according to Mann, it was not the economy that produced classes. The economy produced inequality, to be sure. But it needed the state in order to create the preconditions for class action. This, by the way, was another reason why Mann required so many pages to analyze the growth of state-structures in this Volume II, more pages in any case than he reserved for ideological and economic power networks. Mann’s brilliant insights, however, were accompanied by some costs as well.

First, surprisingly with respect to the period dealt with, in Mann’s account of the long 19^th century empires were not given a central place. One could have argued (and this might have been Mann’s own reasoning at that time) that he was basically interested in the “leading edges” of power so that developments beyond the “West” were not particularly important. However, such an argument is problematic especially when—as already planned by Mann in 1993—he was about to continue his story of “The Sources of Social Power” up to the present. Adhering to such a plan would have made it necessary to provide an account of the processes of decolonization and of the rise of new nation-states in geographical regions formerly dominated by empires—something which would turn out to be rather difficult if in the previous volume (in this Volume II) empires were hardly ever theorized. Thus, Mann’s Volume II—and this comes into ones mind when one rereads it today—was obviously written before the renewed blossoming of imperial history and the enormous boom in global history. Looking into these historiographic trends one might argue that Mann, could he have used the findings there, might have constructed an at least slightly different plot. And this not only because the strength of European states was often the result of imperial endeavours^{Footnote 9} and because Great Britain—more than just the ruler of oceans and continents—due to its capital exports simply had an enormous influence on the structures of other nation-states.^{Footnote 10} Also and above all because the entire 19^th century could be more aptly characterized as the “age of empires” and not of nation-states—due to the fact that all the great powers of that time were empires and often described themselves as such!^{Footnote 11}

Second, Mann’s focus on states and classes had the consequence that the dynamics of capitalism remained in the background and were mainly theorized as the starting point for class formation and state-building. Mann did not have the ambition to develop a really new perspective on capitalism because in the 1990s there was obviously not a great need to do so. Nowadays, however, and not the least due to the current financial and economic crises in many parts of the world, that has changed and the insight has grown that it might be worthwhile taking a fresh look. If one reads, for example, James Belich’s brilliant “Replenishing the Earth”^{Footnote 12} then the dynamics of capitalism become evident in a new way. Interestingly, Belich is as much concerned with space as Mann is when he shows how capitalism shaped the white settler areas of North America, Australia, and New Zealand. But his focus is on enormous boom-bust cycles in which big cities and their hinterland played a decisive role rather than the classes and states that were at the centre of Mann’s story.

4. Despite the fact that the theoretical direction of Volume II of Mann’s The Sources of Social Power was somewhat problematic it remains nevertheless true that Mann used his IEMP-model of power at the end of the book in explaining with unrivalled elegance the outbreak of World War I. He described this decisive event of modern history as a messy and unintended clash of different power networks in which many of the actors involved simply got lost due to the “polymorphous factionalism” of politics in almost all states so that a rational handling of the diplomatic crisis became impossible. Even stern critics of Mann’s overall project^{Footnote 13} have emphasized how sensitive towards contingent phenomena he really was in explaining the catastrophe of 1914. The outstanding quality of this last chapter of Volume II of The Sources of Social Power illustrates once again what a marvellously flexible instrument the IEMP-model really is: it enables one to bring into focus the leeway of action of relevant individuals and groups and to theorize contingent events despite the existence of seemingly rigid structures and robust processes. This chapter, by the way, reminds the reader that Mann has emphasized the contingent character of the socio-historical world in all of his writings; the term “interstitial emergence” so often used by him mirrors his insight that social reality is often not much more than a confusing interaction of different power networks which make long-term linear developments anything but “natural”. To reiterate a previously quoted sentence by Mann: “Power capacities have developed unevenly, in jumps.”

In Volume III of The Sources of Social Power Mann obviously reacts to some of the problems of his earlier volumes. Admitting that the focus on nation-states was too strong and the one on empires too weak, the story of Volume III does not begin in 1914, the year in which Volume II ended. Instead, Mann makes a fresh start in the 1890s in order to correct himself. He now claims that between 1890 and 1945 capitalism, nation-states, and empires were the most important power-organizations (Volume III: 1). Mann characterizes this period by highlighting the competition between different global empires until the second half of the 20^th century in which the United States became the only empire left—a super power in the midst of processes that Mann in Volume IV will call “globalizations” (plural!). “I reintroduce empires into my narrative because they were the main vehicle through which the power of the West (later joined by Japan and the Soviet Union) extended globally. To better understand empires, I begin my empirical analysis by backtracking well before 1914 to discuss the development of three empires: British, Japanese, and American. The last one is still with us, the only global empire there has ever been” (Volume III: 2). It is probably less important that some readers might be somewhat confused by the slight terminological contradiction between this last sentence (the US as the only global empire) and the subtitle of Volume III (“Global Empires and Revolution”) which speaks of global empires in the plural. More important is the following: although not stated explicitly, Mann seems to be prepared to continue his story of the Westward drift of power; he obviously “moves” across the Pacific Ocean in a Western direction, heading towards an analysis of Japan and, later, of China. It is not really clear, however, whether Mann, in doing so, consequently follows his former somewhat teleological perspective that focuses on the “leading edges” of power, i.e. whether he really wants to construct his plot from the position of a social scientist of the 21^st century who knows that some of the power-organizations of the past have been rather short-lived and that some developments of the early 20^th century went nowhere or were stopped. If this is indeed Mann's perspective, then one might critically ask why next to the British and the US-American empire the Japanese one gets so much attention whereas the Russian/Soviet one is only dealt with rather briefly. Even if the rise of Japan in the first decades of the 20^th century was certainly of global historical relevance and thus simply cannot be left out of the story, this is also true with respect to the Russian and Soviet Empire. Mann’s analyses of Russia’s imperial past before 1917 and of the imperial ambitions of the young USSR, however, are at the margins of his overall plot—and it has to be asked whether this can really be justified. As we know, after the end of communism Russia’s imperial contours can still be detected whereas Japan can hardly be called an imperial or great power after 1945 even though it became and remains one of the largest economies in the world.

Be that as it may, Mann begins his Volume III with well-written and convincing chapters on the British, the US, and the Japanese empires starting at the end of the 19^th century. This, however, immediately creates another problem: by going back into the 19^th century Mann at least at some point has to deal with the origins of World War I again—something which has already been done at the end of Volume II. And readers—intrigued by the chapters on empires and imperialism—might ask whether Mann will use some of his new insights in order to explain the outbreak and the structure of the Great War. But, as far as I can see, this is not the case. The explanation given in Volume II stands as it is which is somewhat surprising: is there no need in order to at least slightly revise the previous plot? In addition, some readers will certainly be irritated by some of Mann’s attacks on classic theories of imperialism: on the one hand he not only rejects Lenin’s accounts of imperialism, but also—in later chapters—Schumpeter’s famous explanation of imperial wars in general and World War I in particular (Volume III: 107). On the other hand readers will come across sentences such as the following which undoubtedly sound very Schumpeterian: “Had the Habsburg, Romanov, or German governments been dominated by industrialists, financiers, or other civilians, it is unlikely they would have gone to war” (Volume III: 135). Such a claim seems not only implausible^{Footnote 14} because it is based on Schumpeter’s assumption of capitalism’s basic peacefulness that has often and justly been criticized by Mann himself. The sentence is also problematic with respect to Mann’s own explanation of the Great War in Volume II where he demonstrated so convincingly that, due to “polymorphous factionalism” basically all great powers (and quite a few of them were capitalist) were drifting towards a diplomatic crisis that could no longer be controlled and thus led to war.^{Footnote 15} With respect to contradictions like this one readers of Mann’s new volume will realize that his fresh start, his new focus on empires, has been somewhat detrimental to the coherence and stringency of the overall argument.

The stringing together of the remaining chapters of Volume III, however, is quite logical and convincing. In a chapter on proletarian revolutions, Mann looks into the Russian drama as well as into the somewhat failed revolutions in Germany, Austria, and Hungary immediately after the end of the war. He argues that Russia's revolutionary success had a lot to do with the fact that the revolution occurred in the midst of the war. As such, its soldiers were not disarmed and could thus play an increasingly important role on the revolutionary stage (Volume III: 206). Mann focuses more and more on developments in the United States. Already at the beginning of Volume III he used much space in describing the US-American empire in the progressive era. Now, and due to his decision to follow the leading edges of power, he highlights America’s domestic policy and its response to the Great Depression. This event and World War II are Mann’s two main subjects in his narrative in the third volume. In a very detailed manner he analyzes the political and socio-structural constellations leading to and existing during the New Deal before he compares all these US developments with strategies, structures, and developments in the (still) democratic countries of mainly Western and North-Western Europe. As far as I can judge, Mann’s account is persuasive although I also think that many of the passages do not reach the stringency and brilliance of his analyses of class formation in Volume II: this might have something to do with the fact that it is more difficult to model structures in the 20^th than those in the 18^th and 19^th century. But it also has to do with the fact that many of Mann’s accounts with respect to European countries are rather short and can probably be understood in all their dimensions only by experts.

Much more catchy, however, is Mann’s parallel treatment of the non-democratic paths out of World War I and the non-democratic responses to the world-economic crisis of the 1930s. In chapters of almost identical length Mann explores the fascist and soviet alternative between 1918 and 1945 as well as Japan’s moves between 1930 and 1945 and the one made in China as a reaction to Japanese imperialism. In the same way as Volume II of The Sources of Social Power ends with a narrative of the origins of World War I, Volume III culminates in an analysis of World War II which is called “the last interimperialist war”. And although Mann’s label is quite plausible, I was not sure whether Mann’s narrative has strong theoretical implications. The course of the war is largely described by the use of conventional political and military categories. Recent works of historiography—one might think of Mark Mazower’s “Hitler’s Empire” and its detailed analysis of regionally very different structures of collaboration and administration or of Timothy Snyder’s “Bloodlands” and its focus on mass-killings of almost unbelievable dimensions particularly in the border regions between the German and the Soviet empire^{Footnote 16} — are not or not systematically discussed by Mann.

With his theoretical and analytical framework unchanged Mann leads his readers into the present: in Volume IV: Globalizations, 1945-2011 the iemp-model is used again although—as has already been indicated—the term “globalisations” begins to play an increasing role. Mann uses the plural in order to distinguish his own endeavour from the economic reductionism of many theories of globalisation and, at the same time, to escape the sometimes hopelessly idealistic and optimistic interpretations of scholars such as Ulrich Beck or John Meyer (Volume IV: 5ff.). If I see it correctly, this last volume has fewer problems with respect to its overall structure than its predecessor. The United States remain at the centre of Mann’s analysis and he even claims that his own view of the different macro-regions of the world will be guided by a somewhat US-centred perspective (Volume IV: 86). This, however, must not be seen as a narrow or even ethnocentric point of view. On the contrary! Mann’s observation at the very beginning of the volume, namely that many of the catastrophic scenarios written with respect to the current financial crisis do not describe the entire world but only a small part of it, is certainly insightful (Volume IV: 6).^{Footnote 17}

In the first chapters of Volume IV Mann sketches the structures of the global post-World War II order. He emphasizes the importance of decolonization after the 1940s and above all the causal role of the resistance of colonized peoples in bringing down the British Empire; he characterizes the new economic structures designed in Bretton Woods which soon turned out to be rather fragile; and he has many (not very nice) things to say about US foreign policy characterizing this last and only truly global empire (Volume IV: 26) as a kind of “global warlord” (Volume IV: 36): US influence has never been able to guarantee international stability or to prevent wars and that—according to Mann—will continue for quite a long time as long as the structures of the international system remain unchanged.

These last statements justify why Mann again in a very detailed manner—actually in three whole chapters—tries to come to terms with US domestic and foreign policy from the 1940s up to the 1980s. One might ask whether the ones on US domestic affairs with their main focus on class formation and the Civil Rights movement might not have been accentuated somewhat differently^{Footnote 18}, but Mann makes his point when he shows how strongly US economic development was characterized by (hidden) Keynesian practices (Volume IV: 39, 47) and an early weakening of the unions (Volume IV: 50ff.). Surprisingly sharp is Mann’s criticism of Theda Skocpol’s/Ed Amenta’s well-known comparative account of the British and US welfare state that explains the differences between the two countries by referring to institutional peculiarities and especially the fragmentation of the US-American political system. Mann, in contrast, emphasizes the role of World War II because its effects (destruction of infrastructure, deaths, refugees etc.) on Europe—and this is true even for a winner-nation such as Great Britain—were tremendous and can hardly be compared in a meaningful way with the much lighter consequences in North America. It was this very destructive impact of the war and the ensuing need for cooperation between different social classes that allowed unions and the labour movement to influence governmental decisions—something that never happened in the US with all the consequence for the future shape of its welfare state (Volume IV: 56).

The strong emphasis on the different effects of World War II gives Mann the opportunity to look again into US foreign policy. His balance sheet here is rather sobering—at least for those who believe that the existence of a global empire is somehow related to a more peaceful world. One has to stress, however, that Mann’s diagnosis again refuses to gloss over regional differences. Certainly, he has no doubt that the US won the Cold War not because of its more attractive ideals and values; decisive was America’s greater economic and military power over the Soviet Union. However, according to him, US strategy was not the same and was not equally “successful” everywhere. While US policy in Latin America unintentionally mobilized and radicalized the political left, the situation in Asia turned out quite differently. Arguing against the current, Mann claims that—apart from exceptional cases such as Vietnam—the brutal repression of the left worked quite well so that the US government succeeded in preventing communist take-overs. “So there were in effect two levels of success for American counter-revolutionaries. The higher level would be to produce a democratic capitalist regime, which was rarely achieved. The lower level was scorched earth, so to devastate a country that it would constitute a powerful incentive for people across all classes to desert the revolutionaries, and for people in nearby countries not to follow the example. U.S. policy proved successful in the latter strategy, constituting a major blockage to revolution, especially in small countries, which could be devastated more easily” (Volume IV: 253).

Mann’s sensitivity towards regional differences can also be seen in his dealing with neoliberalism, the only ideology he extensively analyzes in this last volume of The Sources. Although he stresses its enormous impact and novelty when he sketches its rise (Volume IV: 133-148), he always makes clear that this ideology has certainly never been a truly global phenomenon because, for example, the so-called tiger-states in Asia have always followed a completely different path (Volume IV: 148). Thus, neoliberal pressure was geographically very uneven which obviously allows some hope for Mann that—in the case of different constellations of power—the seemingly unstoppable advance of neoliberalism in Europe and North America might be halted or even reversed.

With respect to the political situation of the 1970s and 1980s Mann then changes his geographical focus. Leaving the United States and the neo-liberal West behind, he now deals with the failure of the Soviet experiment in Russia and the somewhat more successful post-Mao reform strategy in China. I was not really sure whether Mann was intending to push major theoretical arguments in these two chapters. It is clear, however, that he uses an elite theoretical approach in order to explain the breakdown of the Soviet Union and—by doing so—argued for the importance of time in explaining this very process. Communist China had much more time to divest itself of a planned economy, and since the country was less centralized than the Soviet Union a smoother and—at least as measured by China’s own yardsticks—more successful transition could be guaranteed (Volume IV: 242ff.).

As plausible and convincing as that might be, Mann’s next chapter, “A Theory of Revolution”, will certainly stir some controversies. Its particular and somewhat strange placement—after the chapter dealing with the failed or more successful transitions in Russia and China and before the three concluding chapters on US hegemony in the 21^st century and on the major current global crises (according to Mann: the neoliberal recession and climate change)—is only convincing if one shares Mann’s diagnosis and prognosis that revolution is not on the agenda right now and will only be so under very specific circumstances in the future. In this very general formulation, most readers will have no problem at all with such a statement. It is the kind of reasoning that emerges at the end of his argument that might raise concern. The argument begins as follows: Mann claims that there have been two major revolutionary waves in the 20^th century. The first one took place between 1917 and 1923 when industrial workers played an important if not decisive role. But generally—and not only in this period—workers have been more interested in reforming capitalism so that revolutions rarely succeeded and, if so, only under very contingent circumstances. The second wave began much later and was mainly inspired by Mao’s example. Here peasants, often motivated by a strong anti-colonial nationalism, began to rise, mainly in the two or three decades after 1945. If Mann’s description is correct, i.e. if workers have usually been more interested in reform than in revolution and if in post-colonial times there is no longer any place for clearly focussed anti-imperial feelings, then—so I understand Mann’s conclusion—the heyday of revolutions is definitely over especially when one is willing to take into consideration the advance of democracy. “As democracies have spread gingerly across the world, so has revolution receded. Unless some major crisis erupts across the world—and, as we shall see, that might be brought about by climate change—we might see revolutions gradually diminishing in frequency and scale” (Volume IV: 267). I would suppose that not all readers are ready to accept Mann’s last argument or share in his somewhat (!) optimistic outlook. They might point to the façade-like nature of many democratic regimes and doubt whether they will all create structures that prevent rebellion and revolt. Of course, one might not like to call a revolt against a democratic regime a “revolution” And that is perhaps precisely the reason why Mann made the argument at all. But, in any case, does Mann not overestimate the stability of (democratic) regimes in a way that goes against his own insights? If it is correct that Mann in basically all of his four volumes, but particularly at the beginning of Volume III (p. 4), has emphasized the “interstitial emergence” of (collective) actors and the contingent and oftentimes explosive results of intertwined processes (see “polymorphous globalizations”), then his prognosis with respect to a less revolutionary future is in need of more justification than he provides.

The following chapters and thus Mann’s arguments with respect to the future superpower status of the United States are more convincing to me. Although Mann always highlights the enormous domestic cleavages within US society, although he points to the weakness of America’s manufacturing sector as one of the main causes of the financial and economic crisis of 2008, and although he is not very optimistic that the United States will be able to solve all these problems, he is nevertheless convinced that there are not enough indicators right now to argue for the rapid demise of America as a global empire. As he claims, basically all countries are dependent on investments in the US so that withdrawing from the dollar is not an option for them. This means that the United States will be able to retain enough economic and thus military resources in order to be Number 1 in the world at least up until around 2050. It will do so, however, in a world that will become increasingly multi-polar (Volume IV: 273, 319).

Although the last chapter of Volume IV with its focus on climate change and the “Conclusion” are certainly not devoid of interesting arguments, I will stop here in order to summarize the achievements of Volume III and Volume IV by comparing them with the ones of the first two volumes of The Sources of Social Power as presented in the first half of this review-essay. Thus Mann is measured by Mann himself. As will be seen, this will lead to a somewhat ambivalent judgement. As impressive as the material devoured by Mann is and as astonishing as the fact that he really succeeded in completing his great project is, it is probably not unfair to say that Mann’s conceptual and theoretical approach in writing these last two volumes does not have the same convincing effects as was the case when he analyzed the historical material of the first two volumes. Let me be more specific.

First, although Mann certainly uses his IEMP-model in order to understand processes of the 20^th and 21^st century, it is very much in the background. This means that his sketches often do not produce the enormous evidence that he achieved in the first two volumes where he dealt much more extensively with the infrastructural preconditions and effects of different power networks. His story of the 20^th and early 21^st century is more descriptive, less analytical.

Second, the last two volumes do not reach Mann’s former vividness with respect to the relevance of space. Mann certainly could have theorized the increasing density of spatial relationships by using his IEMP-model, but he decided not to do so. That means that, for example, the topic of the spatial dimensions of political domination and economic processes in the 20^th century is not at the centre of his story. Thus, many of Mann’s descriptions of changes and developments within power networks remain rather conventional.

Third, whereas the second volume of “The Sources” had a clear conceptual focus on states and classes, such a focus is somewhat missing from the new volumes. Mann’s enormously insightful and theoretically highly innovative analysis of the intertwined processes of state-building and class formation has no real counterpart. Of course, empires are theorized in “Volume 3” and revolutions in “Volume 4”. But the relevant chapters are either at the beginning of the book or almost hidden between country-chapters so that readers will not get the feeling of a theoretically relevant culmination of the whole story.

Fourth, by writing his new volumes Mann necessarily had to accept a somewhat awkward position: volume IV leads towards a rather diffuse present, not towards a major event of world history as was the case in Volume II where Mann could demonstrate all his skills in analyzing the origins of World War I. Now, the fact that the present situation is diffuse (and we are all actually grateful not to be living around 1914) is obviously not Mann’s fault. But this very fact has the consequence that the last chapters of Volume IV somehow mirror this diffuse situation.

In sum, one could argue that by finishing his great project Mann has probably encountered a problem that affects (historical) sociology in general: phenomena of the distant past are easier to grasp than more recent ones. And this might have something to do with the fact that in the 20^th and 21^st centuries, in particular, social processes have become so complex that it is difficult to model them. But even if that is true, there remains one insight: with Mann’s last two volumes of The Sources of Social Power a first serious attempt to theorize the last 100 years in sociological terms is now on the table. Mann’s successors will have to demonstrate that they can do better. Not many will.