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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 February 2015
Michael Mann's last two volumes of The sources of social power are acknowledged to be a milestone in historical sociology. They have not quite reached undergraduate history reading lists, at least in the UK. This is perhaps because his approach does not fit neatly into our common categories. He proclaims himself both an incurable empiricist and a purveyor of ‘macro sociology’. He sees history as a pattern of disrupted equilibria, but this puts him much closer to the ‘historian of events’ than he would perhaps like to be. He is concerned with class, but is no dedicated Marxist, saying that his approach steers ‘somewhere between a Marxian and Weberian position’. He focuses on the nation-state, but is devoid of nationalist commitment of any sort, differing from the position of Jeremi Suri, for instance, whose recent work Liberty's surest guardian broadly promotes a more positive view of America's world role. Indeed, Mann sometimes appears to be rather more hostile to what he sees as the counterproductive ‘imperialism’ of his adopted country than, say, Messrs Chavez and Putin. He wants to inflect history with theory, but has little time for post-modernism. Neither Derrida nor Foucault, let alone Deleuze and Guattari or Zizek, figure significantly in his books, an offence almost worthy of burning at the stake in today's academy. Yet his analysis of key elements of twentieth-century historiography is consistently perceptive and his treatment of the history of the USA and the fall of communism, in particular, outclasses that of any historian I have read.
1 The first two volumes of The Sources of social power were given searching, but generally laudatory reviews in Hall, John A. and Shroeder, Ralph, eds., An anatomy of power: the social theory of Michael Mann (Cambridge, 2005)Google Scholar, to which Mann responded with characteristic intellectual vigour. My remarks here take forward some of those themes but add new ones in view of the radical departures of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
2 Suri, Jeremy, Liberty's surest guardian: America's nation building from the founders to Obama (New York, NY, 2011)Google Scholar.
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16 I am grateful to Dr Sujit Sivasundaram for this point.
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