Michael Mann FBA (born 1942) is a British-born emeritus professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)^[1] and at the University of Cambridge.^[2] Mann holds dual British and United States citizenships.

Mann was born in Manchester, UK, and, after attended a local primary school, went to Manchester Grammar School.^[3]

Mann received a B.A. in modern history in 1963 and a D.Phil. in sociology in 1971 from the University of Oxford.^[4]

Mann was lecturer in Sociology at the University of Essex from 1971 to 1977. He then became reader in Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science, from 1977 to 1987. Mann has been a professor of Sociology at UCLA since 1987.^[5]

Awards and honors

Mann has been the recipient of many awards.^[6]

• 1988 Distinguished Scholarly Publication Award of the American Sociological Association, for The Sources of Social Power. Volume I (1986)
• 1994 Gold Medal of the University of Helsinki
• 2004 Friedrich Ebert Stiftung Prize for the best book on politics published in Germany in 2003 for Incoherent Empire (2003)
• 2006 American Sociological Association's Barrington Moore Award for The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (2005)
• 2015 Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• 2015 Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy
• 2016 Honorary Degree of Doctor of Literature from University College Dublin.^[7]

Academic research

Mann's main work is The Sources of Social Power (four volumes).^[8] The first two volumes of The Sources of Social Power were published in 1986 and 1993. The last two volumes were published in 2012 and 2013 respectively.

He also published several works on the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. These include Incoherent Empire (2003), in which he attacks the United States' 'War on Terror' as a clumsy experiment in neo-imperialism. ^[9] Two of his works, Fascists (2004) and The Dark Side of Democracy (2005), focus on fascism and ethnic cleansing.^[10]

His last work, On Wars, covers the experience of war around the world throughout history.^[11]

Mann's work has been the subject of several critical assessments, including John Hall and Ralph Schroder's The Anatomy of Power: Social Theory of Michael Mann (2006) and Ralph Schroder's Global Powers: Michael Mann's Anatomy of 20th Century and Beyond (2016).^[12]

Social theory

One of Mann’s main ideas is his IEMP model, where IEMP stands for distinct ideological, economic, military, and political sources of power.^[13] The four components of the IEMP model are defined as follows:

• Ideological power is seen as deriving from “the human need to find ultimate meaning in life, to share norms and values, and to participate in aesthetic and ritual practices with others.”
• Economic power is grounded in “the human need to extract, transform, distribute, and consume the products of nature.”
• Military power pertains to “the social organization of concentrated and lethal violence.”
• Political power is “the centralized and territorial regulation of social life.”^[14]

In this model:

• Counter to Marx, none of these sources of power is seen as determinative in the last instance.^[15] and
• Counter to Weber, Mann treats military power as distinct from political power. For Mann, “modern states formally monopolize the means of military violence” but that does “not end the autonomy of military power organization.” ^[16]

In his theory of the state, Mann defines the state with four attributes:

1. "The state is a differentiated set of institutions and personnel
2. embodying centrality, in the sense that political relations radiate to and from a center, to cover a
3. territorially demarcated area over which it exercises
4. some degree of authoritative, binding rule making, backed up by some organized physical force."^[17]

Mann also suggests that Weber confuses two conceptions of state strength, those related to:

• “the distributive despotic power of state elites over civil society” and
• the collective infrastructural power, that is “the institutional capacity of a state, despotic or not, to penetrate its territories and logistically implement decisions.”^[18]

Wars

Mann’s (2023) On Wars is a work that focuses on military power and its main mechanism, war. It covers wars in Rome, imperial China, the Mongols, Japan, medieval and modern Europe, pre-Columbian and Latin America, the world wars, and recent American and Middle Eastern wars.^[19]

Reception of Mann’s ideas

Mann has been called “one of the premier macro-historical sociologists”^[20] and “the Max Weber of our time.”^[21]

Gianfranco Poggi questioned Mann’s conceptual decision to treat military power as a distinct source of power and defended the classic distinction between economic, political and ideological power.^[22]

David D. Laitin challenged two thesis in Mann’s The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing: (1) that democracy and murderous ethnic cleansing are systematically associated, and (2) that genocide as a modern form of state murder is worse than other forms of mass murder.^[23]

A special issue of Studies in Comparative International Development focuses on Mann’s concept of state infrastructural power.^[24]

Mann has responded at length to various critiques.^[25]

Selected publications

• Consciousness and Action Among the Western Working Class, London, Macmillan, 1981. ISBN 0-391-02268-7
• Workers on the Move: The Sociology of Relocation, Cambridge University Press, 1973.
• The Working Class in the Labour Market, with R. M. Blackburn. London: Macmillan, 1979.
• "The Autonomous Power of the State." European Sociology Archives 1984.[1]
• The Sources of Social Power: Volume 1, A History of Power from the Beginning to AD 1760, Cambridge University Press, 1986. ISBN 0-521-30851-8
• States, War and Capitalism: Studies in Political Sociology, Basil Blackwell, 1988.
• Europe and the Rise of Capitalism, edited with Jean Baechler and John Hall, Basil Blackwell, 1988.
• The Rise and Decline of the Nation State, editor. Basil Blackwell, 1990.
• The Sources of Social Power: Volume 2, The Rise of Classes and Nation States 1760-1914], Cambridge University Press, 1993. ISBN 0-521-44015-7
• Power in the 21st Century: Conversations with John A. Hall. Polity, 2011.
• Incoherent Empire, Verso, 2003. ISBN 1-85984-582-7
• Fascists. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. ISBN 0-521-53855-6.
• The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing]. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. ISBN 978-0-521-53854-1.
• The Sources of Social Power: Volume 3, Global Empires and Revolution, 1890-1945, Cambridge University Press, 2012. ISBN 978-1107655478.
• The Sources of Social Power: Volume 4, Globalizations, 1945-2011, Cambridge University Press, 2013. ISBN 978-1-107-61041-5.
• On Wars. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023.

Resources on Mann and his research

• Anderson, Perry, “Michael Mann's Sociology of Power,” Ch. 4 in Perry Anderson, A Zone of Engagement. London: Verso, 1992.
• Blaut, J. M., “Michael Mann: The March of History,” Ch. 6 in J. M. Blaut, Eight Eurocentric Historians. New York: Guilford Press, 2000.
• Hall, John A., and Ralph Schroeder (eds.), The Anatomy of Power: The Social Theory of Michael Mann. Cambridge University Press, 2005.
• Jacoby, Tim, "Method, Narrative and Historiography in Michael Mann’s Sociology of State Development." The Sociological Review 52(3)(2004): 404-21.
• Schroeder, Ralph (ed.), Global Powers: Mann’s Anatomy of the Twentieth Century and Beyond. Cambridge University Press, 2016.