Canadian Journal of Sociology Online November-December 2006
In an endnote buried deep in his own contribution to this volume editor John Hall questions: "[I]s it the case that Mann has been so overwhelmed by historical material that he has in fact ceased to be a sociological theorist, becoming an analytic historian instead?" The best reply, it would seem, comes in the form of this collection of high-powered and sustained reflections on the social theory of Michael Mann. Certainly before Hall and Ralph Schroeder pulled these fifteen chapters from leading sociologists, historians, and political scientists, the question was far from far-fetched. Adding the theory sections of three of the five books mentioned in this collection (The Sources of Social Power Volumes I and II (1983 and 1993) and The Dark Side of Democracy (2005)) Mann had devoted no more than 153 pages of "social theory" to a total of 1,734 pages of detailed historical analyses. Clearly Hall and Schroeder have rendered those who take seriously the study of historical sociology and social theory — in the best tradition of Weber and Marx — an invaluable service.
This review will attempt to serve a single purpose while largely disregarding the editors' separation of chapters into thematic sections; namely, Mann's theory and method, his analysis of power, his explanation for the rise of the West and his examination of modernity. The editors have done well to collate in this way, although in practice several of the contributors address more than one of these issues in their chapter. Instead I will distill the fundamental challenges authors pose to Mann's work around a number of themes. Mann's response, which comes at the end of the volume, will have to wait purchase of the book. Here I offer only a teaser: Do read Mann's response to Daniel Gordon's review of his Dark Side of Democracy in the Canadian Journal of Sociology Online for a sense of his adept skill as a defender.
Several contributors focus on what they see as Mann's limited analysis of ideological power. While Joseph Bryant spends much effort defending Mann's methodology of historically grounded "sociological theorizing", especially against John Goldthorpe's famous critique, he eventually argues that Mann pays insufficient attention to the actual content of ideologies. Taking Christianity as his example, he demonstrates that this world religion did not play the role that Mann thinks during ancient times. In order to fully understand the dynamics of ideologies, Bryant maintains, Mann needs a stronger, more fully worked out sociology of knowledge. Philip Gorski reinforces this very point. He directs us to Mann's inattention — "interpretational blindspot" he calls it — to the real importance of ideological power. Gorski levels three critiques at Mann's use of religion, specifically Catholicism, to help explain the rise of modern capitalism: first, Mann gets the periodization wrong (the take off was not during the Middle Ages but during the early modern period (1500-1750)), he gets the conceptualization wrong (infrastructural power was largely ideological not political) and he gets the explanation wrong (it was Protestantism, namely Calvinism, that impacted state administrations more than Catholicism). He concludes by challenging Mann's analysis of the decline of ideology in the modern world, maintaining instead that there has been a great growth and diffusion of ideological power today.
John Hobson reports that during the conference to discuss the present volume, Mann admitted to him that the 20th century, perhaps more than any other, had been about ideology. He finds this strange because by his account Mann's work contains an essential tension between materialism — "organizational materialism" as labeled by Hall — and constructionism. Hobson thinks Mann solves this tension in practice by being mostly materialist in orientation. Jack Snyder echoes these concerns. Like Bryant, he maintains that Mann's overall analysis has serious limitations because he does not look closely enough at the content of ideology. Finally, while Jack Goldstone's big picture goal is to show that Mann's methodology is more historical than comparative, he argues for the crucial role of ideology, or knowledge, in the rise of the West. Using China as a comparative case, Goldstone demonstrates that economic growth there was comparable to Europe during the same time period. What then explains the "European miracle"? According to Goldstone it was the power of knowledge, in the form of science and secular rationalism that accounts for the growth of the West. He too points to Mann's neglect of the full impact of ideological power.
Several commentators take on Mann's emphasis on the increasing role of political and nation-state power through the long nineteenth century to the detriment of his other three sources of power (ideological, economic, and military). Stephan Epstein, for instance, challenges Mann's claim that the lion's share of the explanation for the rise of the West should go to the increasing spread of political state power. Instead he suggests that corporatism, the joining together of individuals in autonomous independent organizations — for trading, for socializing, for politicking, etc. — played a more significant role in that development. Frank Trentmann is concerned that Mann lacks any sense of "populist optimism" and as a result almost completely neglects the role that civil society plays in the development of political power. He accuses Mann of having an institutional statist conception of politics: a "politics without the people". Linda Weiss, whose chapter is concerned with extending Mann's notion of infrastructural state power to explain cross-national variations in industrial and economic growth, can also be read as supporting this critique. Her idea of "governed interdependencies" is meant to express the negotiated joint relationship between state actors and economic (also civil society) actors. She maintains that state power is "power through" not "power over", thereby challenging Mann's notion of an all- powerful nation-state.
Marxist historian Robert Brenner makes the most relentless critique of Mann's work. He argues that while Mann — like many of the contributors to this volume — celebrates a Weberian multi-causal emergent explanation of social power, in practice this is betrayed by treating Europe as a social and geographic unity. The rise of the West, Brenner says, was not a gradual evolutionary unilinear rise of the centralized territorial nation-state, as Mann and others argue. Rather it is about class conflict, class exploitation and economic development. Like most Marxists, and contrary to most neo-Weberians, Brenner believes that the economy is not autonomous from politics; they are in theory and fact inextricably intertwined. The ruling class interests and the interests of the state are cognate. Brenner's critique is similar to Weiss, Trentmann and Epstein's in that he believes Mann overestimates one source of social power (political) and underestimates others (economic, corporate, civil).
Finally, several challenges are solitary and independent in orientation. Gianfranco Poggi argues that although empirically it might make sense, there appear to be no good theoretical reasons to separate military and political power as Mann does. He maintains that civilian actors and military actors as usually the same people. The state and violence, as Weber's definition so famously pointed out, are entwined. Finally, David Laitin launches a full frontal attack on Mann's Dark Side of Democracy, arguing that it is completely inaccurate to associate democracy with "the most grievous and murderous violations of human rights." Latin's critique is as strong as Gordon's, moving through each of Mann's stated theses about the relationship between democracy and ethnic cleansing.
This collection is as multi-dimensional and finely nuanced as Mann's historical analysis. Like Randall Collins' elegant chapter situating Mann's work within a larger sociological tradition, Hall's richly textured examination of the tension between Mann's biography, resultant social vision and the empirical reality he so aptly describes, and Edgar Kiser's novel description of the micro-foundations of Mann's Weberian methodology, all commentators are well balanced while tackling Mann's sociology head-on. But the last word must go to Mann himself, as it does in this volume. There I guarantee you will find a sociologist as engaged, engaging and humane as his sociology. Commenting on the limitations of mono-causal models Mann points out: "Since I offer a four-sided theory, I win 4-1."
Jeffrey J. Cormier
Department of Sociology
King's College, University of Western Ontario
http://www.cjsonline.ca/reviews/anatomypower.html
November 2006
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