The Winding Passage: Sociological Essays and Journeys Book

Michael Mann's "The Sources of Social Power" is a massive work that attempts to follow the leading edge of social power, on a global scale, throughout recorded history. Although one might technically classify it as a work of sociological scholarship, and it certainly is that, the scope is so grand, and the exposition so much wider than a typical scholarly work, that it might be better to create a new classification for such a masterpiece. Something like "macrohistory", for Mann's ambition is to explain why world history happened the way it did.
Volume 1 introduces Mann's working definitions of social power and society, and follows the leading edge of social power from pre-history to Europe in 1760. Social power is the mastery of humans over other humans, in analogy with the use of power to describe humans' mastery over nature. Social power can be distributive, where one person gets other people to do work that benefits the former at the detriment of the latter, or collective, where cooperative efforts are organized to do work that benefits all involved to a greater degree than the sum of their uncoordinated labour. Social power is created and distributed through a society to achieve functional ends such as food and shelter, to achieve functional means - organizations to accomplish goals - and to build institutions to further societal goals such as armies, states and churches. Society, in Mann's view, is not at all monolithic. It consists of multiple overlapping and interlinked networks of social organization; the networks are the society. Each network is dynamic and may be transient, lasting only as long as a group of common interests and mutually beneficial goals are present.
Mann separates social power into four distinct categories: ideological, economic, military, and political. Ideological power is based on our need to interpret sensory data about the world through a lens of socially organized and accepted meaning. In order to act cooperatively, we need to understand things in the same way. We also need to have a shared sense of social norms and morality if enough trust is to be generated to allow cooperation. Monopolizing any one of these ideological factors is a source of social power, often diffuse, but capable of reaching across vast distances. Economic social power comes from the control of circuits of production, distribution, exchange or consumption of raw materials or manufactured goods. Military social power is always present due to the necessity of organized physical defence. It's reach, however, is limited to where the military can be at any given time. Political social power is the centralized, institutionalized, territorialized regulation of many aspects of social relations. There is always a balance between direct despotic, coercive power and the emergent power of infrastructure.
One of the major themes of volume 1 is the transition from pre-history to history, which is also, not coincidentally, the transition from tribal societies to states and what inevitably follows -- civilization. Pre-history is obviously troublesome but archaeological and anthropological studies of tribal societies show that there is nothing inevitable about the transition from rank societies to states. The state represents a social cage, wherein the people belonging to the state are essentially trapped and cannot leave. That is not to say that the people do not want to be part of the state, indeed, much of human history consists of peoples trying to join states with large economic surpluses and relatively peaceful conditions for living. However, until such a state can be established and provide a model for neighbouring tribes, a rank society with strong central, coercive powers that reaches the stage of a proto-state will always collapse if people have an exit available to them. Mann concludes that state formation requires very specific conditions such as alluvial agriculture in a location that is surrounded by much less productive land with population pressures squeezing people at any potential escape route. These are the conditions that were in place in Mesopotamia and Egypt when states first formed. It is not a very comforting proposition for those who see human progress as an organizing principle in the universe since, but for historical contingency, we might yet be nomads eking out a living in small tribes.
The essential process of state formation, when conditions are ripe, seems to be one in which the hierarchical organization of a lot of small, centrally ordered societies jumps up a level in an inverse-recursive manner to apply a similar hierarchical organization to the whole. One particularly adept leader of a small group somehow becomes a leader of leaders, each of whom are leaders of a group of people. Once the hierarchy has made the jump so that there are at least two layers of leadership (central leader -> local leaders -> people), then the immense benefits of large-scale cooperation inevitably leads to the formation of a civilized state. At this point, the economic surplus is large enough to allow economic social power to become a factor. The surplus also needs to be protected, so a military is essential, leading to military social power becoming a central fact of statehood. The second order power structure also puts political social power at the forefront. Ideological power, though important for the initial phase transition to statehood (if the many groups that come together to form a state are not culturally aligned, they will not come together), does not become particularly important until states begin to butt against each other.
The state that formed in Mesopotamia, centered around the city of Akkad, is the first state that we have historical evidence for. From here, Mann follows the path of maximum social power as these early empires of domination rise and are surpassed and subsumed by a rival empire. Sargon is the first second-order leader in history and he develops a formidable formula for creating an empire. It is essentially a military empire where clients are dominated, rather than territory being claimed. Mann borrows Spencer's term, "compulsory cooperation", to label the strategy used by the Akkadian empire and copied by subsequent empires, all of which were fragile in the same way. As the empire grew, the central power became more diffuse, allowing officials to increase their skim along with their ability to hide it from the central power. Eventually a client would become powerful enough to overthrow the central power and take charge of the empire.
The Phoenicians and Greeks took a different path, forming affiliations of city-states without a central power. Here ideological power starts to come into its own as these civilizations were based on a shared cultural, linguistic, and ethnic identity. The other two empires of domination during this period were the Assyrians in Mesopotamia and the Persians to the East. The Assyrians' power came mostly through compulsory cooperation with a bit of an upper-class "nationalism" that can be seen in their outrageous boasts about the size, strength, and cruelty of their army. They made significant organizational and technological improvements in agriculture and by sharing the surplus more generously with the upper-class, were better able to prevent client rebellion. However, they eventually became too stretched and their enemies (of which they had a lot (cf. boasts about the cruelty of their army)) crushed them. The Persian empire was even more devoted to a universal upper-class culture, shared among the elite of all the client states.

Rome began as an empire of domination based on compulsory cooperation but they soon discovered the authoritative power of ruling-class culture and this became the major, horizontal, collective form of Roman social power. By making conquered peoples citizens of the Roman Republic, they not only created an expanding network of loyal allies, but also a desire among ordinary people to belong to the Republic. The automatic citizenship undermined the structure of the traditional state, however, as the gap in social stratification kept getting wider and the demands of compensating an increasingly large paid army were being increasingly borne by the peasantry. This reduced the value of a Roman identity for the common people while placing far too much power in the hands of the generals. It was sustained through constant expansion of the empire, but with such a puny bureaucracy, elites in the far reaches of the empire could easily hide much of the surplus from the center. Once the generals had enough power, the Republic fell and the imperial state took over. From this point on, Rome was almost entirely dependent on compulsory cooperation through the legionary economy. The traditional form of taxation relying on local governors to assess and collect taxes and send them back to Rome could not keep up with the demands of this enormous empire. Diocletian attempted to centralize taxation, taking by force the maximum that could be squeezed out of every peasant, but he was stymied by not having the bureaucratic means to track people. Constantine created serfdom in a last-ditch effort to enforce central taxation through binding them to the land they worked, but it was too little, too late, and would have required a much larger bureaucracy to make it work.
By this time, only the elite retained any identity as Roman. There was no practical value of citizenship for peasants or merchants, nor was their any ideological value, yet people will always desire some way to know how to be a good person and to be well thought of by their fellows. Christianity filled that gap and was explicitly inclusive of anyone who wanted to partake. Christian ideological power was able to spread by giving the peasants a sense of community that Rome could no longer provide, while at the same time not challenging the empire as it kept its focus specifically on matters of spirituality. The message of Christianity was a very simple one: basic morality and how to measure a good life. Philosophers and theologians added technical detail afterward but this was mostly irrelevant to the rise of Christianity in the late Roman Empire. The message was exclusively spiritual, however, providing no guidance on the problem of social organization. The Church was entirely parasitic on Rome and failed to realize how dependent they were on matters of economic surplus, literacy, education, communication and trading networks and the like. When the empire fell, Christian ideological power had no infrastructure to maintain the state, so it fragmented into thousands of miniature kingdoms.
The dominant social identity in medieval Europe was Christian, and this provided enough normative pacification for some long distance travel to occur, especially for religious pilgrimages; but politically, militarily, and economically, Europe was fractured into tiny pieces. The level of social cooperation that could occur in this environment was similarly restricted, so the economic surplus available to build armies or infrastructure was virtually nil. The lack of central power sources, however, also meant that property could be effectively private in that it was hidden. This meant that what surpluses could be developed, were kept and enjoyed by those who created them. The process of technological innovation through experimentation began to take hold even before the millennium. The same spirit of autonomy with enough privacy to benefit from their own labour also infused economic life. The fractured political landscape provided enough isolation to make short distance trade a stimulant to generating agricultural surplus. With no large-scale attempts to conquer Europe, these customs of private property, private gains from innovation, and market exchange as a means of realizing private gains went on for long enough that they became institutionalized norms of themselves.
In Early Modern Europe, the infrastructure needed to extend this proto-capitalism were developed as economic power started to become the dominant form of European dynamism. With the growth of the size and frequency of economic transactions came the need for an extensive infrastructure to mediate trust between strangers and long-distance or long-lived credit arrangements. The state began codifying laws to govern economic life, which necessitated a more rigid definition of geographic boundaries where these laws would apply. Along with shared culture and the development of vernacular languages, the national-state emerged. Technological innovation was also prominent, although often the innovators were lost to history, so our current penchant for a narrative format that demands individual greatness ignores many of these works of genius (paper, mechanical clocks, eye glasses, gunpowder, artillery, compass and navigational techniques). The printing press, coming at the very end of this period, is but one of the tremendously influential technological innovations that shaped the world.
Mann's last port of call in volume 1 is Europe from 1477 to 1760 in which international capitalism and national-states (emphatically not nation-states) come to the fore. Centralized governments once again regain prominence through the use of artillery in warfare; a capital-intensive activity that needs resources and administrative acumen. Smaller states simply could not afford to challenge larger states and so a consolidation of states occurred throughout Europe. The feudal manor as a center of organization was also finished as the centralized powers imposed their own administration over agrarian production. Paying for permanent war was a problem for centralized despotic power so parliaments, or other institutions where the local nobility could exercise restraint on the king, were developed. Protestant reform movements were not particularly special from a theological perspective (similar reform movements were cyclical); what was new for the Church was a local prince who declared a secular intrusion into Church politics. Although Protestantism did not provide an ecumene like the Catholic Church, it furthered the prominence of the individual thereby increasing the relative importance of economic social power at the expense of the Church's ideological power.
There was not a smooth transition from feudalism to capitalism where economic power came to the fore, but rather a long, drawn out process that was highly contingent upon historical accident and overlapping power networks. This is the primary lesson of volume 1: that the dynamics of social power must be considered in the context of overlapping social networks. Pat theories that try to make our current situation the inevitable outcome of a process of continual progress toward an ideal have no value for understanding the world as it is. Society is complicated and we are nowhere near the pinnacle of human potential.