Reviews for The sources of social power

The average rating for The sources of social power based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-02-22 00:00:00 Edward Matthews Volume II of Michael Mann’s “The Sources of Social Power” takes up in Europe at the end of the early-modern period where Volume I left off. Volume II is decidedly Euro-centric and unapologetically so, as Mann is following the leading edge of social power and the rise of classes and nation-states in Europe was to set the stage for the rest of the world in the 20th century. It is a complicated story of interconnected, overlapping, and mutually reinforcing networks of social power that is difficult for the reader to understand, not least because the actors themselves (classes, states, organizations) were not able to understand the consequences of their actions as they happened. The principle fallout of this inability to understand the unity of state consequences in this milieu of factionalized social power networks was the headlong and inescapable flight into the maelstrom of World War I. The metaphor that Mann relies on throughout the book to capture the dynamics of the interconnected and overlapping networks of social power is one of crystal growth from a polymorphous mixture. Polymorphism is usually used to describe two or more crystalline forms from a pure substance whereas Mann is talking about mixtures where the growth of one component, if not at the expense of another component, will at least serve to constrain the growth potential of other components. The analogy may be more of a hindrance to those who take it too literally. I’m not sure there is a suitable analogy from everyday life where such varied and complex non-linear relations vie for dominance; in physical chemistry, any halfway isomorphic system would be so messy as to provide no help whatsoever. The reader needs to come to grips with a mental picture of this process, however, since Mann relies on it so heavily throughout the book. The major innovations in social power in this period are economic and ideological, with the development of ideologies being caused by the revolution in society’s collective economic power that was created by industrial capitalism. Capitalism is a system in which every factor of commodity production, including labour, is given an (arbitrary) exchange value and is exchangeable against every other factor. The means of production, “every factor” in the preceding sentence, belong exclusively to a private class of capitalists. Although labour is free to be valued and exchanged, the surplus of collective labour is owned by the capitalists. That is to say that although capitalism brings people together to work cooperatively so that the sum of their labour is much greater than if they were all working independently, they are only able to negotiate an exchange value that is in proportion to what they would have produced as independent, solitary workers. This is the nut of the problem as the number of people who sell their labour vastly outnumbers the sum of capitalists while the wealth accrued by the capitalists vastly exceeds that of the workers. The struggle to find an equitable mechanism to share the wealth generated by capitalism without impairing the ability of capitalism to create this wealth has been the driving force behind changes in social power relations in the modern period. However, one must situate this economic and ideological struggle within the context of overlapping networks of political and military social power. Mann is relentless in his determination to always consider the feedback and reinforcement that comes from these interconnections; as well, he takes many authors to task for focussing solely on economic or class struggle without considering the social context. Mann’s view is complicated, but he is utterly convincing in stressing the irreducible complexity of these developments. Mann proposes a theory of the modern state in which the state is a differentiated set of institutions and personnel. The state embodies centrality in the sense that political relations radiate to and from a center to cover a territorially demarcated area over which it exercises some degree of authoritative, binding rule, backed up by an organized physical force. The business of the modern state is to provide security, adjudicate disputes, redistribute resources among regions, age groups, and other interest groups, sacralise some institutions and secularize others, and much else besides. Although the state is territorially centralized, it must sometimes draw on the non-central resources of ideological, economic, and military power. At the center, political power is simultaneously invested in elite persons and institutions. It is composed of “party” relations between persons and institutions both in the center and across state territories. These institutions undertake different functions for different interest groups and may not fit into any final unity or consistency with the state. The modern state penetrates its territories with both law and administration, and conversely, citizens and parties also penetrate the modern state. A nation-state is one where the citizen’s internal sense of community is represented and the citizen’s external interests are somehow distinct from those of citizens of other states. State power is a combination of despotic, distributive power that comes from a monopoly of violence within its territories and the infrastructural power that comes from institutions that penetrate the territory and implement decisions in a logistically efficient manner. The relative balance of all of these power relations within a state are the primary “crystallizations” that Mann uses to characterize particular states. The rest of the book is an analysis of how specific states, chosen to represent major developments in power relations, came to their particular solutions and how those solutions impacted the larger geopolitical progression of interacting nation-states. The industrial revolution, of course, drives all of these developments of states, both within, and in relation to other states. Mann looks at Britain as the pioneer and asks how the greatest surge in collective power in world history could develop without any substantial change in the distributive power relations. In other words, why no revolution in Britain? It is not until much later in the book, once he has discussed the revolutions that did occur, and the emergence of classes within nations, and the issue of central control versus confederal power distribution, that Mann returns to answer that question. It is partly due to what the English ruling class learned from other nations that confronted civil unrest due to industrialization and partly due to the particular development of industrialization in Britain, that was not mirrored in other nations since they could copy the advances made by Britain without going through the painful birthing phase of industrial capitalism. The American revolution was indeed a violent transformation of dominant power relations, and so a genuine revolution, but white men of substantial property were in charge before and after the revolution. Violence was only used to settle the struggle with British rule, the establishment of new class relations and a new constitution were built through compromise and institutional development. The violence, however, did lead to the most expanded democratic franchise in the world and a substantially confederal organization of power in reaction to the centralized power that was overthrown. The French revolution was the only purely bourgeois revolution in history, due to the litany of errors committed by the aristocracy and other nations’ abilities to learn from those mistakes. The enlightenment had vastly increased the ideological potential of a learned bourgeois elite due to the dramatic rise in discursive literacy and the distribution of print media. When the fiscal crisis came and the absolutist regime was unable to solve the problems through practical politics, the power of ideology to galvanize the nation grew exponentially. This power was unleashed with the development of a “national” political process for organizing the Estates General, pushing the ideological elite to the fore. The monarch and the aristocracy remained committed to absolutism and played into the waiting hands of those who used moral persuasion to evoke grand declarations of principle. That was the end of the old regime but the revolutionaries made a surplus of errors of their own, and the resulting national struggle, first for those grand declarations of principle, and later for the very survival of the nation, paved the way for an authoritarian takeover. The period of 1770-1830 proved to be the main creative phase of modern Western history giving rise to socioeconomic classes and the formation of nation-states surrounding issues of militarism, capitalism, democratic representation, and central vs. confederal state power structures. Capitalism and military state organization took over much of the expansion of literacy from religion through the development of contracts, government records, army drill manuals, and business discussions. Capitalism on its own, though, required little extensive organization beyond law courts and markets, so politically, it was better off as a transnational ideology without any of the moral fervour of nationalism. Militarism, on the other hand, was being driven toward ever increasing power as weak states throughout Europe were being defeated and absorbed by stronger states. The result was a diplomatically negotiated Concert of Powers, along with a diffuse trans-national capitalism and British near-hegemony that kept Europe free from major wars during the 19th century. Toward the end of this period, geopolitical norms began to falter as Prussian growth destabilized diplomacy and the expropriating power of the capitalist class began to wane. These factors caused the Powers to increase military expenditures and enter into defensive alliances. States felt the urgent need to mobilize all power resources to support this militarism; modernization was universally held to be necessary for the survival of the state. State modernization encompassed four main processes of growth: state size, the scope of its functions, administrative bureaucratization, and political representation. States grew so that they could coordinate greater social complexity and differentiation, with people recognizing the importance of public goods and the essential need for a central source of power to implement them. The relatively peaceful 19th century had given states a reprieve from ruinous expenditures on war thereby freeing resources to increase the scope of state functions. States began a massive increase in communications infrastructure beginning in about 1870—roads, canals, railways, postal services, telegraphy, and education were all extended as state enterprises. With state intervention in civil society, people could no longer ignore the state; they were politicized whether they liked it or not. In parallel, the increasing bureaucratization of state administration allowed the state to further penetrate civil society, affecting not just the developing social citizenship, but all aspects of civil life. With the modern state finally taking the stage, Mann delves into class struggle and its necessary embedding in the political, military, and ideological power networks that had developed as a result of state modernization—all is not economics, to Mann’s way of thinking. This is not to say that economic power was a minor player; indeed, industrial capitalism improved the quality and length of life so greatly (even if very unequally), that all power actors agreed that it was a critical component of the modern state. Despite the benefits, though, the inequality led all classes to believe that they were being oppressed by the dominant class, and they collectively sought alternative power organizations to address this. The dominant class was generally able to outflank the other classes by using political, military, and ideological power sources to prevent any head-on confrontations between classes on solely economic grounds. Thus the state’s political institutions were subverted toward internal social control while the external balance of power between states was starting to falter, a situation that would contribute to the runaway events of 1914. Mann brings Volume II to a close by showing how the disaster of World War I was mainly caused by the unintended consequences of the interactions of the overlapping power networks of classes, statesmen, militaries, and nationalist parties. The modern state was a singular entity that carried bundled consequences when it acted, as if there was a coordinated intelligence driving those actions. Instead, there was an interconnected, overlapping, and mutually reinforcing network of social power sources that were too complicated for any of the actors to understand fully. Other states were forced to respond even though they, too, were not unified in being able to predict the consequences of their response. The result was a total war that could not benefit any nation though some lost more than others.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-11-13 00:00:00 Gaile Price My interest in poverty studies and bottom-up change is directly related to my reading this book. A great collection of anthropological essays on poverty.