Description
Book SynopsisMichael Mann is one of the most influential sociologists writing today. His three-volume work
The Sources of Social Power, the third volume of which has just been completed, has transformed our way of thinking about power and has rewritten the history of human societies. No one interested in understanding how the modern world was shaped, how we got to where we are today, and where we''re likely to be heading can afford to ignore this modern classic. Michael Mann is, as John Hall aptly describes him, a Max Weber for our times.
In this new book Michael Mann reflects on the meaning of his project as a whole, both as a contribution to social theory and as a guide to the options and constraints that face the contemporary world now and in the near future. He gives sustained attention to the situation of the United States, the nature of the challenge that may come from China, the unrestrained and perhaps unrestrainable power of finance, and the looming crisis of environmental degr
Trade Review
"A very stimulating and thought-provoking book."
Morning Star
"This superb short book deserves the widest readership. A profound understanding of the structures of power in our own age allows Michael Mann, in a brilliant dialogue with John Hall, to offer rich insights into the likely developments of an age that we cannot yet know."
Sir Ian Kershaw, Sheffield University
"Michael Mann has exceeded all of his contemporaries in making sociological sense of Western history, something he has done quite systematically up through the outbreak of the First World War. In these conversations with John A. Hall, he digresses from his nearly completed volume on times since that to cast an insightful gaze on current history, to speculate incisively about the shape of things to come and to draw some major conclusions about history and power."
Alexander Hicks, Emory University
"Wielding his four-dimensional template of power, Mann illuminates the world history of recent times and the foreseeable future. Events become turning points when leading power sources intersect: capitalist crisis with world war in the early 20th century; the stalemate of pluralist politics with ecological crisis in the 21st. Mann displays here in summary strokes the continuing relevance of his grand sociological vision."
Randall Collins, University of Pennsylvania
Table of ContentsIntroduction (
John A. Hall).
Part One: Powers in Motion.
Chapter One: Capitalism.
Chapter Two: Militarism.
Chapter Three: Political Power.
Chapter Four: An End to Ideology?
Chapter Five: Patterns, Cages, Interstices and a Dialectic.
Part Two: The Nature of Social Change.
Chapter Six: States, Strong and Weak.
Chapter Seven: Group Agency.
Chapter Eight: Outcomes.
Chapter Nine: Contingencies of Modernity.
Chapter Ten: Our Looming Crisis.
Conclusion.
