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Retrospective: MANN, THE UNITED STATES, AND THE WORLD
Michael Mann. The Sources of Social Power, Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1986-2012:
Vol. 1: A History of Power from the Beginning to AD 1760. 1986. 578 pp. $109.99 (cloth); 2nd ed. 2012. $39.99 (paper).
Vol. 2: The Rise of Classes and Nation-States, 1760-1914. 2012. 846 pp. $119.99 (cloth); $39.99 (paper).
Vol. 3: Global Empires and Revolution, 1890-1945. 2012. 516 pp. $109.99 (cloth); $39.99 (paper).
Vol. 4: Globalizations, 1945-2011. 2012. 496 pp. $104.99 (cloth); $34.99 (paper).
Michael Mann, a sociologist of class and nation-states in modern Europe, has written a monumental four-volume account of global history that every historian of the United States should read. The first volume of The Sources of Social Power, which examines world history up to the middle of the eighteenth century, was published in 1986; volume two, which covers the period between 1760 and 1914 and provides the keystone for the four-volume set (and, analytically, is the jewel in the crown), appeared in 1993. Mann then took a hiatus of sorts, at least from his magnum opus, and did not produce the third and fourth volumes until 2012. He kept himself busy between the publication of volumes two and three, however, by writing insightful books about U.S. foreign policy, fascism, and ethnic cleansing.1
Mann has had an eclectic career, in disciplinary terms part historical and part sociological, and his eclecticism is reflected in The Sources of Social Power. He has focused on various aspects of culture, ideology, religion, economics, governance, and political thought in a wide variety of social and national contexts. He has an undergraduate degree in history and a doctorate in sociology, both from Oxford; yet despite this Oxonian pedigree, his own social background was modest. After his doctorate, Mann taught in some of the leading sociology departments in Britain, first at the University of Essex and, then, the London School of Economics. In 1986-the same year the first volume of The Sources of Social Power appeared-he moved to the University of California, Los Angeles, where he has remained ever since. Mann's life experience, then, has been in various social and national settings, but his worldview is fundamentally rooted in the ideas of British social democracy and labor politics,...