Mann's main work is
The Sources of Social Power (four volumes). The first two volumes of
The Sources of Social Power were published in 1986 and 1993. The last two volumes were published in 2012 and 2013 respectively. He also published several works on the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. These include
Incoherent Empire (2003), in which he attacks the United States' "
war on terror" as a clumsy experiment in
neo-imperialism. Two of his works,
Fascists (2004) and
The Dark Side of Democracy (2005), focus on fascism and ethnic cleansing. His last work,
On Wars, covers the experience of war around the world throughout history. Mann's work has been the subject of several critical assessments, including
John Hall and Ralph Schroder's
The Anatomy of Power: Social Theory of Michael Mann (2006) and Ralph Schroder's ''Global Powers: Michael Mann's Anatomy of 20th Century and Beyond'' (2016).
Social theory One of Mann's main ideas is his IEMP model, where IEMP stands for distinct ideological, economic, military, and political sources of power. The four components of the IEMP model are defined as follows: •
Ideological power is seen as deriving from “the human need to find ultimate meaning in life, to share norms and values, and to participate in aesthetic and ritual practices with others.” •
Economic power is grounded in “the human need to extract, transform, distribute, and consume the products of nature.” •
Military power pertains to “the social organization of concentrated and lethal violence.” •
Political power is “the centralized and territorial regulation of social life.” In this model: • Counter to Marx, none of these sources of power is seen as determinative in the last instance. and • Counter to Weber, Mann treats military power as distinct from political power. For Mann, “modern states formally monopolize the means of military violence” but that does “not end the autonomy of military power organization.” In his theory of the state, Mann defines the state with four attributes: • "The state is a differentiated set of institutions and personnel • embodying 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 making, backed up by some organized physical force." Mann also suggests that Weber confuses two conceptions of state strength, those related to: • “the distributive despotic power of state elites over civil society” and • the collective infrastructural power, that is “the institutional capacity of a state, despotic or not, to penetrate its territories and logistically implement decisions.”
Wars Mann's (2023)
On Wars is a work that focuses on military power and its main mechanism, war. It covers wars in Rome, imperial China, the Mongols, Japan, medieval and modern Europe, pre-Columbian and Latin America, the world wars, and recent American and Middle Eastern wars. ==Reception of Mann’s ideas==