The Sources of Social Power

(I see bookwyrm has no idea what to do about a multi-volume work, but then again, look at worldcat.) Started on v. 2 almost as soon as I finished v. 1. Good calming (not boring) reading for nighttime. 800 pp. lasted me almost a whole semester. Not quite as full of surprises as vol. 1 but still really good. An argument with Marx runs through the whole thing: "head-on" confrontations between well-organized economic classes are fairly rare; "non-dialectical" tangles involving economic entities intertwined with political formations are far more typical. Depressingly, ruling classes have normally won "head-on" struggle, even against very strong popular movements: Mann's chief example of this is the Chartists. Revolutionary successes instead involve regimes being undermined from multiple directions by multiple power actors (this is how Mann narrates the French Revolution). Things get even more depressing as the narrative moves into the late ninetenth century and the European socialist movements, in Mann's telling, miss their chance to incorporate peasants and thus outflank the ruling regimes. Instead, for both ideological and institutional reasons, become overcommitted their industrial workplace core and thus to "productivism," "statism," and masculinism. And they owe both their success and their limits to their increasing caging within the nation-state.

There's a great discussion of the no-socialism-in-the-United-States question. "America was no more exceptional than all countries are," says Mann, but it became "extreme" (658–59): the labor movement in the US was particularly vulnerable to being split and "sectionalized" (into skilled vs. unskilled, into particular industries, into religious/ethnic/racial groups) because the US political system was very favorable to factionalism within each of the big political parties, and thus particularly unfavorable to the success of a labor party.

The volume ends with a virtuosic accounting of the causes of World War One. The Great War was, Mann argues, one gigantic pan-European fuckup ("cock-up–foul-up" in his terms). The stage was set for cataclysm especially by Germany's 19th-century success at crystallizing as a highly militarist "semiauthoritarian" state, but each of the Powers, and each of the four "sources of power" (ideological, military, economic, and political) has a role to play in Mann's synthesis. His points about the relative independence of the military "castes" and the drift towards aggressive tactics thanks to the industrialization of war are particularly striking, as his point that Great Power diplomacy was conducted by relatively autonomous, often quite unaccountable diplomats drawn from the Old Regime. All in all I think I will no longer glibly tell my students WW1 was a crisis of the capitalist world-system: Mann convinces me it was a crisis for capitalism, but it wasn't only or perhaps even primarily a crisis of capitalism so much as a crisis of the political structures of the European nation-states. I think Mann does mean to leave you with the thought: if only the socialists hadn't been caged inside those states...

I think I'll take a bit of a break before soldiering on to volume 3. As we stagger towards the November calamity I think I need some more cheerful reading matter.