Michael Mann

Michael Mann   is Distinguished Research Professor of Sociology, UCLA. He was born in Manchester, England in 1942, and has dual UK and US citizenship.  Heis married to Nicky Hart and they have three children. He has a BA and D.Phil. from Oxford University, and has been awarded three honorary doctorates (Hon.D.Litts.) from McGill University, Montreal, University College, Dublin, and The University of the Aegean. After graduating from Oxford he worked at Cambridge University, The University of Essex, the London School of Economics, and (from 1987), the University of California at Los Angeles. He was Visiting Research Professor at The Queens University, Belfast, during 2003-2007, and in 2004-2005 he was the Visiting Pitt Professor of American History and Institutions at Cambridge University. In 2008 he was awarded an Honorary Professorship at Cambridge. In 2015 he was elected a Fellow of both the American and British Academies.

His major publication project is the four volume The Sources of Social Power,  all published by Cambridge University Press. Volume I: A History of Power from the Beginning to 1760 (1986)  Volume II:  The Rise of Classes and Nation-States, 1760 -1914 (1993). Volume III Global Empires and Revolution, 1890-1945 (2012), and Volume IV; Globalizations, 1945 -2012 (2013).

In 2003 he published  Incoherent Empire (Verso Books),  a critique of the “new American imperialism” from the perspective of comparative and historical sociology. The German version of this book won the Friedrich Ebert Foundation prize for the best book on politics published in Germany in 2003. He published two more books with Cambridge University Press: Fascists (2004), a  study of fascists in six countries during the inter-war period, and The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (2005). In a book written with four other authors, Does Capitalism Have a Future? (Oxford University Press, 2013), his own personal contribution is the essay “The end may be nigh, but for whom?”

 Two books of essays have been published about his work. The first was John Hall & Ralph Schroeder (eds.), The Anatomy of Power: The Social Theory of Michael Mann. Cambridge University Press, 2006. It contains Mann’s “The Sources of Social Power revisited: a response to criticism”. The second book is Ralph Schroeder (ed.), Global Powers. Michael Mann’s Anatomy of the Twentieth Century and Beyond, Cambridge University Press, 2016. This contains Mann’s essay “Response to Critics”. A further short book Power in the 21st Century: Conversations with John Hall, was published in 2011 by Polity Press. His books have been translated into German, French, Spanish, Italian, Greek, Russian, Turkish, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese. 

Available to view online:

The Autonomous Power of the State (1984)

The Sources of Social Power, Vol.1, Chapter 1 (1986)

Ruling Class Strategies and Citizenship (1987)

The Sources of Social Power, Vol. II, Chapter 3 (1993)

The Sources of Social Power, Vol. II, Chapter 20 (1993)

Is Globalization Threatening the Rise of the Nation-State (1997)

Were the Perpetrators of Genocide "Ordinary Men" or "Real Nazis"? (2000)

The Crisis of Latin American Nation-State (2002)

Incoherent Empire Introduction (2003)

Ethnic Cleansing: Chapter 1 (2004)

An Anatomy of Power Response to Critics (2006)

Reflections on the Sources of Power (2011)

The Sources of Social Power, Vol 3, Chapter 1: Introduction (2012)

The Sources of Social Power, Vol 3, Chapter 15: Conclusion (2012)

The Sources of Social Power, Vol 4, Chapter 1: Globalizations (2013)

The Sources of Social Power, Vol 4, Chapter 12: Global crisis: Climate change (2013)

The Sources of Social Power, Vol 4, Chapter 13: Conclusion (2013)

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