Michael Mann FBA (born 1942) is a British emeritus professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and at the University of Cambridge. Mann holds dual British and United States citizenships.

Life and career

Mann was born in Manchester, UK. He attended a local primary school, and then Manchester Grammar School. Mann received a B.A. in modern history in 1963 and a D.Phil. in sociology in 1971 from the University of Oxford. Mann was lecturer in Sociology at the University of Essex from 1971 to 1977. He then became reader in Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science, from 1977 to 1987. Mann has been a professor of Sociology at UCLA since 1987. He has been PhD supervisor of Professor Azadeh Kian

Awards and honours

Mann has been the recipient of many awards.

Academic research

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: In this model: In his theory of the state, Mann defines the state with four attributes: Mann also suggests that Weber confuses two conceptions of state strength, those related to:

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

Mann has been called “one of the premier macro-historical sociologists” and “the Max Weber of our time.” Gianfranco Poggi questioned Mann’s conceptual decision to treat military power as a distinct source of power and defended the classic distinction between economic, political and ideological power. David D. Laitin challenged two thesis in Mann’s The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing: (1) that democracy and murderous ethnic cleansing are systematically associated, and (2) that genocide as a modern form of state murder is worse than other forms of mass murder. A special issue of Studies in Comparative International Development focuses on Mann’s concept of state infrastructural power. Mann has responded at length to various critiques.

Selected publications

Resources on Mann and his research