Michael Mann

Michael Mann is a British-American historical sociologist best known for The Sources of Social Power, a multi-volume history of societies from prehistory to the present built around what he calls the IEMP model, the claim that ideological, economic, military, and political power are four distinct, overlapping sources of social power whose shifting combinations, rather than any single underlying logic, drive historical change. Mann argued against theories that treat society as a single bounded system, proposing instead that societies are constituted by overlapping and often contradictory networks of these four power sources operating at different scales. His work combined vast historical and comparative scope with close attention to specific cases, including an extended analysis of the origins of fascism, and established him as one of the most ambitious macro-historical sociologists of the late twentieth century.