empires at war

The near-simultaneous appearance of Volumes III and IV of Michael Mann’s The Sources of Social Power concludes a truly grand project of historical sociology. Along with the work of Anthony Giddens, W. G. Runciman, Ernest Gellner and Eric Hobsbawm, Mann’s project was one of the distinctive products of the intellectual conjuncture of 1970s Britain. A colleague of Gellner’s at the lse, Mann was, like Giddens and Runciman, in search of a constructive exit from the impasse of post-Marxian, post-Weberian sociology. But his original formation was that of a quintessential ‘history boy’—a product of the legendary Manchester Grammar School–Oxford pipeline. In the course of an itinerary that took him from social work to engaged labour research, the original idea for Sources of Social Power took shape in the mid-1970s. Conceived as a short book, it grew into a massive undertaking. The publication of Volume I in 1986 made Mann famous, and helped to revivify the field of historical sociology. Whilst contemporaries such as Giddens succumbed to the flesh pots of New Labour, Mann, ensconced in California, toiled on. The thousand-page Volume II, covering the period 1760–1914, appeared in 1993. Twenty years on, Mann presents us with a no less enormous, two-volume treatment of the twentieth century. It is a culmination that has been prepared by three other substantial books, on The Dark Side of Democracy, Fascism and Mann’s reckoning with the derailment of us policy after 9.11, Incoherent Empire.

The title of Mann’s project is programmatic. This is not a study of society or culture; it is a study of social power. The shift from society to power has both a constructive and a critical intent. Along with a number of other thinkers in the 1970s and 1980s, Mann set out to build an account of modern power that did not rely on an overly reified notion of ‘society’. Of course, social units may be made; but this is something to be explained, not assumed. Societies can be unmade as well, as Thatcher attempted to demonstrate. Mann therefore proposed the study of networks of power, as a more basic unit of analysis. There is a temptation in such a move to posit a new monism in the form of a single source of power. Instead, Mann launched an acronym—iemp. It doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue, and that is part of the point. It was a conglomerate, not a single term: Ideology, Economics, Military force and Political organization, all four governed by their own logics, are the constituent ingredients of power, defined as ‘the capacity to get others to do the things they would not otherwise do’, in order ‘to achieve our goals’. It is their combination and overlapping interaction that constitutes the networks and other crystallizations out of which states are formed.

Within this framework, Volume I expanded a multi-faceted narrative sweeping across millennia and culminating in an account of the rise of the West that avoided many, if not all, of the pitfalls of that venerable genre. It was received with great applause. More puzzling is the comparative silence that fell over Volume II, which works in a more painstaking fashion to explain the crystallization of Western power in the course of the nineteenth century, in the form of the European nation-state. It may seem paradoxical that someone who set out to refound sociology on a study of networks rather than societies should end up so resolutely focused on the nation. But for Mann, if the nation–state–society triangle did indeed come to dominate modernity, this is something for critical theory to explain, not to be taken for granted as its starting point. The 1980s and early 1990s saw a high tide for the constructivist analysis of the nation; Mann’s distinctive contribution was his focus on power. He speaks of nations not as imagined communities or invented traditions but as cages, the four corner posts of which are iemp.

The pay-off from this increasingly narrow, but increasingly deep, historical exploration comes at the juncture between Volumes II and III—Mann’s account of the outbreak of World War I. It may be to impute to Mann the particular preoccupations of post-imperial Britain, but it seems not implausible to see the brilliant final pages of Volume II as the point to which the entire previous undertaking has pointed: it is in looking back from the mind-boggling derailment of July 1914 that the arch of his construction becomes visible. If Volume I charted the rise of the West out of the pre-Christian era, and Volume II showed the way in which the nation-state emerged as the great rallying point for the energies of collective social power, then 1914 was Armageddon, the pivotal moment, the beginning of the end. As Mann himself put it on the penultimate page of Volume II, almost with a sense of relief: ‘The Great War exemplifies, horrifically, the structure of modern states and modern societies, as I have analysed them and theorized about them.’

What does he mean by this? In a sympathetic assessment of Volume I in these pages, Chris Wickham criticized Mann for saying in an off-hand remark that ‘minorities usually make history’. This, to Wickham’s mind, was both false as a general statement about history and reflective of a ‘traditional model of history as political action’. The quotation did not do justice to Mann; yet the irony of the modern era revealed so startlingly by the July crisis was precisely that, at the same time as social forces appeared to generate enormous momentum, elites came into play as never before. The culmination of this paradoxical process was the Cold War doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction, when ill-matched pairs of men, wielding the destructive power of two continental states, held in their hands the future of life on our planet. That condition is the subject of Volume IV, but the extraordinarily labile quality of modernity was prefigured in 1914. What Mann’s account of power was able to show us about this moment is the fragile quality of what we mean by a state or a nation at such a moment of stress: the entire collectivity, with its immense destructive forces, can be pitched into conflict as the result of a disastrously counterproductive interaction between parliaments, military staffs, mass publics and economic interests. Though each was separately rational, the upshot was appalling. As Mann put it, the polymorphous power formations which he described states as being were ‘only reflecting modern society, equipped with massive collective powers, their distributive power networks entwining non-dialectically’. In the hands of one of his French counterparts, the suggestive idea of ‘non-dialectical entwining’ might have opened out into a deeper theorization. Mann himself prefers more straightforward language: the reality of modern power was ‘patterned mess’.

If crisis was the dramatic culmination of Volume II of the Sources of Social Power, in Volume III it becomes the dominating theme of the entire narrative. Over 500 pages, Mann offers his readers a fast-paced survey of the dramas of the early twentieth century, from the outbreak of World War I to the end of World War II, by way of the Russian and Chinese revolutions, fascism, Stalinism, Imperial Japan, the emergence of European social citizenship and the American New Deal. It is a narrative that is, as always with Mann, focused on the ‘leading edge of power’. But, as a history of the twentieth century must, it takes in a far wider sphere—virtually the entire Northern Hemisphere, stretching from the United States, Western Europe and the Soviet Union to China and Japan. It is a story, in Mann’s terms, of ‘polymorphous globalizations’, driven by the complex interactions of the three most basic power organizations of human societies—capitalism, empires and nation-states. He concedes that ‘by half-closing our eyes, it is possible to construct an onward-and-upward evolutionary story’ even out of the grisly raw material of the twentieth century. But, as Mann has always insisted, such law-like accounts of modernization are incapable of seizing the true drama of the development of modern power, which consists precisely in its heterogeneous, haphazard and often crisis-prone accumulation. Unlike its two predecessors, Volume III of the Sources of Social Power is therefore dominated by a series of complex events, what Mann calls the ‘Three Great Disruptions’—World War I, the Great Depression and World War II. This theme, he promises us, will continue in Volume IV, which centres on the Cold War arms race and the global environmental crisis. Mann is acutely conscious of this shift in the focus of his analysis. Looking back in the aftermath of 1914, he says, it cannot but seem to us that earlier eras were less prone to such savage disruptions; less contingent, more governed by broader patterns of social development. Is this true? Mann leaves the question open. Certainly the challenge for a twentieth-century history is to assess ‘to what extent contemporary power relations are the product of the logic of development of macrostructures, and to what extent these have been redirected by both timely conjunctures, producing world-historical events, and individuals in positions of great power.’

It is the extent of the rupture in 1914 that makes these questions inescapable. The problem of the ticklish transition between the nineteenth century and the twentieth-century ‘age of extremes’ is not one that Mann faces alone. Two recent grand-narrative accounts of global modernity, Christopher Bayly’s Birth of the Modern World (2004) and Jürgen Osterhammel’s Die Verwandlung der Welt (2011) stop abruptly and frustratingly short in 1914. On the other side of the great divide, Mark Mazower’s account of the twentieth century, Dark Continent (2000), managed the remarkable feat of boot-strapping its way into the interwar period without a serious discussion of either World War I or the Russian Revolution. Amongst those who do bridge the divide, Arno Mayer’s Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? (1988) did so by extending the nineteenth century deep into the twentieth, thereby making even World War II and the Judeocide into rearguard actions of the Ancien Régime. More compellingly, Charles Bright and Michael Geyer, whose work Mann unfortunately disregards, have proposed in a series of articles that we should think in terms of a long twentieth century, beginning not in 1914 but with the earth-shaking upheavals that came between the hungry 1840s and the Paris Commune.

By far the most widely read account of this type is Eric Hobsbawm’s, whose four volumes span the period from the French Revolution to the fall of Communism. What is not so often remarked upon is the break between the best-selling Age of Extremes and the three volumes that preceded it. Whereas The Age of Revolutions, The Age of Capital and The Age of Empire were classical in their construction, basing themselves on a non-dogmatic Marxism, Age of Extremes opened with a chapter that postulated the extreme violence that erupted with World War I as a distinctly new phenomenon, with its own causal force. It then went on to frame the century as a battle of ideas, an ideological contest which Hobsbawm traced back to the French Revolution. Interestingly, Mann’s 1995 review of Hobsbawm for nlr appears in retrospect as a manifesto for his own project to come. With Hobsbawm, Mann acknowledged that a history of the twentieth century would have to be a history of ideology, of crisis and of singular individual actors—Stalin, Hitler and so on. But Mann went on to insist on a more sociological and materialist account. If ideology was important, who were the extremists and what made them susceptible to such wild ideas? Furthermore, what made their ideologies so historically consequential? Crucially, what was the combination of forces that impelled the massive expansion of state power? Compounding the P, the I and the M of the crisis, there was always E. Mann took Hobsbawm to task for ducking out of a serious engagement with economics.

But in the early 1990s, Mann did not yet seem to anticipate one of the great intellectual discoveries of the next two decades, the advent of the global. In retrospect the most remarkable absence from Volume II of The Sources of Social Power was any coherent account of Western empire. Insofar as the world is allowed to enter, it is by way of global capitalism and then only in a single, sheepish chapter. Fast forward twenty years to Volume III, and ‘empire’ is the key word. Capitalism and nation-states are both now (re)described as drivers of globalizations. Acknowledging their omission from Volume II, Mann here stresses that empires ‘have provided the most dominant type of rule across the large-scale societies of history’. He insists, of course, that the resulting globalizations were polymorphous, fractious, plural and divisive. But one of the surprises of the concluding volumes of Sources of Social Power is the extent to which Mann allows empire to dominate the story, not of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but of the twentieth. For Mann it is not World War I, but World War II that is the great inter-imperial war.

This counter-intuitive result of the discontinuity in Mann’s project over the decades becomes somewhat easier to accept if we take account of the revisionist geography that underpins Mann’s discussion of imperialism. As it is introduced in Volume III, starting in the 1890s, imperialism is represented as much by Japan as by Britain’s global empire and the United States. If we spin the globe to East Asia, where those powers intersect, then it is of course entirely reasonable to see an escalation of inter-imperial rivalry, beginning with Commodore Perry’s intrusion in 1853 and running down later to the apocalyptic war between Japan and the West that began in 1941. It is in Mann’s treatment of Tokyo’s imperial strategy between 1890 and 1941, which draws on a crop of very fine literature on Japanese politics and political economy, that we see the most direct continuation of his penetrating analysis of European power politics before 1914. The question is how to make this suture between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries work, not in Asia, but at the epicentre of violence and turmoil between 1914 and 1945, in Europe. One might think that Mann could simply espouse the account of imperialism’s corrosive impact on the European nation-state system offered by Hobson or Lenin, but he chooses ostentatiously to side with Niall Ferguson, in sweeping any such idea into the dustbin of history. He gives similarly short shrift to the more fashionable versions of that argument offered by neo-Schmittians or Arendtians. But what, then, is the connection between the new imperialist setting of Volume III and the crisis of 1914 that frames the book?

One concrete way of relating inter-imperialist competition in East Asia to events in Europe would have been by way of the geopolitics of Eurasia. But this would have required Mann to expand his panorama of late nineteenth-century imperialism to include what was in fact its largest, most rapidly and arguably most aggressively expansive power, Tsarist Russia. Following this line, one imaginative team of historians led by John Steinberg and Bruce Menning has suggested that the Russo-Japanese War of 1905 should be rebadged as ‘World War Zero’. But whereas Mann’s treatment of Japan is strong, Russia is a weak link in his analytical chain: in Volume II he had more to say about the Habsburgs; in Volume III his narrative begins only with the Revolutions of 1917. Russia as a Eurasian hinge is missing. An alternative route to coherence might have been by way of what John Darwin, in his The Empire Project (2009), aptly calls ‘the British world-system’. In the calculations of the Edwardian Committee of Imperial Defence the hemispheres were routinely ‘thought together’ as a single strategic space. But in his discussion of British imperial power, Mann is too easily distracted by accounts of colonial atrocity. With regard to economics, he allows himself to get side-tracked into a moralistic reckoning of the costs and benefits of empire, the purpose of which seems to be to confirm the idea that empire was principally a project of coercion and ideology, not driven by powerful social interests. But surprisingly, he does not turn this critique into the spring-board for a discussion of mass resistance to the British Empire, which after the great imperial crisis of 1919–22 certainly weighed heavily on strategic decision-making in Whitehall.

Without this connecting tissue, one is left with the disconcerting sense not of a ‘patterned mess’, but of a book coming apart at the joins. Mann senses this tension and seeks to recuperate it for his argument with suggestive terms such as ‘imperially fractured’ and ‘half global’. But this does not rescue him from coming close to self-contradiction: in his conclusion he is happy to insist that the downfall of European empire by 1945 was only justice, because ‘European imperialism, imitated by the Japanese, had been the deeper cause’ of the ruinous wars that eroded their power resources. But having rejected imperial geopolitics as an explanation of the July 1914 crisis, he is forced to paper over the gap by a new holism: militaristic culture. ‘Europeans’, Mann tells us ‘were still from Mars’. There was ‘no necessary reason why multi-state systems should generate much war, but when they become enveloped in a culture of militarism, as Europe did, it is likely to generate endless war and competitive imperialism.’ With a magic cloak of such enveloping capacity, one that supposedly links Europe and Japan in a single cultural unity, a deeper pattern is found. But this seems a depressing step back for a project that once prided itself on its ability to grasp power in its concrete operations.

At stake here is Mann’s persistent difficulty in escaping the cage of individual states to address inter-state, geostrategic competition. In the earlier volumes, this might have been attributed to his fixation on the nation-state; but the problem recurs in his treatment of empire. The discussion of imperialism, even with the various distinctions between formal and informal modes that Mann introduces, obstructs a clear view of the dynamic that was decisive in the early twentieth century—the extraordinary ascent of American power. As one would expect, Mann delivers a competent survey of the country’s development after the Civil War. But when it comes to the American empire, his usual sense of the main lines of power deserts him. Following the conventional preoccupations of the American left, he devotes 16 pages—the same number he reserves for the Russian Revolution—to us forays into the Philippines and the Monroe zone. But was this, to put Mann’s question to Mann, the main axis of American power in the early twentieth century? Obviously not. The truly remarkable feature of us policy, from the turn of the century onwards, was not its activities as an imperial conqueror, but the weight it exerted globally as a massive continental nation-state, straddling two oceans. From that base it developed a truly dramatic ambition, not to accumulate Latin American satrapies, but to corral the great powers, the main players of the imperialist game—to tame Russia and Japan, Britain, France and Germany. This was announced in the Open Door policy for China, in Roosevelt’s arbitration of the Russo-Japanese War and, most overtly of all, in Wilson’s wartime diplomacy. As Negri and Hardt have rightly insisted, to call this imperialism misses the point. It was the assertion of something grander—Empire, in their terms. Mann, of course, includes hegemony in his repertoire of imperial forms. But in this volume, which addresses precisely the period in which this claim first arose, he refuses to deploy the term to any analytic effect.

If the Open Door was merely an aspiration in 1900, and if Wilson was powerless to halt World War I, Washington did exert important influence on both the war and the peace through American financial leverage, a story which is waved aside in Mann’s volume. Though he has made a point of stressing the centrality of alliance politics, there is no account of the wartime clinch between Wilson, Lloyd George and Clemenceau. The story of Versailles is told simply as a prelude to Hitler’s regime. The 1921–22 Washington Conference, the Dawes Plan and Locarno are mentioned only in passing. Missing from Mann’s account is the entire process of self-reflection within the networks of power, the attempt to reconfigure international society that was triggered by the disaster of 1914. This absence is all the more striking in that, just as Mann was conceiving of his project, and driven no doubt by the same contemporary influences, a sophisticated historical literature emerged which, highlighting the polymorphous quality of state power, took as its subject-matter precisely what is missing from Mann’s book: the political economy of stabilization in the aftermath of World War I and, specifically, America’s role in it. An indirect echo of these endeavours has come down to the present generation by way of the contemporary preoccupation with Carl Schmitt; but neither the neo-Schmittian literature nor this rich vein of historical scholarship is cited by Mann. Of course, any work of this scope must be selective; but what justifies the inclusion of Niall Ferguson’s outpourings, whilst Charles Maier’s Recasting Bourgeois Europe (1975) or Gerald Feldman’s epic Great Disorder (1993), to name just two milestones, are left out of the account? This is not so much selection, as absent-minded self-sabotage of his own historical project.

The omission of any discussion of the political economy of 1914–23 undermines one of Mann’s most laudable ambitions, namely to do Hobsbawm one better and produce an adequate account of the Great Depression. It is a remarkable fact that in the last thirty years there has been no major historical narrative of that defining event in the history of modern capitalism. What stands in for such an account is Barry Eichengreen’s Golden Fetters (1996), which is elegantly crafted around the so-called trilemma—the conflict between the Victorian institutions of the gold standard, the Edwardian privilege of unfettered capital mobility and the conflicting demands of emerging national electorates that demanded not monetary orthodoxy, but jobs. It is hugely influential, providing the basic frame, along with Milton Friedman’s work, for Ben Bernanke’s neo-monetarist understanding of the international dynamics of the Depression. But it also comes with a politics, or rather an anti-politics. Eichengreen’s approach was specifically designed to make interwar political economy intelligible to mainstream economics. The first move in such an operation is to evacuate the problem of power, to dismiss the problem of hegemony popularized by Charles Kindleberger’s The World in Depression and to replace it with the neoclassical analytic of cooperation and credibility. After dismissing theories of imperialism as an explanation of World War I, Mann is no less swift to dismiss models of hegemony as explanations of the interwar crisis. The result is that he is reduced to vapidities, attributing the failure to build a robust financial regime to the fact that ‘World War I had not solved geopolitical rivalries’. In fact the ‘coordination failure’ of 1931 was nothing less than a shipwreck of the first effort at us hegemony. But to have brought that into sharp relief would have required Mann to focus, as Eichengreen refuses to do, on the principal medium through which us power was exercised: inter-governmental debt. From the moment the Entente contracted its first war loan with JP Morgan in 1915, down to the collapse of Bretton Woods in 1971, it was political debt that defined a novel problem of hegemony: loans distributed not to private borrowers or to the imperial periphery, but from one political centre to another within the core. This is what an analysis of iemp must tackle if it is to grasp the first phase of America’s ascent.

There is no disagreement, of course, that it was out of the failure of that global economic regime that Hitler emerged; nor was this an isolated event of merely local importance. It was Germany’s extraordinary aggression that catalysed one belligerent after another: Italy, the Japanese, the Soviets. But what are we to make of Mann’s reading of the confrontation in Europe between 1938 and 1941 as an inter-imperialist war? In part this reads like a polemical settling of scores with the popular Churchillian ideology of Mann’s British childhood: instead we get Churchill as a red-baiting, imperialist bully—as far as the clash with Hitler was concerned, this had the one great advantage that ‘it took a thug to know a thug’. Mann’s writing, at its best concise and workmanlike, becomes noticeably coarser as we approach the climax of World War II. Yet, polemical sniping apart, he never delivers an analysis of British policy-making between 1933 and 1941 that would demonstrate the priority of imperial concerns in Whitehall during this crucial period. Was this not principally, as Mann himself argues for 1914, a defence of the British nation-state? Given what had been invested in that project—in Mann’s terms a cage, no doubt, but a gilded cage if ever there was one—was the political and moral calculus behind both the desperate effort at appeasement and the final decision to fight not more complex than his reductive characterization suggests?

Another tack would be to argue that World War II was indeed an inter-imperialist conflict, even in Europe, because that is what Hitler made it into. The stakes seemed from the outset far greater than in World War I. There was historicity here: the actors in 1939 knew they came after a previous failed effort at nothing short of a new global order, and they made their plans accordingly. This was all or nothing. But whereas Mann’s account of Japanese decision-making is sophisticated enough, and his description of the politics of appeasement touches key issues, his description of the Third Reich falls seriously short. One might think of inter-war Germany as a locus classicus for a polymorphous state theory. Carl Schmitt’s polycracy, Ernst Fraenkel’s Dual State (1941) and Franz Neumann’s Behemoth (1942) are all legitimate precursors to Mann’s account of modern power. But what Volume III offers us instead is a simplistic, Hitler-centric account. At one point, apropos of Marshal Zhukov’s repeated urging of a pre-emptive assault on Nazi Germany and Stalin’s dismissive response—‘Hitler is not such an idiot as to attack the Soviet Union’—Mann informs us that ‘Hitler was an idiot and so was Stalin’. This is barrack-room talk, precisely the kind of crude characterization that Mann refused in his masterful account of the Wilhelmine regime in 1914. In any case, Mann does not think Hitler was an idiot; he actually thinks that his territorial goals were those of a conventional imperialist writ large. Hitler, Mann informs us, ‘did not want an end to fractured imperialism, he just [sic] wanted to found the dominant empire’. It was London’s unwillingness to concede this Napoleonic ambition that led to war.

There are shades here of a long-standing British misconception: when Mann says that Hitler ‘did not want either a global war or a global empire’, he ignores the fact that Hitler did not believe he had any real choice in the matter—world Jewry was converging against him. The small space allocated to anti-Semitism and the Judeocide is a final striking feature of this volume. In his defence Mann would no doubt reply that he does not want to repeat himself: he has devoted many pages to the subject in The Dark Side of Democracy; yet the result is one of the least substantial treatments of the Judeocide seen in any such general survey for many years. More fundamentally, though Mann recognizes the significance of racial ideology to the Nazi movement, he does not take it seriously as an organizing element in Hitler’s exercise of power. Above all, it was through anti-Semitism that Hitler encoded his understanding of the uncanny absent presence of American power. If Mann is right, if this was an inter-imperialist war, then in Hitler’s mind the scope was always global. Nazism’s violence was directed ultimately not merely towards establishing a dominant imperial position, but against the end of history, the finis Germaniae threatened by American suzerainty.

The iemp framework which Mann has used to orchestrate the vast array of data gathered in the more than two thousand pages of The Sources of Social Power is a determinedly open-ended grid for historical and sociological analysis. But by the same token, the results depend very much on the historical raw material to which it is applied and the skill of the analyst. In the account of the July crisis that concludes Volume II, Mann, the great student of the European nation-state, delivered a truly memorable vindication of his model’s power. The results in Volume III are more uneven. The two chapters on the dilemmas of Japanese imperialism show Mann at his best—analytical, clear-headed, non-deterministic. When addressing the other great oceanic axis of power, in the Atlantic, the iemp framework is simply not fed with the material it needs to produce illuminating results.

But perhaps there is another factor at play here. The results to be derived from an iemp-style analysis also depend in part on the critical energy that animates its application. The discussion of the 1914 crisis, which Mann completed as the crowds were surging through the Brandenburg Gate and the two Germanies were brought together within a unified Europe, summoned up a truly memorable affirmation of democratic politics. In the light of Europe’s twentieth-century experience, was it ‘mere naivety’, he asked, ‘to hope for the emergence of genuinely democratic foreign policy in which mass opinion and parties are not nationally obsessed and where they openly debate routine foreign policy, keeping regimes under restraints imposed by deep-rooted, general social interests—one of which is not to have large numbers of people killed in useless wars?’ Twenty years later, the normative spirit is still alive, but it now takes on a far less political tone. The story of the century is the reduction of the political potential of Europe, to be replaced first by two super-states and then by one overarching power. The threat of violence was still present, of course, but as Mann tells us, ‘American was preferable to Japanese imperialism’—or European imperialism, one presumes—

because informal imperialism is more benign and more open than direct imperialism. Informal empire is calibrated more to global economic advantage, uses less violence and is less malign than an empire that subordinates economic interest to military and nationalist concerns. Unlike Sombart, I prefer traders to heroes.

Meanwhile, for the hundreds of millions who are neither traders nor heroes, Mann applies an even more basic measure of development. In the first half of the twentieth century, despite the political catastrophes of the era, the height of the average European and American increased by more than twice as much as it had done in the previous half century. It was, he concludes, a ‘process comparable to Darwin’s evolutionary biology’, attributable to ‘public-health regimes, better housing conditions, and better diets’. What are we to make of this flattening, anti-political turn in Mann’s thought? Does it express the same bleak mood that led him to The Dark Side of Democracy? Or, more promisingly, could the biopolitical terrain on which Mann seeks ultimately to ground himself serve as a place from which his iemp framework might be opened towards other sociological critiques of modern power?