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Book The Sources of Social Power  Volume 1  A History of Power from the Beginning to AD 1760

Download or read book The Sources of Social Power Volume 1 A History of Power from the Beginning to AD 1760 written by Michael Mann and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1986-04-30 with total page 564 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Distinguishing four sources of power in human societies - ideological, economic, military and political - 'The Sources of Social Power' traces their interrelations throughout human history. Volume 2 deals with power relations between the Industrial Revolution and the First World War.

Book The Sources of Social Power  Volume 2  The Rise of Classes and Nation States  1760 1914

Download or read book The Sources of Social Power Volume 2 The Rise of Classes and Nation States 1760 1914 written by Michael Mann and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-09-24 with total page 845 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This second volume deals with power relations between the Industrial Revolution and the First World War.

Book The Sources of Social Power  Volume 1  A History of Power from the Beginning to AD 1760

Download or read book The Sources of Social Power Volume 1 A History of Power from the Beginning to AD 1760 written by Michael Mann and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1986-04-30 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first part of a three-volume work on the nature of power in human societies. In it, Michael Mann identifies the four principal 'sources' of power as being control over economic, ideological, military, and political resources. He examines the interrelations between these in a narrative history of power from Neolithic times, through ancient Near Eastern civilisations, the classical Mediterranean age, and medieval Europe, up to just before the Industrial Revolution in England. Rejecting the conventional monolithic concept of a 'society', Dr. Mann's model is instead one of a series of overlapping, intersecting power networks. He makes this model operational by focusing on the logistics of power - how the flow of information, manpower, and goods is controlled over social and geographical space-thereby clarifying many of the 'great debates' in sociological theory. The present volume offers explanations of the emergence of the state and social stratification.

Book Global Historical Sociology

Download or read book Global Historical Sociology written by Julian Go and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-08-31 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bringing together historical sociologists from Sociology and International Relations, this collection lays out the international, transnational, and global dimensions of social change. It reveals the shortcomings of existing scholarship and argues for a deepening of the 'third wave' of historical sociology through a concerted treatment of transnational and global dynamics as they unfold in and through time. The volume combines theoretical interventions with in-depth case studies. Each chapter moves beyond binaries of 'internalism' and 'externalism,' offering a relational approach to a particular thematic: the rise of the West, the colonial construction of sexuality, the imperial origins of state formation, the global origins of modern economic theory, the international features of revolutionary struggles, and more. By bringing this sensibility to bear on a wide range of issue-areas, the volume lays out the promise of a truly global historical sociology.

Book Carbon Democracy

Download or read book Carbon Democracy written by Timothy Mitchell and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2013-06-25 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A brilliant, revisionist argument that places oil companies at the heart of 20th century history—and of the political and environmental crises we now face.” —Guardian Oil is a curse, it is often said, that condemns the countries producing it to an existence defined by war, corruption and enormous inequality. Carbon Democracy tells a more complex story, arguing that no nation escapes the political consequences of our collective dependence on oil. It shapes the body politic both in regions such as the Middle East, which rely upon revenues from oil production, and in the places that have the greatest demand for energy. Timothy Mitchell begins with the history of coal power to tell a radical new story about the rise of democracy. Coal was a source of energy so open to disruption that oligarchies in the West became vulnerable for the first time to mass demands for democracy. In the mid-twentieth century, however, the development of cheap and abundant energy from oil, most notably from the Middle East, offered a means to reduce this vulnerability to democratic pressures. The abundance of oil made it possible for the first time in history to reorganize political life around the management of something now called “the economy” and the promise of its infinite growth. The politics of the West became dependent on an undemocratic Middle East. In the twenty-first century, the oil-based forms of modern democratic politics have become unsustainable. Foreign intervention and military rule are faltering in the Middle East, while governments everywhere appear incapable of addressing the crises that threaten to end the age of carbon democracy—the disappearance of cheap energy and the carbon-fuelled collapse of the ecological order. In making the production of energy the central force shaping the democratic age, Carbon Democracy rethinks the history of energy, the politics of nature, the theory of democracy, and the place of the Middle East in our common world.

Book Incoherent Empire

Download or read book Incoherent Empire written by Michael Mann and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 407 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, noted sociologist Michael Mann argues that the "new American imperialism" is actually a new militarism. Dissecting the economic, political, military and ideological resources available to the US, Mann concludes that they are so uneven as to generate only an 'incoherent empire' and increasing world disorder. The US is a military giant, though it is better at devastating than pacifying countries. It is a political schizophrenic, its personality split between multilateralism, unilateralism and an actual inability to rule over foreign lands or to control its own supposed client states. It is only a backseat driver of the global economy. It cannot steer it, but it prods poorer countries toward an unproductive and unpopular neo-liberalism.

Book An Anatomy of Power

    Book Details:
  • Author : John A. Hall
  • Publisher : Cambridge University Press
  • Release : 2006-02-09
  • ISBN : 1139450700
  • Pages : 4 pages

Download or read book An Anatomy of Power written by John A. Hall and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-02-09 with total page 4 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Michael Mann is one of the most influential sociologists of recent decades. His work has had a major impact in sociology, history, political science, international relations and other social science disciplines. His main work, The Sources of Social Power, of which two of three volumes have been completed, provides an all-encompassing account of the history of power from the beginnings of stratified societies to present day. Recently he has published two major works, Fascists and The Dark Side of Democracy. Yet unlike other contemporary social thinkers, Mann's work has not, until now, been systematically and critically assessed. This volume assembles a group of distinguished scholars to take stock, both of Mann's overall method and of his account of particular periods and historical cases. It also contains Mann's reply where he answers his critics and forcefully restates his position. This is a unique and provocative study for scholars and students alike.

Book Power in the 21st Century

Download or read book Power in the 21st Century written by Michael Mann and published by Polity. This book was released on 2011-06-13 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Michael Mann is one of the most influential sociologists writing today. His three-volume work The Sources of Social Power, the third volume of which has just been completed, has transformed our way of thinking about power and has rewritten the history of human societies. No one interested in understanding how the modern world was shaped, how we got to where we are today and where we’re likely to be heading, can afford to ignore this modern classic. Michael Mann is, as John Hall aptly describes him, ‘a Max Weber for our times.’ Conducted in the form of an extended dialogue with John Hall, this concise and accessible book is the ideal introduction to the work and thought of one of the most original social scientists in the world today. Students and scholars will find the book invaluable, and general readers will find in this book a clear, insightful and masterful guide to the key challenges we face in the years and decades ahead.

Book A History of the Roman Equestrian Order

Download or read book A History of the Roman Equestrian Order written by Caillan Davenport and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-10 with total page 1088 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the Roman social hierarchy, the equestrian order stood second only to the senatorial aristocracy in status and prestige. Throughout more than a thousand years of Roman history, equestrians played prominent roles in the Roman government, army, and society as cavalrymen, officers, businessmen, tax collectors, jurors, administrators, and writers. This book offers the first comprehensive history of the equestrian order, covering the period from the eighth century BC to the fifth century AD. It examines how Rome's cavalry became the equestrian order during the Republican period, before analysing how imperial rule transformed the role of equestrians in government. Using literary and documentary evidence, the book demonstrates the vital social function which the equestrian order filled in the Roman world, and how this was shaped by the transformation of the Roman state itself.

Book More Money  More Crime

Download or read book More Money More Crime written by Marcelo Bergman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While worldwide crime is declining overall, criminality in Latin America has reached unprecedented levels that have ushered in social unrest and political turmoil. Despite major political and economic gains, crime has increased in every Latin American country over the past 25 years, currently making this region the most crime-ridden and violent in the world. Over the past two decades, Latin America has enjoyed economic growth, poverty and inequality reduction, rising consumer demand, and spreading democracy, but it also endured a dramatic outbreak of violence and property crimes. In More Money, More Crime, Marcelo Bergman argues that prosperity enhanced demand for stolen and illicit goods supplied by illegal rackets. Crime surged as weak states and outdated criminal justice systems could not meet the challenge posed by new profitably criminal enterprises. Based on large-scale data sets, including surveys from inmates and victims, Bergman analyzes the development of crime as a business in the region, and the inability-and at times complicity-of state agencies and officers to successfully contain it. While organized crime has grown, Latin American governments have lacked the social vision to promote sustainable upward mobility, and have failed to improve the technical capacities of law enforcement agencies to deter criminality. The weak state responses have only further entrenched the influence of criminal groups making them all the more difficult to dismantle. More Money, More Crime is a sobering study that foresees a continued rise in violence while prosperity increases unless governments develop appropriate responses to crime and promote genuine social inclusion.

Book The Confucian Legalist State  A New Theory of Chinese History

Download or read book The Confucian Legalist State A New Theory of Chinese History written by Dingxin Zhao and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015-09-22 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Confucian-Legalist State, Dingxin Zhao offers a radically new analysis of Chinese imperial history from the eleventh century BCE to the fall of the Qing dynasty. This study first uncovers the factors that explain how, and why, China developed into a bureaucratic empire under the Qin dynasty in 221 BCE. It then examines the political system that crystallized during the Western Han dynasty, a system that drew on China's philosophical traditions of Confucianism and Legalism. Despite great changes in China's demography, religion, technology, and socioeconomic structures, this Confucian-Legalist political system survived for over two millennia. Yet, it was precisely because of the system's resilience that China, for better or worse, did not develop industrial capitalism as Western Europe did, notwithstanding China's economic prosperity and technological sophistication beginning with the Northern Song dynasty. In examining the nature of this political system, Zhao offers a new way of viewing Chinese history, one that emphasizes the importance of structural forces and social mechanisms in shaping historical dynamics. As a work of historical sociology, The Confucian-Legalist State aims to show how the patterns of Chinese history were not shaped by any single force, but instead by meaningful activities of social actors which were greatly constrained by, and at the same time reproduced and modified, the constellations of political, economic, military, and ideological forces. This book thus offers a startling new understanding of long-term patterns of Chinese history, one that should trigger debates for years to come among historians, political scientists, and sociologists.

Book Desire and Excess

    Book Details:
  • Author : Jonah Siegel
  • Publisher : Princeton University Press
  • Release : 2000-08-20
  • ISBN : 9780691049144
  • Pages : 384 pages

Download or read book Desire and Excess written by Jonah Siegel and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2000-08-20 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this fascinating look at the creative power of institutions, Jonah Siegel explores the rise of the modern idea of the artist in the nineteenth century, a period that also witnessed the emergence of the museum and the professional critic. Treating these developments as interrelated, he analyzes both visual material and literary texts to portray a culture in which art came to be thought of in powerful new ways. Ultimately, Siegel shows that artistic controversies commonly associated with the self-consciously radical movements of modernism and postmodernism have their roots in a dynamic era unfairly characterized as staid, self-satisfied, and stable. The nineteenth century has been called the Age of the Museum, and yet critics, art theorists, and poets during this period grappled with the question of whether the proliferation of museums might lead to the death of Art itself. Did the assembly and display of works of art help the viewer to understand them or did it numb the senses? How was the contemporary artist to respond to the vast storehouses of art from disparate nations and periods that came to proliferate in this era? Siegel presents a lively discussion of the shock experienced by neoclassical artists troubled by remains of antiquity that were trivial or even obscene, as well as the anxious aesthetic reveries of nineteenth-century art lovers overwhelmed by the quantity of objects quickly crowding museums and exhibition halls. In so doing, he illuminates the fruitful crises provoked when the longing for admired art is suddenly satisfied. Drawing upon neoclassical art and theory, biographies of early nineteenth-century writers including Keats and Scott, and the writings of art critics such as Hazlitt, Ruskin, and Wilde, this book reproduces a cultural matrix that brings to life the artistic passions and anxieties of an entire era.

Book The History of Government from the Earliest Times  Volume II  The Intermediate Ages

Download or read book The History of Government from the Earliest Times Volume II The Intermediate Ages written by Samuel Edward Finer and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1999-05-27 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This unprecendented survey and analysis of government is planetary in its reach. The Late S.E. Finer's tour de force demonstrates the breadth of imagination and magisterial scholarship which characterized the work of one of the leading political scientists of the twentieth century.

Book The Sources of Social Power  Volume 3  Global Empires and Revolution  1890 1945

Download or read book The Sources of Social Power Volume 3 Global Empires and Revolution 1890 1945 written by Michael Mann and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-09-17 with total page 519 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This third volume of Michael Mann's analytical history of social power focuses on the interrelated development of capitalism, nation-states and empires.

Book The Sources of Social Power  Volume 3  Global Empires and Revolution  1890   1945

Download or read book The Sources of Social Power Volume 3 Global Empires and Revolution 1890 1945 written by Michael Mann and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-09-17 with total page 519 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Distinguishing four sources of power - ideological, economic, military and political - this series traces their interrelations throughout human history. This third volume of Michael Mann's analytical history of social power begins with nineteenth-century global empires and continues with a global history of the twentieth century up to 1945. Mann focuses on the interrelated development of capitalism, nation-states and empires. Volume 3 discusses the 'Great Divergence' between the fortunes of the West and the rest of the world; the self-destruction of European and Japanese power in two world wars; the Great Depression; the rise of American and Soviet power; the rivalry between capitalism, socialism and fascism; and the triumph of a reformed and democratic capitalism.

Book Mapping the Nation

Download or read book Mapping the Nation written by Gopal Balakrishnan and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2012-11-13 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In nearly two decades since Samuel P. Huntington proposed his influential and troubling ‘clash of civilizations’ thesis, nationalism has only continued to puzzle and frustrate commentators, policy analysts and political theorists. No consensus exists concerning its identity, genesis or future. Are we reverting to the petty nationalisms of the nineteenth century or evolving into a globalized, supranational world? Has the nation-state outlived its usefulness and exhausted its progressive and emancipatory role? Opening with powerful statements by Lord Acton and Otto Bauer – the classic liberal and socialist positions, respectively – Mapping the Nation presents a wealth of thought on this issue: the debate between Ernest Gellner and Miroslav Hroch; Gopal Balakrishnan’s critique of Benedict Anderson’s seminal Imagined Communities; Partha Chatterjee on the limitations of the Enlightenment approach to nationhood; and contributions from Michael Mann, Eric Hobsbawm, Tom Nairn, and Jürgen Habermas.

Book Geography  History and Social Sciences

Download or read book Geography History and Social Sciences written by Georges B. Benko and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-06-29 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Georges Benko «Societies are much messier than our theories of them» Michael Mann The Sources of Social Power 1 Towards a unified social theory Why are there communication problems between the different disciplines of the social sciences? And why should there be so much misunderstanding? Most probably because the encounter of several disciplines is in fact the encounter of several different histories, and therefore of several different cultures, each interpreting the other according to the code dictated by its own culture. Inevitably geographers view other disciplines through their own cultural filter, and even a benevolent view remains 'ethnocentric'. It was in order to avoid such ethnocentricity that Femand Braudel called for more unity among the social sciences in 1958 : «l wish the social sciences . . . would stop discussing their respective differences so much . . . and instead look for common ground . . . on which to reach their first agreement. Personally I would call these ways : quantification, spatial awareness and 'longue duree'». In its place at the center of the social sciences, geography reduces all social reality to its spatial dimensions. Unfortunately, as a discipline, it considers itself all too often to be in a world of its own. There is a need in France for a figure like Vidal de la Blanche who could refocus attention away from issues of time and space, towards space and social reality. Geographic research will only take a step forward once it learns to address the problems facing all the sciences.