Paris Black Star

At this year’s Anti-University festival in London I ran two workshops. The first workshop was about a fairly dense book, the magnum opus of a sociology professor at the University of California, Michael Mann. Across four volumes, Mann presents the entire history of humankind and analyses it through four interconnected lenses, the sources of social power.

We started the workshop with an introduction to the Sources of Social Power and the models underpinning the work. The theories are actually straightforward and much of the first chapters of the book is denser for its academic rigour and for comparisons to Marxian and Weberian perspectives. In the first 15 minutes of the workshop we presented Mann’s view on “society” and the four sources of social power, detailed below.

Human beings are social, not societal animals

Mann argues that contrary to the assumptions of most dominant sociology orthodoxies (Marxism, evolutionism, systems theory, etc), society is not a “unitary” whole, even one with “levels”, “dimensions”, “layers”, or any other structure for decomposing a totalising entity. On this he wrote: “It may seem an odd position for a sociologist to adopt; but if I could, I would abolish the concept of ‘society’ altogether.”

Empirical proof can be found in the simple question: in which society do you live? The answer might start at the level of the national state: “The United Kingdom”. Another answer would be broader: an “industrial society”, a “capitalist society”, or “the West”. A carefully-considered answer would certainly be a confederal rather than a unitary society.

Instead, Mann conceives of the social space we inhabit as being “overlapping networks of social interaction”; more simply, we are moved by ideological, economic, political and military organisation, specific groups of people who are using organisational means at their disposal to achieve human goals, whatever these may be. To analyse them we can thus reject abstract language like “factors” of social life, where the central problems concern organisation, control, logistics, communication—the capacity to control people, materials, and territories, and the development of this capacity throughout history.

Four Sources of Social Power

• Military power is the “concentration of force”, military organisations apply violence to coerce people into implementing their will.
• Ideological power is the power over people via ideological rules.
• Economic power derives from the satisfaction of subsistence needs through the social organisation of the extraction, transformation, distribution, and consumption of the objects of nature.
• Political power refers to state power; the centralised and institutionalised regulation of a territory.

Most organisations don’t fall perfectly into a single category but may include aspects of multiple or even all sources of power. Political states haven’t always had control over the military levy (and history is littered with coup d’états), while trade unions may involve economic power as well as ideological power (and historically have even employed political and military power).

Mann notes that powers can be authoritative in nature, or diffused. They can be intensive (persuading someone to risk their life is an intensive power), and they can also be extensive (covering a wide territory).

	Authoritative	Diffused
Intensive	Military command structure	General strike
Extensive	Militaristic Empire	Market exchange

The extent or intensity of authoritative power depends on logistical infrastructure (e.g. communication technology), while diffused power depends on universality infrastructure (e.g. literacy, coinage).

Arpentage

Having introduced Mann’s theories in an accessible way and having answered questions from the participants, we proceeded to the second part of the workshop.

Arpentage is a method of reading materials efficiently within a group. Simply put, we split a resource up into sections, and each person takes one section. While reading, each person prepares a summary of the content they are reading and presents their section to the group. We discuss and interact with the content together, building a group understanding and creating space for cross-pollinating reflections and understanding of the work as we go.

Arpentage can be an efficient way to cover large works with a group, but in our case running a fairly short workshop we decided that we would cover only one chapter. Having already read the book ourselves, we chose Chapter 9 which was on the Roman Empire, a history likely to be familiar to the people attending our workshop.

The Development of the Roman Empire

The Etruscans (a pre-Roman civilisation from North-West Italy) probably migrated from the Balkans and Asia Minor, and brought with them “civilisation”. By about 600 B.C. their cultural influence on their neighbors was changing hill villages into small city-states. One of these was Rome.

The Romans copied the hoplite form (heavy infantry) from the Etruscans. From the peasant farmers (who were less politically concentrated and less egalitarian than in the Greek Polis), this later evolve into the Roman legion.

There was a dualism between popular assemblies and the Senate, the origin of the “orders,” senatorial and equestrian, as well as of the political factions which were important in the late Republic.

Each economic class provided people to the Roman military, measured in “centuries” (100 men), their equipment provided by the state. The lowest class (the proletarii) formed one nominal century without military-service obligation. Each century had equal voting rights in the principal popular assembly, the comitia centuriata. From the beginning, collective organisation mixed together both economic and military relations.

Class struggle preserved some of the social base of both heavy infantry and cavalry. The patricians were forced to admit wealthy plebs (commoners), thus revitalising themselves. Meanwhile, the peasant proprietors in 494 went on the first of perhaps five military strikes, refusing to do military service until they were allowed to elect their own tribunes of the people, to intercede between them and the patrician magistrates.

The combination of tribal and city-state forms, and citizen equality and stratification, also enabled the Romans to deal flexibly and constructively with conquered and client peoples in Italy. Some were given citizenship and voting rights, which anyway all immigrants to Rome received. Federated allies were allowed to maintain their own class systems so that there would be less reason for them to rebel for “national” reasons. These allies were important right through the Punic Wars, contributing large numbers of auxiliary troops instead of tax or tribute.

By 272 B.C., Rome was a loosely federated state with a core of about 300,000 citizens, all theoretically capable of bearing arms, dominating about 100,000 square kilometers.

The Punic Wars against the Carthaginians (in which Hannibal nearly destroyed Rome) revealed the militarism of Roman social structure and its ability to sacrifice. For a period of about 200 years, about 13 percent of citizens were under arms at any one time. In the end, the Romans won a war of attrition.

During the Punic Wars the Romans gradually stumbled on the invention of extensive territorial citizenship, a novel political invention, brought about largely by the desire to totally destroy Carthaginian rule in Spain, Sardinia, Sicily and North Africa. It was motivated by ferocious revenge for the humiliations imposed by Hannibal and his predecessors, but this policy necessarily resulted in the formation of imperial provinces ruled directly by designated magistrates backed by legionary garrisons, where hitherto there had been dominated allies and vassals.

These changes undermined the volunteer citizen army. The legions had become virtually full-time and were paid, while military-service and military destruction in Italy had undermined many peasant farms, plunging them into debt. Their land was acquired by large landowners, and the peasants migrated to Rome. Conquest had also created a proliferation of slavery within the empire, slaves of vast numbers in large concentrations, capable of collective organisation. Three “Servile Wars” would soon follow.

Conclusions

The history summarised here was taken from the first part of Michael Mann’s text on the Roman Empire, formulated by one of the workshop participants while reading. After the reading phase, each participant presented their summary and together we analysed it using our understanding of the theory and the other summaries already presented. Towards the end of the text, for example, we can see how a new form of political power developed in conquered territories, precipitated by ideology (the desire to annihilate Carthage), which also caused an upheaval in military organisation and of economic classes, from the professional soldiery to the urbanised peasantry to the enormous population of newly created slaves. As the text goes on we discover how a succession of massive slave rebellions came to shake the empire, and how this in turn motivated the Gracchus brothers to ideological disgust of the proliferation of slavery and the decline of the free peasantry, resulting in their gambits at radical political change and more bloody conflict.

The lenses employed by Mann engender a perspective on history in which struggle and cooperation between social powers weaves a path through history predicated on the reactions to reactions to reactions. It enriches our human experience by helping us to put ourselves in the historical context of our predecessors. It also helps us to parse complex social relationships down from unitary “totals”; destructive patterns in the happenings around us can absolutely be overcome and our reactions to circumstance are constantly reforming the social bonds that bind us.

Sources of Social Power is in my view is an antidote to a determinist thinking because it demonstrates how a different outcome can radically alter the future of social power. If Gracchus had been successful in reforming the republic, or if Rome had not pursued the annihilation of Carthage in the way which it did, social power today may have looked very different. Mann’s historical analysis is thorough and based on a huge work of scholarship, and such a grand history (covering the entire span of human existence) can help us to adopt a larger scale view on the essential question “how do we want to live together?”, as well as when applying the same analytical lenses to contempary social power networks.

The arpentage method felt like a success, and we felt that re-applying it over a longer session covering the entire book would be worthwhile. During the conclusion of our workshop we discussed the possibility of adjusting workshop output, and one suggestion was that we could produce a lighter text, somewhat as I have done in this article.