Political power un-manned: a defence of the Holy Trinity from Mann's military attack

Abstract

This brief contribution addresses only one of the problems raised by Michael Mann's imaginative and substantial discussion of the military phenomenon in his magnum opus (Mann 1986; 1993). The problem concerns the conceptual status Mann confers upon that phenomenon by considering it as the locus of a distinctive, relatively self-standing source of social power, on which it falls occasionally to play an autonomous role in the making and unmaking of societies, and which in any case interacts with the other sources as the custodian of a resource – organized coercion – which they don't control while it does.