Research On Michael Mann’s Power Theory

Michael Mann,as the most influential historical sociologist in recent years,has a wide influence in political science,sociology and other social sciences.This article teases the concept,development logic and research methods of IEMP power theory model,analyzes the advantages and disadvantages of his research methods and theoretical models.The research is aimed at enriching the perspectives,methods and types of the power research,deepening our understanding of social change in theory.Simultaneously,it provides the possibility and reality of observing power in practice.It contributes to changing the existing and unreasonable power structure,achieving social fairness and justice and enhancing our ability of responding to the social crisis and the social revolution.This paper is divided into four chapters,the first chapter is preface,the other three chapters respectively tease out the ideological origins,the IEMP theory models of Mann and their advantages and disadvantages.In terms of the ideological origins,this second chapter analyzes Mann’s academic purport from his life and works,theoretical sources and research methods.Mann’s academic purport of paying attention to combining history,empirical experience with social theory is closely related to the experience of studying and teaching at the University of Oxford,Essex and the London School of Economics.Based on the criticism of Marx and Web’s theory of social stratification,Mann makes the military power to separate from the political power,and puts forward the IEMP power models.Using the methods of historical sociology to research social reform,he put forward an interpretation mode of power which better explains the diversity and complexity of the human society than hierarchical theory of Marx and Web.The third chapter describes the basic concepts and development logic of IEMP power models.It includes economic power,political power,military power and ideological power.Every power is not pure,but crossed,overlapped and interacted with each other.They have an "orthogonal" relationship and form different power networks.Multiple crossed,overlapped power networks continue to interact in social spaces,societies development presents a balance between construction of institutionalization and intermittently mutation,which is the evolution mechanism of human society,it is also namely “Symbolic Interaction Theory” by Mann.Specifically,the economic power experiences the former commercial capitalism,capitalism,industrial capitalism and the globalization of industrial capitalist.The organization forms of political power include conventional management of the citizens within the territory and conventional foreign diplomatic routine,namely soft geopolitics.The organization forms of military power are embodied in raising morale internal and external deterrent,war and so on.Ideological power includes "inherent","transcendent" and "institutionalized" organization forms.These networked organization form of power intermittently break the original institutional structure and prompt the society towards a new development direction.The fourth chapter mainly analyzes the contribution and shortcomings of Mann in research methods and theoretical models.In regard to research method,the drawback of the comparative macro historical analysis is neglecting actors.But overall,Mann’s emphasis on interaction between the organized power networks to a certain extent goes beyond the traditional sociological "two opposites of activity and structure”.Compared with other scholars,Mann’s historical sociology pays more attention to the historical process tracking and causal mechanism analysis.In regard to theoretical model,although there are still some doubts,Mann still provides important insights.He reconstructs the concept of power and society,not only achieves self-consistent of his inertial logic,but also provides an important way for the reconstruction of the concept of social science research and makes studying power’s universality possible.In addition,The IEMP power model constructed by Mann is more refined,inclusive,historic and dynamic than hierarchical theory of Web.