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The Ghost of Theories Past

M I C H A E L M A N N ’ S T W O V O L U M E bonanza, published in a span of a few months, is significant for several reasons. It is, as many reviewers have noted, one of the most ambitious attempts to analyze the expanse of European—and in the later volumes, world—history within a single conceptual framework. In many ways, it might appear the kind of scholarship more in line with the intellectual culture of the nineteenth century, rather than the hyper-specialized ethos of academe today. But in fact it is the last of several extremely ambitions projects that were launched in the 1970s, all of which were geared to generating new frameworks for social and historical analysis. Mann published the first volume of his project in 1986, around the same time as similarly ambitious endeavors were underway by Anthony Giddens, W.G. Runcimann, Ernest Gellner, and others. The backdrop to all of these projects was the deep, albeit temporary, influence of Marxist theory in academic circles, particularly among students and freshly minted Ph.D.’s who had been radicalized by the movements of the time. It was an index of this radicalization that, even though Marxism did not sweep aside all other theoretical frameworks, it motivated a number of projects that were intended either explicitly as alternatives to historical materialism—as in the case of Giddens—or less so, as with Mann and perhaps Runciman. Those other projects were either completed by the end of the 1980s or were abandoned. Mann’s is the one that has taken longest to reach fruition, and is without doubt the most successful. Of course, Marxist theory no longer exercises the influence it did when Mann launched his project. But it continues to lurk in the book’s arguments as a kind of interlocutor. It would be fair, then, to