The Causes of War
Channel: Havens Wright Center for Social Justice
Date: 2022-09-25

A lecture by Michael Mann offering an analysis of the causes of war based on his model of the four sources of social power - economic, ideological, military, and political power - that, when used, enable people to take particular action they would otherwise not.

Michael Mann is Distinguished Research Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and Honorary Professor at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of more than a dozen books, including Incoherent Empire (awarded the Friedrich Ebert Foundation Prize), The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (recipient of the ASA’s Barrington Moore Award), Fascists, and most notably the multi-volume The Sources of Social Power, the last two volumes of which (Global Empires and Revolution 1890-1945 and Globalizations 1945-2011) were published by Cambridge University Press in 2012 and 2013 respectively.