Mann, Michael (1986) The Sources Of Social Power Cambridge; Cambridge University Press.doc

sources of social power del 3- s.366 550innholdsfortegnelsesources of social power del 3- s.366 5501innholdsfortegnelse1chapter 11 (continued from part 2)2bibliography712 the european dynamic: i.the intensive phase, a.d. 80011559bibliography5213the european dynamic: ii. the rise of coordinating states, 1155147756bibliography8714the european dynamic: iii. international capitalism and organic national states, 1477176092bibliography13715 european conclusions: explaining european dynamism capitalism, christendom, and states145bibliography16116patterns of worldhistorical development in agrarian societies162bibliography186index187(366)chapter 11 (continued from part 2)in terms of the supposedly innate qualities of human beings or of societies that have figured largely in debates between materialism and idealism that is, the general relationship between ideas and material reality or material action. in volume iii, i shall argue on general grounds that such debates are not helpful to social theory. but here we can note that careful examination of the historical record reveals a superior explanation.in any historical period there are many points of contact between human beings that existing power structures do not effectively organize. if these points of contact become of greater significance for social life, they throw up general social problems requiring new organizational solutions. one particular solution has great plausibility when existing power structures remain unable to control the emergent forces. this is a conception of transcendent power, divine authority invoked by emergent counterelites. in the case of the first civilizations, discussed in chapters 3 and 4, this emerged as the main integrating force in a regional civilization. but its force must have been relatively weak, given the infrastructures of the time, which was confined to a basic level of shared, diffuse civilizational identity and norms just sufficient to trust trading strangers and to underpin multistate diplomacy. the intensive penetrative powers of these first great ideologies were restricted.in the first two millennia of human history, little infrastructure existed for communicating ideas through extensive social space. until about the time of assyria and persia, not even ruling classes could exchange and stabilize the ideas and customs of their members over large spaces. the main infrastructural bases for combining extensive and intensive power were military and economic structures of compulsory cooperation and political federations of citystates and tribal and regional elites, sometimes existing within looser, predominantly oral, regional civilizations. gradually, however, the two preconditions of far more extensive and intensive autonomous ideological power developed: (1) extensive networks of social interaction developed that were interstitial to official power networks. (2) these networks specifically carried a twostep structure of literate local communication. gradually larger and more diffused masses of people became part of these interstitial networks. they were placed in a novel but common social situation whose meaning was not given by the traditional beliefs and rituals of existing local or extensive official structures. articulate persons could generate new explanations and meanings for their situation in the cosmos. as this meaning could not be encapsulated by either local or official traditions, it was interstitial to them, that is, socially transcendent. belief in transcendent divinity with a direct relation to themselves was the imaginative expression of their interstitial social situation. as both the official structure of empire and their interstitial trading networks encouraged individual rationality, there was a persistent strain in their religion toward rational monotheism. thus an interstitial social situation was expressed as a salvation religion and communicated through partial literacy into a religious movement of the book.(367)this is a recognizably materialist explanation (provided it is not restricted to economic factors). that is, a social situation generated a belief system that largely reflected its characteristics in imaginative form. but because such groups and their breeding grounds were interstitial, their resulting powers of social reorganization were novel and autonomous. their capacity to lay new historical tracks was heightened by normative commitment, that is, by ideology as morale, now acquired by religious conversion. christians could withstand persecution; islamic warriors could overcome their supposedly formidable enemies. they created new societies to rival those already constituted by traditional mixtures of power relations. in some cases they overcame or outlived those traditional networks. ideological power was, in this sense and this period, transcendent.but by being in the world they also had to come to terms with traditional power organizations in three main ways. first, the socalled spiritual realm was centered on a particular social sphere, the life of the individual, his or her lifecycle progression, and his or her interpersonal and familial relations. as a form of power it was extremely intensive, centering on the direct life experience of intimate groups. it may have been the most intensive form of power replicated over relatively large social networks to date. this spiritual realm, however, and any popular mobilization consequent upon it, might be merely an aggregation of localities, similar but without organic connections. such a sphere could not alone easily maintain a high and extensive level of social mobilization. for this it would depend largely on other power organizations. to refer back to an argument i made in chapter 1: in extensive societies, family structure is not a critical part of macrosocial power arrangements. this dependence on the family restricted the extensive reach and autonomy of ideological power.second, this sphere of life was in reality not purely spiritual. like all social life it was a mixed spiritual/material, sacred/secular realm. for example, decisions must be taken about correct ethical conduct, about the correct ritual for birth or marriage, or about the nature of death and the hereafter. these involve power, the setting up of decisionmaking bodies for agreeing on and implementing decisions and sanctions against the disobedient. extensive power could thus be stabilized. in this sense religions did not so much transcend existing power organization as parallel them, institutionalizing the sacred, routinizing the charismatic (as weber put it), a second restriction on the autonomy of ideological power.third, the social sphere with which the religions were primarily concerned actually presupposed the existence of other power structures, particularly their communications infrastructures. the religions had to come to terms with, and use the facilities of, previous macropower structures.the way in which the exact power balance worked out, between the achievements and the restrictions i have identified, varied considerably among (he different religions. at one extreme, all managed to obtain nearmonopoly(368)powers over the regulation of their core social sphere, especially of the family and the life cycle. they have, indeed, retained many of these powers even to the present day. this was the fifth great achievement of ideological power.at the other extreme, they all made compromises with existing macropower structures, accepting the legitimacy of the structures and using them to control their own religious communities. thus, despite early universal religious pressures, the dominance of men over women and the overall fact of class dominance have not been challenged by the rise of the world religions. these were a fourth and a fifth restriction on the autonomy of ideological power.in between these extremes lay considerable variety. one rather particular, yet important, power was exercised through religious impact upon military power. in two of the cases there was a connection between a strong interpersonal ethic and military morale. in the case of islam the religious solidarity of arab cavalry conquered enormous territories, securing at a stroke the power achievements of islam over most of this area. in christian byzantium and western europe, religiousmilitary morale was confined within, and considerably reinforced, social hierarchies, increasing authority at the xpense of universalism. christianity was not merely compromising with worldly authorities, but also influencing their form. there proved indeed to be an enduring connection between these two religions and warfare, particularly between faith and the solidarity, fervor, and ferocity of the troops. it was usually to take rather nasty forms the infidel enemy was likely to be treated as less than fully human and butchered accordingly. this sixth achievement of ideological power reduced the universalism of the second achievement, indicating the contradictory nature of the achievements.another problem, and opportunity, was posed for the world religions by the general faltering of the extensive states that had witnessed their rise. the two processes were obviously connected. even if the states like the roman were also beset by other major problems, it did not help their chances of survival to have a competing community of identity and attachment operating within and across their boundaries. the chinese and the persian states had seized the opportunity to attach this community to themselves, and they had thus helped prevent the emergence of a world religion within their domains. in the remaining cases the states collapsed, repeatedly.in this context all the world religions achieved one common strategy: to secure nearmonopoly control of the infrastructure of literacy, sometimes extending it to all written documents, including laws. hinduism achieved most in this respect, followed by buddhism and islam, with christianity generally sharing control with the stronger states within its domain. this was the seventh great achievement of ideological power.in other respects the power struggle varied. only hinduism actually took over the structure of extensive controls, instituting caste as the distinctive mechanism through which extensive power could be exercised. substantial(369)parts of all major power relations, economic, political, and military, were developed by its own authority structure, weakening them and making india vulnerable to conquest, foreign political rule, and economic stagnation. but it was nevertheless the pinnacle of the achievements of ideological power. hinduism alone moved to an eighth achievement: the establishment of a ritual cosmology and a religious society. however, in doing this it completely subverted the second achievement, the popular, universal community. for caste carefully graded humanity into degrees of ultimate worth.neither buddhism nor islam nor christianity achieved this much. buddhism tended to remain more subordinate, operating in the interstices of hinduism in india and dependent on secular power elsewhere. islam and christianity often assumed economic, political, and military powers, but usually in a mold set by traditional secular forms, not by their own religious structure. they felt the force of the third restriction noted above. but in compromising, they kept alive and kicking a deep contradiction between their universal and their authoritarian natures, leaving them much more dynamic than was hinduism. in chapter 12 i explore the worldhistorical consequences of this dynamism.it is obvious that the diverse achievements of the world religions were not simply cumulative. a part of their achievement, a result of their struggles with secular authorities, was that humanity was led along several different tracks of development. nevertheless, there was a core to what they did: the mobilization of a popular community, differing considerably from anything hitherto seen in relatively extensive societies. they introduced a hierarchical intensity to extensive power relations. the people were mobilized into a normative community.i have emphasized the normative level, arguing that it enables us to cut through the sterile dualism of ideas or the spiritual versus the material. this is an issue i will discuss in more theoretical terms in volume iii. but it is incumbent on me to add a word here about durkheim, for that great sociologist underpins my argument. durkheim argued that stable social relationships require prior normative understandings among the participants. neither force nor mutual selfinterest offered a sufficient basis for stability. thus society depended on a normative, and ritual level, somewhat removed from the secular world of force, interests, exchanges, and calculations. society in the sense of social cooperation was sacred. durkheim then proceeded to interpret religion, concerned with the sacred, as merely the reflection of societys normative needs.it is a profound argument, but it is too limiting. for over the last chapters we have seen religion not merely as a reflection of society but also as actually creating the normative, ritual community that actually is a society. the christian ecumene, the islamic umma, the hindu caste system were all societies. the religions created a social order, a nomos, in situations in which the traditional regulators of society existing economic, ideological, political, and(370)military power relations were faltering. thus their cosmologies were, socially speaking, true. the world was ordered, and by their own conceptions of the sacred, their transcendent normative and ritual communities. i have extended, not rejected, durkheim.but let me back away from any suggestion that i can yet imitate durkheim by producing a general theory of the role of religion in society. so far, the most characteristic feature of religion has been its extraordinary unevenness. first it probably had a major, if somewhat murky, role in the federal, segmented power networks of the earliest regional civilizations. then during more than a millennium of larger empires of domination, its role was largely confined to the immanent strengthening of ruling classes. then in the next millennium it exploded transcendently in the shape of worldsalvationist religions.i explained the explosion less in terms of the fundamental and stable needs of individuals or societies for meaning, norms, cosmology, and so forth they may have such needs but they had precious little social significance for the previous millennium than in terms of the worldhistorical development of power techniques. only now could ideological messages be stabilized over extensive social spaces. only now emerged a series of fundamental contradictions between official and interstitial power networks of ancient empires. only now were the latter generating socially transcendent organizations in which a cosmology of a universal divinity and rational, individual salvation appeared plausible. this was, therefore, a single worldhistorical opportunity.even to say this is seemingly to overgeneralize. salvationist religion did not explode universally over this particular historical terrain. the chinese empire redirected religion to its own immanent ends. so did persia. the last of the hellenistic empires kept it damped down until they were overcome from outside. only christianity, islam, and hinduism developed transcendent power to overcome existing power structures. of these, christianity and islam adopted one peculiarly dynamic and contradictory power form, whereas hinduism and its offshoot buddhism adopted another, more monolithic form. thereafter, the developmental patterns of all the regions where these religions predominated differed extraordinarily. as i remarked at the beginning of the chapter, what had been up until now a broad family of societies across eurasia was splintered apart in this era.of course, the subsequent paths of these diverging societies were not unconnected to their prior characteristics and history: china lacked cosmopolitanism, india lacked imperial strength, europe had already witnessed more class struggle, and so forth. but one generalization can be made about the impact of salvationism in this period: it amplified such deviations. such was its enhancement of power techniques, of social solidarity, of the possibilities for diffuse communication both vertically and horzontally, that whoever seized its organizations could change their social structure more radically than had(371)probably ever been the case in prior history. a series of true revolutions rolled across eurasia, led by ideological power techniques and organizations. from then on, china, india, islam, and europe went very different ways. global comparative sociology always in my iew a difficult enterprise now becomes too difficult. from now on i chronicle only one case, christian europe and its offshoots.the chances of constructing a general theory directly from the social role of religion are therefore slim. it has had no general role of any significance, only worldhistorical moments. there may have been such moments amid the earliest civilizations, and there certainly were in the era of christ and saint paul, muhammad, and the brahmins and buddha. upon these men and their followers are built my notion of transcendent religious power. then i slightlysecularize it to include the more worldly flavor of the early civilizational cultures plus the possibility of analyzing modern ideologies (