Michel Mann《社会权力来源vol.4：全球化》的9点评论

Sewell, William H. Jr. 2013. ‘The Age of American Empire’. Contemporary Sociology 42(4):495–99.【对Mann vol.4的书评专栏中的一篇】

 该专栏包括：

Marx, Weber, and Mann

Randall Collins

Routes or Rivals? Social Citizenship, Capitalism, and War in the Twentieth Century

Dylan Riley

The Age of American Empire

William H. Sewell, Jr.

The Sources of My Sources 【回应】

Michael Mann

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Contemporary Sociology 

Vol 42, Issue 4, pp. 482 - 484

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1. Mann的四卷（从新石器时代到全球化的二战后世界），实际上是从一个小caging写到了一个global cage。

2. Mann的四卷里，在第1卷中，经常是一页写一百年；到了第2-4卷，平均下来就5-9页/年了。

3. 第四卷虽叫《全球化》，写的是二战后的世界格局，但其实可称为The Age of American Empire，焦点只有美国+苏联/中国。美国部分甚至还专门写两章，只关注1945-1980。苏联和中国也只是为了反衬罢了。

4. Mann是怎么分析看待二战结束时的美国的呢？

——Three facts should make this clear. First, in 1945, the United States, which had 6 percent of the world’s population, produced an astounding 35 percent of its GDP (p. 270). Second, in the years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States has accounted for nearly half of the world’s military spending ... Finally, although the American share of world GDP has shrunk since 1945, its dominance in the financial and monetary sphere has been maintained, even enhanced.

5.但是，Mann也只认为美国的霸权地位是偶连的，例如未受战争影响。

Mann points out that America’s imperial dominance was a highly contingent consequence of the Second World War. The United States, safe from attack behind its vast Atlantic and Pacific moats, came through the war with its industrial might enhanced while bombing and intense ground war gutted the productive capacities of the other combatants.

6. 特色在于，美国帝国主义是非领地的，外交型、经济霸权主义。

America has dominated by a combination of “gunboat diplomacy,” rule by proxies, economic imperialism, and hegemony, which Mann defines as the acceptance of American leadership as benign or natural. The mix of these strategies has varied by region and over time.

7. Mann对美国的当代发展基本上是悲观的，例如麦卡锡主义，但其发展的positive一面是60s的民权运动的成果identity politics。

Mann has a very dark view of American history in this period ... I agree that the Cold War anti-communism of the 1950s was deeply oppressive and that the years since 1980 have seen a durable rightward turn. ...

In Mann’s view, the sole positive development in the United States in these years was the civil rights movement, which brought about major changes in the racial order of the United States and helped diminish the power of racism as an ideology all over the globe.

8. 但美国最重要的成果其实是新自由主义.。

But over the past three decades, America’s most important contribution to world political and ideological development has not been identity politics—it has been neoliberalism.

7. Mann提醒，不应夸大新自由主义的全球力量。因为在英国和美国之外，新自由主义要和不同的政体类型混合在一起。而即使在美国，2008年金融危机，便是对新自由主义的最大挑战。

Mann properly warns that the global power of neoliberalism should not be exaggerated. Outside the United States and the United Kingdom, where it has been applied in relatively pure form, neoliberalism has been mixed with a whole array of quite different policies—continued Communist party economic guidance in China, state-sponsored developmental regimes elsewhere in Asia, ... The current global economic crisis, which Mann dubs “the great neoliberal recession” should, in principle, have challenged the dominance of both the neoliberal model and its American sponsor. Yet so far there has been no sustained challenge to the neoliberal international order—it has remained intact

8. Mann也有一些关于全球秩序的重要结论，包括：

——欧洲在二战后变成最和平的区域

——民族国家这一形式，在全球取得了决定性的胜利

——Mann甚至承认，二战后至今是a favorable era of human history.

——racism的全球衰落

——残酷的毁灭性战争正在被取代为其它combat形式

——America has acted as the period’s chief aggressor

9. 有趣的是，Mann的最后一个人类故事，是以气候危机为结尾了，意味着千/万年来文明的人类社会的自我消解的可能性正在出现。

At the end of the long saga in which humanity amasses ever-greater concentrations of social power, we are faced with the possibility of a human-induced dissolution of civilization itself

（Sociological理论大缸第190期）

链接：

本合辑 预告】全球化社会学三题：美帝、新自由主义和劳工

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