On His Travels

What is the link between mobility and academic study? Does a peripatetic lifestyle encourage a crossing of disciplines, the borders of history, economics, anthropology just so many roads we traverse?

It starts early. Mann the father a travelling salesman; Mann the boy sent from Newcastle to Manchester Grammar School. Later there’s travel between Cambridge and Essex, the university separating husband and first wife. His second marriage follows this same pattern; Essex and now London stretching the married couple across country. Finally they settle in UCLA. Odd that the city of the car should end this man’s journeys; though the initial reaction - of course! - was to move again. After Madrid and a little time in England, they, at last, decide to make Los Angeles their permanent home. Whew!1

Does he stay long enough to visit the libraries….

We establish this fact: Michael Mann doesn’t fit in. Not a hard worker as an undergraduate; his PHD is rejected (‘referred’ is the polite Oxbridge term). Not many top-flight theorists have had that honour. Luckily it’s not the end of this road. He grafts, exercises his talent, and his gifts recognised Cambridge him accept onto their academic bus. Though not for long. That restlessness returns, and he takes a trip to Colchester. Fed up with the place (and no wonder!) he leaves for the LSE, where department heads Donald McRae and Terence Morris suffocate his prospects.2 Time to move! UCLA seems something of an accident.3 But why stop in LA, break those habits of a lifetime? A good knit of people, who give him both the space and the stimulation - Perry Anderson, Bob Brenner - to write his magnum opus, is the answer. Or am I overplaying the intellectual? I suppose it's more banal: even a peripatetic needs to settle his family in neighbourhood and school.

Mann calls himself an individualist. A consequence, surely, of so much travel. It also seems reflected in the work; which sits, a little uncomfortably perhaps, between sociology, history and anthropology. No one subject his nation.

He begins as a typical sociological fact-man, studying the culture of a British factory as it moved from Birmingham to Banbury (these the years when industrial culture and industrial psychology were believed the secret of industrial success).4 But already there are maverick signs: not quite anthropology - too much reliance on the survey - yet more than number-crunching, as he observes the men at work (though he doesn’t pick up the tools and don overalls). To interview and to observe will induce some interest in beliefs and opinions; so taking the eye off those monumental theories that overshadow the subject.5 Though, at this early stage, the sociologist wins out; and something of the human is lost, as his attention turns to the production-line of generalisation (sociology’s ‘profit motive’). Similar faults and folds in the anthropological strata - a Firth, Lienhardt, Evans-Pritchard - but these are less pronounced - they camp out on savannahs not sierras -; while theory is closer to the surface; this why Firth can put such emphasis on the individual.6 So many ethnographical details…sometimes we need an artist’s eye to shift the facts, organise the shapes, create the beautiful insights: even this fan finds Firth’s work a little too data-dry at times: take me to the well of an idea! But it is the details, when used to create new theories, that will decide a thinker’s fate; elevate him to greatness, banish her to bibliographical oblivion.

How get the balance right? Susan Sociologist’s weakness is her tendency to occupy the two extremes of intellectual endeavour: Data and Theory. The data selected not for peculiarity but shifted for quantitative patterns; the big theories are apt to ignore the ‘minute perceptions’, so important to Leibniz in understanding how all life is lived.7 It is to see London from the top of the Shard. Is there a lower but equally abstract view? Always, if time taken to find it. Michael Mann’s work an attempt to select a more suitable building for social analysis; thus he alights on Big Ben and Westminster Abbey, the Ministry of Defence and the old Stock Exchange. Close enough to pavement and park he sees actual people in picnic or talk.

His omnivorous reading is guided by a loose theoretical framework - his own - which he controls by concentrating on the facts.8 Always an emphasis on the facts. When getting train or plane we’d better buy the right tickets….

This man breaks into a book like a burglar, stealing, not jewels - those flashy theories - but knick-knacks, those telltale signs of its owner's character. We salute the screen. This sociologist almost a writer.9 His method is likewise idiosyncratic: he reads a book until it ceases to offer anything new; by which is meant, it no longer opens up new territories in the mind. When he meets an old path, finds himself walking along a familiar motorway, he puts the monograph down. It suggests an intellect searching, growing; never still; that irrepressible urge towards new destinations. An open city, not a gated community.

Does he get the balance right? Too soon to tell: I haven’t read anything…but I will. This Mann is interesting.

Are there clues here? What strikes is the absence of anecdote and character study. Grandparents don't exist - no reference to either side. Parents are quickly skimmed; his mother reduced to a room with the central-heating on; his father simply an influence, with his intelligence and his political ideas, that Rochdale liberalism. School seems empty of people. While no peers are recalled from Oxford. A.H. Halsey, John Goldthorpe, Robin Blackburn, and many other academics populate his post-graduate career; but in this gallery they appear as poor sketches not rich portraits: Goldthorpe is a forceful character, McRae a ‘jerk’. It suggests that such men - also Gellner, Hall, Anderson - exist only as academics. 

Let’s pause the film for a moment… Susan Sociologist wants to give us her definition of a human being: man is a machine for producing concepts.10 Pause off….

This is not to say there is no human feeling - seminars are followed by dinners, and clearly there is much conviviality - but human relations are mediated through ideas, which are the dominating, controlling factor.11 Under the arc lamp of conceptual analysis the rest of our personalities vanish in the shade.

Are there consequences? The main drivers of human behaviour, custom, habit, and inertia - Bertrand Russell, with his usual acuteness, once remarked that much of the important things in life can be explained by laziness - are left out. They are not included in Michael Mann’s four forms of social power. A caricature is thus drawn of the human subject.

The conclusion of his early work - workers have a pragmatic resignation to social inequality - shows that he both knows his stuff - the value of survey data - but also that he doesn’t know the workers quite well enough: there is little intimacy in formal interviews. For sure, in a Left-wing milieu, where Marxist alienation had become the cult concept, such a conclusion would appear radical; a little outré. But to a boy growing up in the Valleys this insight seems off-key. I never expected to make it to the big time, and sought my life’s interests elsewhere, in the small towns of social fortune and social favour. Cambridge? The Tate? The Bank of England…did I once think these possible? No! Let’s go further. Such an attitude was not conceptualised - there was no ‘resignation’. Where fabulous opportunities are not possible there are no fabulous opportunities to lose; I didn’t mourn, ‘resign’ myself to not appearing on the BBC (as now I don’t hunger about going to the Moon; I leave that to fools like Musk and Bezos). In my Valley village the public realm hardly existed as a participatory realm: we were mere observers, armchair kibitzers, who voted now and again.12 Politicians, journalists, intellectuals? They were them; a more or less alien species. We worked, then got on with the essentials: family, holidays, a few beers in the club. To spend good thought on the ‘airy-fairy’ stuff, as my mother might say, was a waste of time and energy. Nothing to do with us! And note the emphasis: politicos, journalists and intellectuals were crooks, fakes and fools. Easy to turn giants into dwarfs if they block our road. Yes! That’s right, we looked down on such characters. No resignation here boyo! 

Mann has a different take. The workers’ acceptance of the status quo - that ‘resignation’ - is a conscious and instrumental act, a clever strategy to deal with a lack of power, and the bad feelings that result. A typical misconception, often seen with tourists to foreign lands. Although class is largely to blame - the bourgeoisie are educated to see life in general terms, with the stress on ideas not the emotions13- the intellectuals exacerbate this error. Too much time in the conceptual bar. Though not a heavy drinker - compared to many of his colleagues our Mann is tea-total - nevertheless he likes a glass: behaviours have to be poured into the pint pot of a concept. But to give a purpose to what is indifference (and neglect) is create something where there is nothing; it is to transform habits, centred on private life, into a conscious socio-political act. This distorts the picture massively. In the Valley much of public life is simply accepted, like the mountains, chapels and the local Tesco. They just exist, and always will exist, while we absorb their influences and navigate around whatever irks. There is the occasional moan; which can turn into a rant, when given a megaphone - those interviews, the survey data -; but this is to mistake a stage for the home. Ideas? Resignation? A signpost we past at 30 miles an hour.

Too many ideas in Susan Sociologist’s head. Professor Michael Mann is wiser, but, like many academics, he is projecting one class view (that of the professional bourgeoisie) onto others who occupy a quite different culture.

Something about Mann’s characterisation retains a flavour of that once (ideologically) popular ‘alienated self’, with its fast friend ‘false-consciousness’ (it goes by other names today). Everyone is expected to challenge the system; be distressed when their efforts are rebuffed. A perpetual discontent because someone has switched the power supply off the escalator to social success. I believe this a fundamental error. These factory workers are not like the middle class, who have been educated into dissatisfaction. Schooling for those who rule requires self-assertion, an ability to dominate, some insouciance about power, with its effects on those you change, coerce, and sometimes ruin.14 A certain indifference has to be bred towards places, cultures, even people; it is how rulers cope with the consequences of their actions.15 At the same time such self-assertion is said to be in the name of a school, an institution, one’s country…easy to see how, with such training, institutional obstacles, that are a bar to one’s own promotion, can be generalised as societal ills, bad for everyone. An elite education conflates the self with the public good; the reason obtuse egotists can convince themselves they are selfless warriors for social justice. The selfish impulse generates illusions about one’s motivation, which it disguises with social concern; and these attitudes created early on, the middle class child taught to confuse their own advancement with that of the human race.16 Not wholly wrong for some characters, or when transferred to the world of ideas; but mostly camouflage for the majority, who outside the classroom rarely take ideas seriously;17 it is why most pupils turn out accountants and managers not saints or philosophers. 

You stop me. Complain I’m off topic…. No no, my friend, I am taking the long way round, so you get the wider view.

For the successful such an education is ideal; it produces a perfect fit with one’s society.18 But such schooling can debilitate. For those kids who don’t fulfil their classroom dreams life can turn sour, when forced to confront the brick wall of failure, or the privet hedge of moderate prosperity. They were meant to rule! So why stuck in suburbia…. By mid-thirties many know they will never reach the top. Taught, trained, conditioned to work their guts out in the belief they’ll touch the highest reaches, many can only look at wealth and power on the television screen. So close, but far more than a train-ride away…. Resignation? No! More like resentment, even…‘alienation’! 

You smile, you know where I’m going with this…. Alienation is a concept that belongs to the elite, it is hard-wired into their education. Manageable in the old days, it looks like getting out of hand today; as generations suffer the shock of an absolute decline in money, honour, prestige, authority.19 One reason why the Left has been embraced by the professional middle class in recent decades; the Left no longer to serve the workers - who have enjoyed the rise in living standards (I speak from experience) - but to play to the fantasies of radical social transformation, of revolution; that dream of a return to a previous autonomy, and the wealth and authority it secured.20 The Left. An ambulance that drives the wounded bourgeoisie all over our political landscape.

Because most workers don’t take a close interest in politics, the Left-leaning parties have got away with this shift in social allegiance for a long time. This may be changing. Trump and Johnson are signs that the workers are no longer asleep on our agora’s steps. At last they are heeding the lessons they have been told to learn in the classroom and on telly.

Michael Mann cannot be accused of disenchantment. A success, no matter how measured, he has not just fulfilled but exceeded his early promise. Can we view it within the context of his childhood, adolescence and all that travel? A lower middle class background; a rapid rise in living standards - his father became a director -; an exceptional grammar school education; that stint at Oxford; followed by his own peculiar odyssey around the inner ocean of Anglo-Americana: these are moves not just across space but class and culture. Such changes have produced their effects. It’s why he could look at the factory differently from his Left-wing colleagues. Also why he’s an individualist, and has escaped the usual academic categories; thus his insistence on different but equal forces of social power - ideology, politics, violence, economics - at a time when Monsieur Marx, Herr Smith and Dr Hayek were insisting on the primacy of cash and card. This chap is thinking for himself; such thinking - crucially - touched by the worlds he passes through. Not all the clever are so open to such influences: cleverness as likely cut off the antennae as grow them. That said, Mann is not quite a writer; no littérateur of sociology this, alive to atmosphere, scene, taste; he is not Richard Sennett, our Proust of social theory. We can’t have everything! There is a lot here. To look clear-sightedly at the violence of modern life, a violence encouraged by the Left, to which he is belongs, a Left that rejoices in revolution, those earthquakes bringing societies down, unleashing their barbarism, again suggests a loner in the academic field. Something of ordinary life has entered the campus gates.21

We’re calling up the Ellis Bookshop, as Alan finishes the interview, asking if they’ve got anything by this professor fellow, Michael Mann….

Interview: Michael Mann

________

Notes

1. This wasn't the usual pattern for academics. They often led highly sedentary and conservative lifestyles: A.H. Halsey, Decline of Donnish Dominion: The British Academic Profession in the Twentieth Century.

2. See John A. Hall’s description of McRae in Ernest Gellner.

3. A curious feature of many of these interviews: how much is decided by luck or accident. 

4. The classic history is Daniel Bell’s The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties. Today, technology by itself is believed to do the business; a point strongly made by Evgeny Morozov in The Net Delusion: How Not to Liberate the World. Though beware: this tract is written for readers of The Economist.

5. Geoffrey Hawthorn, Enlightenment and Despair: A history of social theory.

6. See his classic The Gods of Tikopia.

7. New Essays on Human Understanding, edited by Peter Remnant and Jonathan Bennett.

8. His technique is similar to Max Weber’s, who used the work of historians to develop his own sociological theories. For insightful comment, see Mann’s bête noire, Donald McRae, Weber.

9. For a sociologist who is a writer: Richard Hoggart. In addition to his work read Stefan Collini’s affectionate portrait in English Pasts: Essays in History and Culture.

10. Does it all come from Comte?

11. Leibniz is the archetype. There are wonderful passages in the New Essays which clearly brings out this bias; due in large part to the contrast with Locke’s empiricism, with its stress on the senses: for Locke reason is no longer the driver of the cart but its passenger.

12. We could argue that one of the tragedies of Twitter is that it fosters the illusion of public participation. We are so close, just a tweet away from power….

13. Wonderfully described in the contrast between ‘common’ Aunt Hat and middle class Ellen, in Nina Bawden’s A Little Love, A Little Learning. Although once again, the big contrast is with the present times. As education has gone down the populist route it has taken on characteristics of the popular sensibility, with its emphasis on feelings. No longer to look at life as it is - Ellen - but to imagine what you want it to be: Aunt Hat.

14. It is why religion is so important to elite groups: they need a faith to drain off their guilt.

15. The master artist of this mentality is early Claude Chabrol. See my This is Love for an analysis of one of these films.

16. For a more abstract discussion, see my Milton Keynes. Plato’s emphasis on the organic unity of the City is the natural expectation of an elite: their interests, beliefs, actions will fuse with those of the polis, because they are all essentially one.

17. Leibniz has a wonderful phrase for this: ‘blind thoughts’. New Essays.

18. The archetypical character is Innstetten in Theodor Fontane’s Effi Briest. Of my multiple pieces on this extraordinary novel, see One Smile was Enough, It was an Earthquake and Freedom Against Freedom (dealing with Fassbinder’s cinematic interpretation).

19. For the proletarianisation of the academic industry: Decline of Donnish Dominion.

20. Marvellous insights in the older Socialism, before it became intoxicated with State-worship, can be found in Fiona MacCarthy’s marvellous biography of Eric Gill. Gill, like many middle class intellectuals of the time, intellectualised the crafts, which he turned into a religion. It is an example of what happens when the educated enter working class trades and lives: habits and its by-products are transformed into conscious acts and dedicated purposes.

21. This at a time when those gates are bolted and guarded against the outside world: David Bromwich, Politics by Other Means: Higher Education and Group Thinking.