Michael Mann

Quotes From

“The Autonomous Power of the State: Its Origins, Mechanisms, and Results” (1984)

• A co-ordinated administrative division between infantry, cavalry, and artillery, usually organized by the state, would normally defeat forces in which these activities were mixed up—at least in ‘high intensity’ warfare.#
• The laws of the feudal states in Europe were reinforced by rules descending from Roman law (especially property law), Christian codes of conduct, and Germanic notions of loyalty and honour.#
• Where stateless societies conquer ones with states, they either themselves develop a state or they induce social regress in the conquered society.#
• [Besides the state,] only three alternative bases for order exist: force, exchange, and custom, and none of these are sufficient in the long-run. At some point new exigencies arise for which custom is inadequate; at some point to bargain about everything in exchange relations is inefficient and disintegrating; while force alone, as Parsons emphasized, will soon ‘deflate’. In the long-run normally taken for granted, but enforceable, rules are necessary to bind together strangers or semi-strangers.#
• We can estimate that in Near Eastern imperial societies up to Alexander the Great the maximum unsupported march possible for an army was about 60-75 miles. Alexander and the Romans may have extended it to nearly 100 miles, and this remained the maximum until the eighteenth century in Europe when a massive rise in agricultural productivity provided the logistical basis for far wider operations. Before then further distances required more than one campaigning phase, or—far more common if some degree of political control was sought—it required elaborate negotiations with local allies regarding supplies.#