history as civilizational leaps has typically been a dialectical process of material advances followed by marcher lord conquest and a greater geographical stage (empire)

The initial polarity here is between ideology along Durkheimian lines as a power-enhancing means of solidarity and cohesion in social formations, and ideology as Weberian value-rationality, where there can be no adjudication between ultimate values.

The initial polarity here is between ideology along Durkheimian lines as a power-enhancing means of solidarity and cohesion in social formations, and ideology as Weberian value-rationality, where there can be no adjudication between ultimate values.

[...] Market fundamentalism is self-evidently false. Contra Karl Polanyi’s classic account, he says, capitalism does not homeopathically reform itself. Pure capitalism may be impossible, as Polanyi insisted; but in Mann’s view it needs actively to be tamed, regulated and modified and for that to happen there has to be struggle and countervailing forces, above all a vigorous lib-lab and union presence. The golden age was the product of just such a regulated capitalism put to good uses in the context of authoritative nation-states and powerful socio-political movements. Conversely, the Great Recession was a graphic example of what happens in the absence of such countervailing forces. Yet Mann also seems to say that the crisis of the time was real and that the golden age was over no matter who was in charge. If so, there were no progressive solutions to it, only bad ones, of which the neoliberal was the worst. At the same time, he suggests that causation also worked in the opposite direction. The question then becomes how far the crisis, once underway, was ultimately an ideological product of irrational neoliberalism and the obverse fatigue of the neo-Keynesians. It is hard to tell. Moreover, it is not apparent what could have been put forth instead, except defensive action and hoping for the best. Mann is perfectly aware that the essentials of ‘the golden age’ were no longer present and could not be recreated.

Neo-Keynesian success brought its own downfall in over-accumulation, over-production, and sundry other dislocations: OPEC price hikes in oil, stagflation, the beginnings of financialization, the transfer of production to low-wage areas, the end of social compromise and the appearance of the disastrous, neoliberal solution of market fundamentalism that would reach its peak in the 1980s and 90s.

Neo-Keynesian success brought its own downfall in over-accumulation, over-production, and sundry other dislocations: OPEC price hikes in oil, stagflation, the beginnings of financialization, the transfer of production to low-wage areas, the end of social compromise and the appearance of the disastrous, neoliberal solution of market fundamentalism that would reach its peak in the 1980s and 90s.

Neoliberalism failed to bring proper recovery (from the viewpoint of the many); and in any case came chiefly to mark the Anglophone countries along with the now globalized and enormously expanded financial sector.

it needs actively to be tamed, regulated and modified and for that to happen there has to be struggle and countervailing forces, above all a vigorous lib-lab and union presence

He disregards the important German Ordoliberalen, but the attack on neoliberalism is well taken.

Yet this is largely belied by his account of its actual trajectory.

Lessons learnt and the demands of sacrificing masses forced advanced capitalism after the War into a golden age of reform and relative equality, regulated by cooperating nation-states under the benign hegemony of the US and by the framework of the Bretton Woods system.

an ideological product of irrational neoliberalism and the obverse fatigue of the neo-Keynesians

If the golden age is gone, its larger historical framework nevertheless remains, albeit precariously. This is the structure that has marked, unevenly, the leading edge of collective power ever since the Middle Ages, for which Mann’s infelicitous term is a ‘multipower actor civilization,’ decentralized and on the whole non-imperial, productively as opposed to lethally competitive: first Europe, then the West, then perhaps the World. Today the space for marcher lords—outsiders or borderland primitives who could suddenly take over the advanced centres and turn them into something more powerful and dynamic, only to fall to new outsiders—has vanished. The last marcher lords were the empires of the US and USSR, which took centre stage as a result of World War II. However powerful China has become, it will not be another marcher lord. For the PRC is already on the inside. It may well become the new ‘leading edge’, but it is and will remain part of a multipower actor civilization (recent US unilateralism being doomed to failure).

Mann challenges world-systems theorists on the issue of decline: the recession of the 1970s, it turns out, was an opportunity for the US to delay the crisis for several decades, permitting it to profit extensively from its seigneurial position

‘Revolutions are rarely a good idea’, as he typically puts it in bluff style. They tend to comport lots of ideology, in a bad sense.

Most Americans had, to be sure, a shallow grasp of foreign realities and were prone to a fearful anti-communism—a case of Durkheimian ideological excess, perhaps.

The master signifier was not ‘empire’ (politically inadmissible except, chiefly, as a designation for the Soviet Union) but ‘security’.