Speaker: Professor Michael Mann, Honorary Professor and Director of Research at the University of Cambridge and Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles
For further information about Professor Mann, please click this link.
Convenor: Professor Hazem Kandil, Department of Sociology, University of Cambridge
For further information about Professor Kandil, please click this link.
At this specially convened talk, Professor Mann will take as his starting point two main propositions: First, most wars have been irrational in terms of means or ends, and often of both together. As well as supposed material interests, “choices” for war are also constrained by emotions, ideologies, domestic politics, and path dependence. Second, wars have been almost invariably chosen by rulers and their entourages, regardless of the formal constitution of the state. Two further propositions derive from this. First, wars are rarely made by “states” or “peoples” (or indeed the capitalist class). Second, where wars are chosen rationally, this usually serves the material or ideal interests of ruling entourages.
Professor Mann’s talk will depend for these propositions firstly on political scientists’ quantitative research, generally on wars since 1816; and secondly on his own sample of long-run sequences of war across history: in the Roman Republic, ancient and imperial China, Japan from feudalism to 1945, Europe over a millennium until today, pre- and post-colonial Latin America, and the United States from the Civil War to today. The latter source will enable him to put individual wars into their historical context, for this is an arena of human activity in which path-dependence looms large.
