Welcome to Card Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I'm the editor-in-chief of Current Affairs Magazine.

I am joined today by Michael Mann. He is one of the world's leading sociologists. He's distinguished research professor of sociology emeritus at UCLA, an honorary professor at the University of Cambridge.

His latest book on wars is the culmination of an exhaustive effort to understand the phenomenon of war across human societies and hopefully provide us some lessons on how

humanity might avoid new wars in our own time, a hugely important task given the stakes

in the nuclear age. He joins us today, Professor Michael Mann, thank you so much for joining us on

Current Affairs. Thank you for having me. Let me first ask you, what, so when you sat down to

begin this project, what was it about war that you wanted to understand?

Well, my work in general has been based on the notion that there are four kinds of power in human societies, ideological, economic, military, and political.

And I have written quite a lot about military power, but rather curiously, I realized

that when I reached the end of my series of books on the sources of social power, I realized

that I hadn't actually dealt adequately with what militaries are supposed to do,

which is still people in wars.

So I decided to plug that hole.

But like most books that I write, it took longer.

I did far more research than I'd expected to do.

And so this has consumed my research time for about eight years before publication.

Yeah, I mean, some books come across as the author explaining what they already kind of knew at the beginning of the process of writing the book.

This book comes across, and you can tell me if this is wrong, as the process of writing the book being an effort to understand the phenomenon that you're covering.

It seems like in the process of putting the together, you begin not with the answer,

but with the question of, you know, why are there wars? Why do they come about?

Yes, I think that's exactly right.

I should add one thing, which is that many sociologists kind of study themselves

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