This brief contribution addresses only one of the problems raised by Michael Mann's imaginative and substantial discussion of the military phenomenon in his magnum opus (Mann 1986; 1993). The problem concerns the conceptual status Mann confers upon that phenomenon by considering it as the locus of a distinctive, relatively self-standing source of social power, on which it falls occasionally to play an autonomous role in the making and unmaking of societies, and which in any case interacts with the other sources as the custodian of a resource – organized coercion – which they don't control while it does.

Put otherwise, I question, below, Mann's decision to stage his show with four protagonists – IEMP – rather than with the usual trinity of political, economic and ideological power. In doing so, he expressly and, one might say, gleefully sets himself against the trinitarian orthodoxy. I contend that, on purely conceptual grounds, this a doubtful decision, though I concede that it has occasionally some justification in specific empirical circumstances.

In making that decision, I believe, Mann was carried away by the intensity of his reaction against the social theorizing prevalent at the time he conceived and planned Sources of Social Power, for there the military phenomenon was sometimes ignored, more frequently treated diffidently and without an adequate sense of its nature and significance.