Michael Mann is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Power in the 21st Century: Conversations with John Hall (2011), Incoherent Empire (2003) and Fascists (Cambridge, 2004). His book The Dark Side of Democracy (Cambridge, 2004) was awarded the Barrington Moore Award of the American Sociological Association for the best book in comparative and historical sociology in 2006.

Preface to the second edition; 1. Introduction; 2. Economic and ideological power relations; 3. A theory of the modern state; 4. The Industrial Revolution and old regime liberalism in Britain, 1760-1880; 5. The American Revolution and the institutionalisation of confederal capitalist liberalism; 6. The French Revolution and the bourgeois nation; 7. Conclusion to chapters 4-6: the emergence of classes and nations; 8. Geopolitics and international capitalism; 9. Struggle over Germany, I: Prussia and authoritarian national capitalism; 10. Struggle over Germany, II: Austria and confederal representation; 11. The rise of the modern state, I: quantitative data; 12. The rise of the modern state, II: the autonomy of military power; 13. The rise of the modern state, III: bureaucratization; 14. The rise of the modern state, IV: the expansion of civilian scope; 15. The resistible rise of the British working class, 1815-80; 16. The middle class nation; 17. Class struggle in the second industrial revolution, 1880-1914, I: Great Britain; 18. Class struggle in the second industrial revolution, 1880-1914, II: comparative analysis of working class movements; 19. Class struggle in the second industrial revolution, 1880-1914, III: the peasantry; 20. Theoretical conclusion: classes, states, nations, and the sources of social power; 21. Empirical culmination - over the top: geopolitics, class struggle, and World War I; Appendix.