Infrastructural power in financial governance: Its meaning, applications, and varieties

Michael Mann’s concept of infrastructural power is increasingly invoked to grapple with how state capacity has been leveraged upon processes of financialization since the 1970s. Yet while furnishing new insights about state-market hybridity, the literature risks losing sight of Mann’s historical vision, which concerns the transformations of state-society relations throughout the modern era. This chapter restores the intended scope of Mann’s concept by situating it within the intellectual project of his Sources of Social Power quadrilogy. Finding inspiration in Mann’s Weberian Ideological-Military-Political-Economic (IEMP) model of the evolution of social power, the chapter proposes ideal types of infrastructural power in financial governance – instrumental, communicative and network-forming – illustrated with historical and contemporary examples.