C. Wright Mills
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Charles Wright Mills (August 28, 1916, Waco, Texas – March 20, 1962, Nyack, New York) was an American sociologist. Mills is best remembered for studying the structure of Power in the U.S. in his book, The Power Elite. Mills was concerned with the responsibilities of intellectuals in post-World War II society, and advocated relevance and engagement over disinterested academic observation, as a "public intelligence apparatus" in challenging the policies of the institutional elites in the "Big Three", the economic, political and military.
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[edit] Life and work
Mills graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 1939 and received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1941. After a stint at the University of Maryland, College Park, he took a faculty position at Columbia University in 1946, which he kept, despite controversy, until his untimely death.
The New Men of Power: America's Labor Leaders (1948) studies the Labor Metaphysic and the dynamic of labor leaders cooperating with business officials. Mills concludes that labor is appeased by bread & butter, has given up structural challenge while becoming comfortable as part of the system. With such incorporation in the system, he saw them playing a (be it a somewhat subordinate one) role as the New Men of Power among the US Power Elite.
White Collar: The American Middle Classes (1951) contends that bureaucracies have overwhelmed the individual city worker, robbing him or her of all independent thought and turning him into a sort of a robot that is oppressed but cheerful. He or she gets a salary, but becomes alienated from the world because of his or her inability to affect or change it.
The Power Elite (1956) describes the relationship between the political, military, and economic elite (people at the pinnacles of these three institutions), noting that these people share a common world view, 1) the "military metaphysic"- a military definition of reality, possess 2) "class identity"- recognizing themselves separate and superior to the rest of society, have 3) interchangibility: i.e. they move within and between the three institutional structures and hold interlocking directorates 4) cooptation/socialization: of prospective new members is done based on how well they "clone" themselves socially after such elites. These elites in the "big three" institutional orders have an "uneasy" alliance based upon their "community of interests" driven by the military metaphysic, which has transformed the economy into a 'permanent war economy'.
The Sociological Imagination (1959) describes a mindset—the sociological imagination—for doing sociology that stresses being able to connect individual experiences and societal relationships. The three components that form the sociological imagination are 1. History: how a society came to be and how it is changing and how history is being made in it 2. Biography: the nature of "human nature" in a society; what kind of people inhabit a particular society 3. Social Structure: how the various institutional orders in a society operate, which ones are dominant and how are they held together and how they might be changing etc. The Sociological Imagination gives the one possessing it the ability to look beyond their local environment and personality to wider social structures and a relationship between history, biography and social structure. The appendix "On Intellectual Craftsmanship" gives an impressive insight into what a sociologist as a social scientist whenever working creatively (like an artist) is able to work out.
Other important works include: The Causes of World War Three (1958), Listen, Yankee: The Revolution in Cuba (1960), and The Marxists (1962).
[edit] Outlook
Mills is often described as a Marxist because of his emphasis on social classes and their roles in historical progress. Mills, however, more closely identified with the work of Max Weber. Moreover, Mills believed that societies could improve through broad social policies, inspired by intellectuals and enacted democratically by the populace.
Mills argues that micro and macro levels of analysis can be linked together by the sociological imagination, which enables its possessor to understand the large historical sense in terms of its meaning for the inner life and the external career of a variety of individuals. Individuals can only understand their own experiences fully if they locate themselves within their period of history. The key factor is the combination of private problems with public issues: the combination of troubles that occur within the individual’s immediate milieu and relations with other people with matters that have to do with institutions of an historical society as a whole.
According to Mills, in modern society, the centralization of power and the men who head government, corporations, the armed forces and the unions are closely linked. The means of power at the disposal of centralized decision makers have greatly increased. The Power Elite is made up of political, economic and military leaders. Eisenhower’s “military-industrial complex” gives a clear image of the entwinement of these bases of power.
Mills shares with Marxist sociology and elite theorists the view that society is divided rather sharply and horizontally between the powerful and powerless. He also shares their concerns for alienation, the effects of social structure on the personality and the manipulation of people by the mass media. At the same time however Mills does not regard property (economic power) as the main source of conflict in society.
[edit] Further reading
- C. Wright Mills, an American Utopian (1983). Irving Louis Horowitz. ISBN 0-02-915010-8
- C. Wright Mills: Letters and Autobiographical Writings (2000). Kathryn and Pamela Mills (eds). ISBN 0-520-23209-7
- Radical Nomad: C. Wright Mills and His Times (2006). Tom Hayden with Contemporary Reflections by Stanley Aronowitz, Richard Flacks, and Charles Lemert. ISBN 1-59451-202-7
- Intellectuals in Action: The Origins of the New Left and Radical Liberalism, 1945-1970 (2002). Kevin Mattson. ISBN 027102206X
- "Mills's The Power Elite 50 Years Later." By G. William Domhoff in Contemporary Sociology, November 2006.
- "A Mills Revival?", by Stanley Aronowitz, Logos Journal, Summer 2003.
