C. Wright Mills Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

American scholar Charles W. Mills (1916–1962) was one of the most influential sociologists of the twentieth century. Although he died at the early age of forty-six, he left a body of work that has not been equaled for its breadth of analysis and intellectual honesty. Mills was paradoxical: He was a radical who broke away from radical traditions, both a pessimist and an optimist, a sociologist who had little patience with academic minutiae, and an intellectual who was skeptical of intellectualism.

Mills was born in Waco, Texas, and did his doctoral work in sociology at the University of Wisconsin, where he came under the tutelage of German scholar Hans J. Gerth. Gerth led Mills to study the sociology of knowledge associated with the Frankfurt school, and over the next decade the pair produced a number of works, including From Max Weber (1946) and the groundbreaking 1953 Character and Social Structure. At the same time, Mills’s opposition to World War II (1939–1945) branded him as an antiwar radical; he held this stance that he held for the rest of his life.

In 1945 Mills moved to New York City to join sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld’s Bureau of Applied Social Research and later the Department of Sociology at Columbia University. Here he joined forces with J. B. S. Hardman, veteran labor journalist, who inspired in Mills a brief interest in the trade union movement. Mills then moved to the most mature phase of his writing, producing three great works: The New Men of Power: America’s Labor Leaders (1948), White Collar: America’s Middle Classes (1951), and The Power Elite (1956). In The New Men of Power Mills contended that labor had effectively renounced its opposition role and had become a subaltern of the capitalist system. In White Collar he expressed the belief that bureaucracies had overwhelmed the working classes, robbing them of all independent thinking and making them mindless robots. Power was concentrated exclusively in an axis of evil: the military, corporations, and politics. Yet, Mills shared the hope with many of his militant peers that history was still open to human intervention and that there was nothing inevitable about the corruption of the body politic. A condemnation of America’s economic, political, and military elites, The Power Elite explored the insular nature of groups in power and claimed that they were predisposed to use unwarranted military force.

Mills followed up these works with two polemical tracts: The Causes of World War III (1959), which assailed U.S. foreign policy, and Listen, Yankee (1960), which defended Fidel Castro’s Cuba against attacks from the administration of American president John F. Kennedy. His last two scholarly books, The Sociological Imagination (1959) and The Marxists (1963), dealt with the cultural apparatus of the intelligentsia.

In Mills’ Sociological Imagination (1959), he excoriated the tendency of sociologists (and political scientists) to be obsessed with grand theories and abstract empiricism. However, he had a high sense of mission himself, not only his own but that of intellectuals in general and social scientists in particular. He considered science and politics as vocations. Because all other classes were mired in mediocrity, it was up to the intellectuals to deploy reason and intervene in imposing social order. Political philosophers needed not only to analyze society but also articulate an ethic and formulate ideals. Mills was not cynical about the possibility of social regeneration and felt that humans needed more rationality and enlightenment.

The central category in Mills’s social thought was that of power, especially the structures that helped to perpetuate it and the mechanisms by which it was achieved and retained by the elites. He was a state theorist to whom the elites were an institution in themselves. Although corporations possessed some autonomy, the state was the principal locus of power. Thus the three institutional orders that are closely linked, but spatially and historically independent, are the military, corporate, and political. Together these three constitute a ruling class whose interests coincide with that of the ruled.

Mills was also a pamphleteer and a radical journalist. In the last decade of his life, he concentrated on manifestos and indictments of the prevailing social and political order to the exclusion of scholarly works. He rejected the prevailing conception of the scholar as politically neutral and uncommitted. Mills was an unabashed partisan whose values infused his research and writing, although he continued to be dedicated to critical theory and dispassionate, empirical inquiry. He was an inveterate critic of “old ideas,” among which he included communism, soft liberalism, and market economics.

Mills was the best social commentator on the troubled 1960s, an era that exemplified the best and the worst of the new radicalism. He articulated the function of the intellectual in a society that was undergoing upheaval, and his final exhortation was for the new left to fight against the tired orthodoxies of the past.

Bibliography:

Brewer, John D. C.Wright Mills and the Ending of Violence. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
Clekac, Peter. Radical Paradoxes: Dilemmas of the American Left 1945–70. New York: Harper and Row, 1973.
Hayden,Tom. Radical Nomad: C.Wright Mills and his Times. New York: New York Press, 2006.
Horowitz, Irving L. C.Wright Mills: An American Utopian. New York: Free Press, 1983.
Oakes, Guy, and Arthur J.Vidich. Collaboration, Reputation and American Academic Life. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999.
Tilman, Rick. C.Wright Mills: A Native Radical and His American Intellectual Roots. University Park: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984.
Veblen, Dewey and Mills: An Intellectual Relationship. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003.

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