C. Wright Mills
From Philosopedia
C. Wright Mills (28 August 1916 - 20 March 1962)
Charles Wright Mills was born in Waco, Texas, and received his A.B. and M.A. at the University of Texas, Austin. In 1941, he earned his Ph. D. at the University of Wisconsin. From 1941 to 1945 he taught at the University of Maryland, after which he taught at Columbia University until his death.
Mills was considered controversial because as a critic he advocated comparative world sociology. He criticized intellectuals for not using their freedom responsibly by working for social change. The Power Elite (1956) referred to the power structure of post-war American society in terms of an oligarchy. The Nation (8 March 1958) wrote of his freethinking humanities humanism:
- As a social and as a personal force, religion has become a dependent variable. It does not originate; it reacts. It does not denounce; it adapts. It does not set forth new models of conduct and sensibility; it imitates. Its rhetoric is without deep appeal; the worship it organizes is without piety. It has become less a revitalization of the spirit in permanent tension with the world than a respectable distraction from the sourness of life.
John Summers, a Harvard professor of intellectual history who is author of a forthcoming work, The Politics of Truth: Selected Writings of C. Wright Mills (2008), asks
- Mills could not answer many of the most important questions he raised. How did the power elite make its decisions? He did not know. Did its members cause their roles to be created, or step into roles already created? He could not say. Around what interests did they cohere? He asserted a "coincidence of interest" partially organized around "a permanent war establishment," but he did little more than assert it. Most of the time, he said, the power elite did not cohere at all. "This instituted elite is frequently in some tension: it comes together only on certain coinciding points and only on certain occasions of 'crisis.' " Although he urged his readers to scrutinize the commanding power of decision, his book did not scrutinize any decisions.
- These ambiguities have kept The Power Elite vulnerable to the charge of conspiracy-mongering. In a recent essay in Playboy called "Who Rules America?" Arthur Schlesinger Jr. repeated his earlier skepticism about Mills's argument, calling it "a sophisticated version of the American nightmare." Alan Wolfe, in a 2000 afterword, pointed out that while Mills got much about the self-enriching ways of the corporate elite right, his vision of complacent American capitalism did not anticipate the competitive dynamics of our global economy. And of late we have seen that "occasions of crisis" do not necessarily serve to unify the generals with the politicians.
- Yet The Power Elite abounds with questions that still trouble us today. Can a strong democracy coexist with the amoral ethos of corporate elites? And can public argument have democratic meaning in the age of national security? The trend in foreign affairs, Mills argued, was for a militarized executive branch to bypass the United Nations, while Congress was left with little more than the power to express "general confidence, or the lack of it." Policy tended to be announced as doctrine, which was then sold to the public via the media. Career diplomats in the State Department believed they could not truthfully report intelligence. Meanwhile official secrecy steadily expanded its reach. "For the first time in American history, men in authority are talking about an 'emergency' without a foreseeable end," Mills wrote in a sentence that remains as powerful and unsettling as it was 50 years ago. "Such men as these are crackpot realists: in the name of realism they have constructed a paranoid reality all their own."
(See Mills's website, which is designed by his son Nik, who sponsors it along with his sisters Kate and Pam. C. Wright Mills: Letters and Autobiographical Writings by his daughters tells about Tovarich, their dad's imaginary Soviet intellectual pen-pal. Kate works for a trade and reference book publisher in Boston. Pam is a university English teacher in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.)
