Information about C. Wright Mills

Charles Wright Mills (August 28, 1916, Waco, Texas – March 20, 1962, West 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 "Three", the economic, political and military.

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 by heart attack. (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.

(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:

• the military metaphysic: a military definition of reality
• possess class identity: recognizing themselves separate and superior to the rest of society
• have interchangibility: they move within and between the three institutional structures and hold interlocking directorates
• cooptation / socialization: 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), (1960), and The Marxists (1962).

The novel The Death of Artemio Cruz (1962), by Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes, is dedicated to him. The dedication says: "To C. Wright Mills, true voice of North America, friend and companion in the struggle of Latin America".

Outlook

There has long been debate over Mills' overall intellectual outlook. Mills is often seen as a closet Marxist because of his emphasis on social classes and their roles in historical progress. Just as often, others argue that Mills more closely identified with the work of Max Weber, whom many sociologists interpret as an exemplar of sophisticated (and intellectually adequate) anti-Marxism and modern liberalism.

Few who have registered opinions in this rather jejune and misleading debate have bothered to notice that Mills himself left his answer to it. While Mills never embraced the "Marxist" label, he nonetheless told his closest associates that he felt much closer to what he saw as the best currents of flexible, humanist Marxism than to its alternatives. In a November 1956 letter to his friends Harvey and Bette Swados, Mills declared himself "a goddamned anarchist," while adding "[i]n the meantime, let's not forget that there's more [that's] still useful in even the Sweezy [Paul M. Sweezy, founder of Monthly Review magazine, "an independent socialist magazine"] kind of Marxism than in all the routineers of J.S. Mill [i.e., liberal intellectuals] put together."

Hence, though he died before taking up his plan to "work out [my intellectual] position in a positive and clean-cut way," Mills clearly understood his position as being much closer to Marx than to Weber, albeit influenced by both.

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 other "conflict theorists" the view that American society is sharply divided and systematically shaped by the ongoing interactions 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 elites and the mass media. Mills combined such conventional Marxian concerns with careful attention to the dynamics of personal meaning and small-group motivations, topics for which Weberian scholars are more noted.

Above all, Mills understood sociology, when properly done, as an inherently political endeavor and a servant of the democratic process. In The Sociological Imagination, Mills wrote: "It is the political task of the social scientist -- as of any liberal educator -- continually to translate personal troubles into public issues, and public issues into the terms of their human meaning for a variety of individuals. It is his task to display in his work -- and, as an educator, in his life as well -- this kind of sociological imagination. And it is his purpose to cultivate such habits of mind amoung the men and women who are publicly exposed to him. To secure these ends is to secure reason and individuality, and to make these the predominant values of a democratic society."

Award

The Society for the Study of Social Problems established the C. Wright Mills Award in 1964.

Further reading

• C. Wright Mills, an American Utopian- (1983). Irving Louis Horowitz.
• ''C. Wright Mills, A Native Radical and his American Roots" (1984) Rick Tilman

ISBN 0-02-915010-8

• ''C. Wright Mills, Key sociologist,By John Eldridge,(1983)
• 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.

External links

• Official website
• Frank Elwell's page at Rogers State