C. Wright Mills

Charles Wright Mills (August 28, 1916, Waco, Texas – March 20, 1962, Nyack, New York) was an American sociologist. His writings addressed the responsibilities of intellectuals in post-World War II society and advocated relevance and engagement over disinterested academic observation.

Life

Mills was born in Waco, Texas in 1916. His father worked in the insurance industry and his mother was a housewife. Mills had a lonely childhood as continuous friendships were difficult due to his family's moving often [1].

Mills received both a bachelor's (in sociology) and a master's degree (in philosophy) from the University of Texas at Austin in 1939. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in 1941. His high blood pressure earned him a deferment from the draft and enabled Mills to begin his career in academia at the University of Maryland in 1942. In 1946 he took a faculty position at Columbia University, which he kept, despite controversy, until his death in 1962.

Mills was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Fulbright grant, lecturing at the University of Copenhagen in 1956.

Mills married his first wife, Dorothy Smith-Freya, in 1937. Tensions developed in the relationship as Freya asserted her intellectual individuality [2]. The two had a daughter, Pamela, in 1943 and divorced in 1947. Also in 1947, Mills married his second wife, Ruth Harper, who had been a research assistant to Mills. Mills and Harper had a daughter, Kathryn, in 1955 and were divorced in 1959. Later in 1959, Mills married his third wife Yaroslava Surmach and had a son, Nikolas.

Mills died of a heart attack on March 20, 1962 at his home in West Nyack, New York.

Work

The New Men of Power: America's Labor Leaders (1948) analyzes the 'labor metaphysic,' which is the traditionally held belief that labor movements drive social consciousness towards advancement. Mills looked at the dynamic of labor leaders cooperating with business officials. He concluded that labor movements are appeased by simple concessions and that labor leaders and businessmen are actually part of the same system of capitalism.

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 an oppressed, yet cheerful, robot. He or she gets a salary, but becomes alienated from the world because of his or her inability to affect or change it. Mills included a discussion of the 'typical American,' which has evolved from a frontiersman to the white-collar life of today.

The Power Elite (1956) describes the relationship between the political, military, and economic elite in America. Mills noted 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. the ability to move within and between the three institutional structures and hold interlocking directorates 4) co-optation: 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 alliance based upon their "community of interests" driven by the military metaphysic, which has transformed the economy into a 'permanent war economy.' This book is particularly relevant in consideration of America's current War on Terror.

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. Mills criticized other schools of sociology including the grand theory of Talcott Parsons, which he believed was rarely based in reality. Mills also spoke out against overuse of statistics, which he says can only be afforded by large bureaucracies and is leading to the bureaucratization of academia.

Other works include: The Causes of World War Three (1958), Listen, Yankee: The Revolution in Cuba (1960), The Marxists (1962), and From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (1958), a widely used translation of Max Weber's works.

Outlook

According to the basic shape of any intellectual portrait of C. Wright Mills, his essays - as published in his anthology "The Sociological Imagination" (Oxford University Press, 1961) - are of particular interest. The appendix "On Intellectual Craftsmanship" gives an insight into what a sociologist as a social scientist whenever working creatively, like an artist, is able to work out. Mills believed that substance and appearance are by no means identical. Whenever substance and appearance are looked upon as identical there is no need for science, scientists, or scholars at all. Given this setting, Mills was indeed, as Irving L. Horowitz told us, a social scientist sharply contradicting the bulk of mainstream (sometimes called "bullshit") sociology. When G.F.W. Hegel once stated: "The most reasonable thing children can do with their toy is to break it to pieces" (Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse, part III) this might express the attitude of C. Wright Mills whenever looking at the mainstream concepts of the sociology of his time.

Mills was heavily influenced by Marxist thought:

He echoed the idea of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels that "It is not the consciousness determinating the every-day-life but it is the very life [pre] determinating the consciousness" (The German Ideology, 1st part, on Ludwig Feuerbach).
He was against any individualistic, reductionist, and obscure images of what constitutes society. This concept channels the Marxist idea that "Any society does not consist of individuals but expresses the sum of relationships [and] conditions that the individual actor is forming" (Karl Marx: Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie/Rohentwurf, 1857/58: "Gesellschaft besteht nicht aus Individuen, sondern drückt die Summe der Beziehungen, Verhältnisse aus, worin diese Individuen zueinander stehn").

Mills shared with Marxist sociology and elite theorists the view that society is divided rather sharply and horizontally between the powerful and powerless. He also shared 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 did not regard property (economic power) as the main source of conflict in society.

Legacy

Mills argued 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 troubles 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.

Mills thought it was possible to create a good society on the basis of knowledge and that people of knowledge must take responsibility for its absence.

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. Dwight Eisenhower’s election as president gives a clear image of the entwinement of these bases of power in the military-industrial complex.

While many professors were unwilling to tackle controversial subjects or form strong opinions, Mills eagerly did both. He criticized others for their unwillingness to take stands, which contributed to his reputation as brash. These harsh criticisms and commitment to social change placed Mills outside of mainstream academia [3].

Mills also drew the ire of his contemporaries for offering support to Cuban president, Fidel Castro. Ideas critical of the administration such as those found in The Power Elite, along with support of the communists in Cuba, which Mills saw as the 'third way' were particularly bold considering the blacklisting of suspected American communists occurring in Mills' lifetime.

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