WORKS BY MILLS
SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
C. Wright Mills (1916-1962) was at his death professor of sociology at Columbia University and one of the most controversial figures in American social science. He considered himself and was considered by his peers something of a rebel against the social science “establishment,” and he attracted both admirers and critics for this role.
Shortly after his death, a series of essays, The New Sociology, was published in his honor. A central theme of these essays was the notion that Mills exemplified that spirit of social concern which he himself saw as the fundamental duty of the modern intellectual, in particular the social scientist—a duty, be it said, which he felt was not fulfilled by the majority of contemporary American social scientists (Horowitz 1964). His writings represented an attempt to open up paths of inquiry and analysis that would enable men to combat what he called the “main drift” of modern society to “rationality without reason,” that is, the use of rational means in the service of substantively irrational ends. He found Marx and Weber to be the most helpful classical theorists, but he wanted to go “beyond” both of them to a new comparative world sociology that would seek to understand our time in terms of its historical specificity and by so doing renew the possibility of achieving human freedom. He thus set himself a large task, requiring research on the whole canvas of human (and particularly modern) history, but he died before he could present a full synthesis of his ideas.
He saw the present as a transition from the modern age to a postmodern period which he called the Fourth Epoch. If throughout his work there is a current of ultimate hope, it is equally suffused with pessimism about the more immediate future. He spoke of the “moral uneasiness of our time,” a consequence throughout the Western world (including the Soviet Union) of what he called the “higher immorality,” immorality encrusted in the structures and norms of the society, which he saw as particularly prevalent in the United States.
The basic problem of this era was that, unlike the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, rationality no longer produced freedom, and since the two central ideologies which were developed in the modern West, liberalism and Marxism, assumed that it did, they no longer sufficed to explain and thus to control social change. Liberalism, being more heavily dependent on this assumption, was, he said, now irrelevant, and Marxism was inadequate.
What was even more unsettling to Mills was the “default” or “defeat” of the free intellectuals, especially deplorable at a time when the power of the intellectual had become potentially very great. His emphasis on the role of the intellectuals, on their failure, derived from his basic assumption that there is a great difference between the range of action possible to what he called “elites” and the range of action possible to the “masses.” Men make their own history, but some are freer to do so than others. If the relatively free intellectuals fail to assert their moral leadership, other members of the elite, less qualified and less disinterested, will inevitably do so in their stead. This is in fact what had happened, according to Mills.
This failure is indicated by the nature of the problems studied by social scientists, and even more by the inadequate theory and methodology that underlie their work, an inadequacy he attributed to their deliberate abdication of social responsibility. Social theory, to be usable for Mills, had to deal in categories whose level of abstraction was not so high as to deprive them of all historical content or relevance. It should involve the search for causes of specific historical sequences and thereby explain shifts in the importance of and relations between the various “institutional orders” (politics, economics, the military, religion, and kinship). Mills took a strong stand against “principled monism or pluralism” and stated that the simple view of economic determinism must be “elaborated” by political and military determinism.
But more than theory was involved. Mills felt that the way in which the theory is used—the methodology of social research—is central to the results. He was not opposed to empirical research (indeed, he conducted a considerable amount of it), but he was against “abstracted empiricism,” to which he contrasted the ideal of “craftsmanship.” Craftsmanship is at once an ethos and an ideal which is only possible in a “properly developing society” but which also brings such a society into being. While Mills constantly called for such a conception of the role of the intellectual, he preferred to exemplify the skill rather than give an operational definition of it. It is perhaps as a result of this lack of definition that discussion of Mills’s criticisms of his colleagues sometimes resembles a theological debate.
Mills’s intellectual fathers in macrosociological theory were clearly Marx and Weber, as he himself acknowledged, and Freud and Mead in social psychology. It is sometimes said that he was the heir of Veblen. But while he called Veblen “the best social scientist America has produced,” he was clearly critical of him, even in the introduction he wrote to The Theory of the Leisure Class (see Mills 1953). Mills called Veblen’s views “over-simple” and “inadequate” and found the substance of his work less useful than the style. It is indeed in style and populist bias that Mills most resembles Veblen.
In his own research, he was more concerned with restating and advancing the Marx-Weber tradition than the Freud-Mead one. He accepted what he considered to be Weber’s two most important revisions of Marx—the broadening of the concept of economic determinism to a wider social determinism and the “sophisticating” of the idea of class by the addition of the category of status or prestige. Mills thought that Marx’s major political expectation about advanced capitalist societies—the progressive role of the proletariat—had “collapsed,” and he railed against a “labor metaphysic,” a faith in the progressive role of the working class (1960a), although an early monograph of his, The New Men of Power (1948), may be thought to exhibit this very view.
The shift in focus and methodology of Mills’s empirical work over his life reflected his increasing discomfort with his peers in American sociology. The New Men of Power and The Puerto Rican Journey (Mills et al. 1950) rely in large part on survey data, especially the latter. They were both done under the aegis of the Bureau of Applied Social Research of Columbia University and under the methodological influence of Paul Lazarsfeld. Nonetheless, even in these works Mills used the data to deal with problems of social change of the larger society, the United States; this was a feature of all his books, whatever their particular problems. In White Collar (1951), interview data became minor and government statistical data more important; he explicitly sought to locate the problems of the individual (in this case, the “new middle class”) within the trends of the epoch, thus illustrating a methodological orientation he was later to insist upon in The Sociological Imagination (1959). The Power Elite (1956) represented a further evolution of this trend. The problem here was to explain the over-all power structure of the United States, not the role of out-groups that are relatively more accessible to being studied (labor leaders, migrants, white-collar workers). In this task, Mills asserted, national surveys are useless, and he relied upon “reasoning together.” The data were largely historical, and the objective of the research was to explain the “moral uneasiness of our time.”
In the three books that followed, The Causes of World War Three (1958), The Sociological Imagination (1959), and Listen, Yankee (1960b), Mills had moved one stage further. There was no question here of survey methods. There was even little question, as there still was in The Power Elite, of the systematic collection of data or the use of a research design and a research organization. These three books were historical interpretations—of the contemporary world system, of the evolution of the social sciences in the United States, of social revolution in Cuba—in the form of polemical essays. By then, Mills seemed to feel that methodological rigor was a trap which would prevent him or other scholars from dealing with significant problems. Thus, despite his critical view of Marxian theory, he grew more and more interested in Marxism as a “method of work,” as his last published volume, The Marxists (1962), indicates. This was undoubtedly largely because he grew more and more unhappy with what he regarded as the ideological uses other scholars made of the Weberian critique—to defend an established order. And he came to fear the emphasis on science less as an illusion than as a diversion.
Mills ended as he began, a moralist preaching to his peers, the community of social scientists, throughout the world but especially in the United States. While he continued to accept the fundamentals of the Weberian modifications of Marx, he refused to accept Weber’s “pessimistic world of a classic liberal.” He thought the dominant apolitical or “value-free” bias of contemporary American sociology was an ideological mask, hiding value preferences which he did not share. In a basic sense, he was a Utopian reformer. He thought that knowledge properly used could bring about the good society, and that if the good society was not yet here, it was primarily the fault of men of knowledge.
Immanuel Wallerstein
[See alsoAssimilation; Elites; Knowledge, sociology of; Leadership, article onsociological aspects; Marxist sociology; Political sociology; Power; Social problems; and the biographies ofFreud; Marx; Mead; Veblen; Weber, Max.]
WORKS BY MILLS
1948 The New Men of Power: America’s Labor Leaders. New York: Harcourt.
1950 Mills, C. Wright; Senior, C.; and Goldsen, R. K. The Puerto Rican Journey: New York’s Newest Migrants. New York: Harper.
1951 White Collar: The American Middle Classes. New York: Oxford Univ. Press. → A paperback edition was published in 1956.
1953 Introduction. In Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions. New York: New American Library.
1953 Gerth, Hans; and Mills, C. WrightCharacter and Social Structure: The Psychology of Social Institutions. New York: Harcourt.
1956 The Power Elite. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
1958 The Causes of World War Three. New York: Simon & Schuster.
1959 The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
1960a Mills, C. Wright (editor) Images of Man: The Classic Tradition in Sociological Thinking. New York: Braziller.
1960b Listen, Yankee: The Revolution in Cuba. New York: McGraw-Hill.
1962 The Marxists. New York: Dell.
Power, Politics and People: The Collected Essays of C. Wright Mills. Edited and with an introduction by Irving Louis Horowitz. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1963.
SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aptheker, Herbert 1960 The World of C. Wright Mills. New York: Marzani & Munsell.
Horowitz, Irving Louis (editor) 1964 The New Sociology: Essays in Social Science and Social Theory, in Honor of C. Wright Mills. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
Weber, Max (1906-1924) 1946 From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. Translated and edited by Hans H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
