C. Wright Mills

C Wright Mills
Born	28 August 1917(1917-08-28) Waco, Texas
Died	20 March 1961(1961-03-20) (aged 44) West Nyack, New York
Nationality	United States
Alma mater	Texas A&M University University of Texas at Austin University of Wisconsin–Madison
Occupation	political sociologist

Charles Wright Mills (August 28, 1917, Waco, Texas – March 20, 1961, West Nyack, New York) was an American sociologist. Mills is best remembered for his 1959 book The Sociological Imagination in which he lays out a view of the proper relationship between biography and history, theory and method in sociological scholarship. He is also known for studying the structures of power and class 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 public, political engagement over uninterested observation.

Life and work

Mills graduated from Dallas Technical High School in 1934.^[1] He initially attended Texas A&M University but left after his first year and subsequently 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, in 1945 he took a research associate position at Columbia University's Bureau of Applied Social Research. The following year he was made assistant professor in the university's sociology department.^[2] He remained with the department, despite controversy, until his early death due to a car accident. In the mid-1940s, together with Paul Goodman, he contributed to Politics, the journal edited during the 1940s by Dwight Macdonald.^[3]

Works

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The New Men of Power: America's Labor Leaders

The New Men of Power: America's Labor Leaders (1948) studies the Labor Metaphysic and the dynamic of labor leaders cooperating with business officials. Mills concluded that labour had effectively renounced its traditional oppositional role and become reconciled to life within a capitalist system. Appeased by "bread and butter" economic policies, unions had adopted (Mills argued) a pliantly subordinate role in the new structure of American power.

White Collar: The American Middle Classes

Main article: White Collar: The American Middle Classes

White Collar: The American Middle Classes (1951) contends that bureaucracies have overwhelmed the individual city workers, robbing them of all independent thought and turning them into near-robots, oppressed but cheerful. They get a salary, but become alienated from the world because of their inability to affect or change it.

The Power Elite

Main article: The Power Elite

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 interchangeability

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

Main article: The Sociological Imagination

The Sociological Imagination (1959), Mills' most influential work, 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, how are they held together, how they might be changing, etc.

In The Sociological Imagination, Mills asserts that one must look inside oneself to help important research problems, and that social scientists "translate private troubles into public issues." ^[4] This translation means that you connect the problems you face in your biography to social institutions, the collection of which forms social structure and that you locate that structure in history. Additionally on this topic, Mills maintained throughout The Sociological Imagination that it is very difficult for most individuals in society to link their personal troubles to the social institutions in which they live.

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.

Others

Other important works include: The Causes of World War Three (1958), Listen, Yankee: The Revolution in Cuba (1960), and The Marxists (1962).

In a 1997 survey of members of the International Sociological Association which asked them to identify the ten books published in the 20th century which they considered to be the most influential for sociologists, The Sociological Imagination ranked second, preceded only by Max Weber's Economy and Society. [2].

The novel The Death of Artemio Cruz (1962), by Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes, is dedicated "To C. Wright Mills, true voice of North America, friend and companion in the struggle of Latin America". Dwight Macdonald had an off-again-on-again association with Mills, and sometimes, in his capacity as magazine editor, published Mills' material.

Outlook

There has long been debate over Mills' intellectual outlook. Mills is often seen as a "closet Marxist" because of his emphasis on social classes and their roles in historical progress and attempt to keep Marxist traditions alive in social theory. Just as often, however, 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. However Mills clearly gives precedence to social structure described by the political, economic and military institutions and not culture which is presented in its massified form as means to ends sought by the power elite, which puts him firmly in the Marxist and not Weberian camp.

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. He considered himself as a "plain Marxist", working in the spirit of young Marx as he claims in his collected essays: "Power, Politics and People" (Oxford University Press, 1963). In a November 1956 letter to his friends Bette and Harvey Swados, Mills declared "[i]n the meantime, let's not forget that there's more [that's] still useful in even the Sweezy ^[5] kind of Marxism than in all the routineers of J. S. Mill ^[6] put together." ^[7]

There is an important quotation from Letters to Tovarich (autobiographical essay) dated Fall 1957 titled "On Who I Might Be and How I Got That Way":

“

You've asked me, 'What might you be?' Now I answer you: 'I am a Wobbly.' I mean this spiritually and politically. In saying this I refer less to political orientation that to political ethos, and I take Wobbly to mean one thing: the opposite of bureaucrat. […] I am a Wobbly, personally, down deep, and for good. I am outside the whale, and I got that way through social isolation and self-help. But do you know what a Wobbly is? It's a kind of spiritual condition. Don't be afraid of the word, Tovarich. A Wobbly is not only a man who takes orders from himself. He's also a man who's often in the situation where there are no regulations to fall back upon that he hasn't made up himself. He doesn't like bosses –capitalistic or communistic – they are all the same to him. He wants to be, and he wants everyone else to be, his own boss at all times under all conditions and for any purposes they may want to follow up. This kind of spiritual condition, and only this, is Wobbly freedom.[8]

”

These two quotations are the ones chosen by Kathryn Mills for the better acknowledgement of the nuanced thinking of C.W.Mills.

It appears that Mills understood his position as being much closer to Marx than to Weber, albeit influenced by both, as Stanley Aronowitz argued in A Mills Revival?.^[9] 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. Mills shares with Marxist sociology and other "conflict theorists" the view that American society is sharply divided and systematically shaped by the relationship 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.

Mills had a very combative outlook regarding and towards many parts of his life, the people in it, and his works. In this way, he was a self proclaimed outsider.

“

I am an outlander, not only regionally, but deep down and for good.[10]

”

C Wright Mills gave considerable study to the Soviet Union. Invited to the U.S.S.R., where he was acknowledged for his criticism of American society, Mills used the opportunity to attack Soviet censorship . He did hold the controversial notion that the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. were ruled by similar bureaucratic power elites and thus were convergent rather than divergent societies.

Above all, Mills understood sociology, when properly approached, 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 among 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.[4]

”

Personal life

When studying at the University of Texas, Mills met his first wife, Dorothy Helen Smith, who was also a student there. After they were married in 1937, Dorothy Helen, who became known as "Freya," worked to support the couple while Mills did graduate work, in addition to copyediting and typing many of the texts he wrote during this period, including his Ph.D. dissertation. They separated in New York City in 1945 and were divorced in 1947.

Mills' second wife was Ruth Harper, a statistician who worked with Mills on White Collar, published in 1951 and The Power Elite, published in 1956. Mills and Ruth were married in 1947, separated in 1957, and divorced in 1959.

Mills' third wife was Yaroslava Surmach, an American artist of Ukrainian descent whose varied work included glass paintings, book illustrations, and stained glass window designs. They were married in 1959, about three years before Mills' death in 1962.

By a strange coincidence, all three women died within a period of less than three months, Ruth on July 1, 2008, Freya on August 19, 2008, and Yaroslava on September 17, 2008. Mills had one child with each wife: Pamela (with Freya), Kathryn (with Ruth), and artist Nikolas (with Yaroslava).

Awards

The Society for the Study of Social Problems established the C. Wright Mills Award in 1964 for the book that "best exemplifies outstanding social science research and a great understanding the individual and society in the tradition of the distinguished sociologist, C. Wright Mills." The criteria are for the book that most effectively:

1. critically addresses an issue of contemporary public importance,
2. brings to the topic a fresh, imaginative perspective,
3. advances social scientific understanding of the topic,
4. displays a theoretically informed view and empirical orientation,
5. evinces quality in style of writing,
6. explicitly or implicitly contains implications for courses of action.[3].

See also

• Military-industrial complex

Notes

1. ^ Short biography of C. Wright Mills published in the Dictionary of Modern American Philosophers in 3 volumes by Thoemmes Press, Bristol, UK, 2004
2. ^ Daniel Geary (2009). Radical ambition: C. Wright Mills, the left, and American social thought. ISBN 0520258363. "In early 1946, he was appointed assistant professor at Columbia College" 
3. ^ TIME April 4, 1994 Volume 143, No. 14 - "Biographical sketch of Dwight Macdonald" by John Elson (Accessed 4 December 2008)
4. ^ ^{a b} [Mills, C Wright. THE SOCIOLOGICAL IMAGINATION Fortieth Anniversary Edition. Oxford University Press, 2000.]
5. ^ Paul M. Sweezy, founder of Monthly Review magazine, "an independent socialist magazine".
6. ^ I.e., liberal intellectuals.
7. ^ 7-nov-2007 17.07 library.umass.edu Remo, I just reviewed the Mills correspondence in the Swados Papers, and, yes, that is an accurate quote. In a letter dated Nov. 3rd [1956] Mills writes, "What these jokers -- all of them -- don't they realize that way down deep and systematically I'm a goddamned anarchist. I'm really quite serious and I'm going over the next few years to work out the position in a positive and clean-cut way. In the meantime, let's not forget that there's more still useful in even the Sweezy kind of Marxism than in all the routineers of JS Mills put together." I'm happy to send you a photocopy of the entire letter if you like. Please let me know if you have any questions, or if I can be of further assistance. Best regards, Danielle -- Danielle Kovacs Curator of Manuscripts Special Collections and University Archives W.E.B. Du Bois Library University of Massachusetts 154 Hicks Way Amherst, MA 01003 [phone] [1].
8. ^ From C. Wright Mills: Letters and Autobiographical Writings, edited by Kathryn Mills with Pamela Mills, introduction by Dan Wakefield (University of California Press, 2000.), pag.252. Wobblies are members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and the direct action they are favouring includes passive resistance, strikes, and boycotts. They want to build a new society according to general socialist principles but they are refusing to endorse any socialist party or any other kind of political party.
9. ^ "These perspectives owed as much to the methodological precepts of Emile Durkheim as they did to the critical theory of Karl Marx and Max Weber. Using many of the tools of conventional social inquiry: surveys, interviews, data analysis—charts included—Mills takes pains to stay close to the “data” until the concluding chapters. But what distinguishes Mills from mainstream sociology, and from Weber, with whom he shares a considerable portion of his intellectual outlook, is the standpoint of radical social change, not of fashionable sociological neutrality." A Mills Revival?.
10. ^ [Horowitz, Irving L. C. Wright Mills: An American Utopian. New York: Free Press, 1983.]

Further reading

• Irving Louis Horowitz, C. Wright Mills, an American Utopian (1983).
• Rick Tilman, C. Wright Mills, A Native Radical and his American Roots (1984). ISBN 0-02-915010-8.
• John Eldridge, C. Wright Mills, Key sociologist (1984).
• Kathryn Mills, ed., with Pamela Mills, C. Wright Mills: Letters and Autobiographical Writings, introduction by Dan Wakefield (University of California Press, 2000). ISBN 0-520-23209-7.
• Tom Hayden with Contemporary Reflections by Stanley Aronowitz, Richard Flacks, and Charles Lemert, Radical Nomad: C. Wright Mills and His Times (2006). ISBN 1-59451-202-7.
• Kevin Mattson, Intellectuals in Action: The Origins of the New Left and Radical Liberalism, 1945-1970 (2002). ISBN 027102206X.
• G. William Domhoff, "Mills's The Power Elite 50 Years Later" in Contemporary Sociology, November 2006.
• Stanley Aronowitz, "A Mills Revival?", in Logos Journal, Summer 2003.
• Keith Kerr. Postmodern Cowboy: C. Wright Mills and a New 21st Century Sociology. (Paradigm 2008) ISBN 1594515794
• Daniel Geary, "Radical Ambition: C. Wright Mills, the Left, and American Social Thought" (University of California Press 2009). ISBN 0520258363
• Daniel Geary, "'Becoming International Again': C. Wright Mills and the Emergence of a Global New Left" in "Journal of American History," December 2008 [4]

External links

• Official website
• Frank Elwell's page at Rogers State
• An interview with Mills's daughters, Kathryn and Pamela
• C.Wright Mills, The Power Elite
• Contemporary C.Wright Mills
• C.W Mills,Structure of Power in American Society,British Journal of Sociology,Vol.9.No.1 1958
• A Mills Revival?
• C.Wright Mills,The Causes of World War Three
• C.Wright Mills, Letter to the New Left
• Sociology-Congress in Köln 2000 workshop: C. Wright Mills and his Power Elite: Actuality today?
• John D Brewer, C.Wright Mills, the LSE and the sociological imagination [5]
• Daniel Geary (2009). Radical Ambition. C. Wright Mills, the Left, and American Social Thought. University of California Press. Chapter 6 [6]
• Daniel Geary in C.S.Soong's radio program Against the Grain (KPFA 94,1 MHz) on C.Wright Mills [7]

Persondata
Name	Mills, C. Wright
Alternative names	Mills, Charles Wright thinking
Short description	American sociologist
Date of birth	28 August 1916
Place of birth	Waco, Texas, United States
Date of death	20 March 1962
Place of death	West Nyack, New York, United States