His writings made a profound impression on my political outlook.
Charles Wright Mills (August 28, 1916 – March 20, 1962) was an American sociologist, and a professor of sociology at Columbia University from 1946 until his death in 1962. Mills was published widely in popular and intellectual journals, and is remembered for several books such as The Power Elite, which introduced that term and describes the relationships and class alliances among the US political, military, and economic elites; White Collar: The American Middle Classes, on the American middle class; and The Sociological Imagination, which presents a model of analysis for the interdependence of subjective experiences within a person’s biography, the general social structure, and historical development.
Mills was concerned with the responsibilities of intellectuals in post-World War II society, and he advocated public and political engagement over disinterested observation. Mills’s biographer, Daniel Geary, writes that Mills’s writings had a “particularly significant impact on New Left social movements of the 1960s.”[2]Indeed, it was Mills who popularized the term “New Left” in the U.S. in a 1960 open letter, Letter to the New Left.[3]
The Power Elite (1956) describes the relationships among the political, military, and economic elites, noting that they share a common world view; that power rests in the centralization of authority within the elites of American society.[16] The centralization of authority is made up of the following components: a “military metaphysic,” in other words a military definition of reality; “class identity,” recognizing themselves as separate from and superior to the rest of society; “interchangeability” (they move within and between the three institutional structures and hold interlocking positions of power therein); cooperation/socialization, in other words, socialization of prospective new members is done based on how well they “clone” themselves socially after already established elites. Mills’s view on the power elite is that they represent their own interest, which include maintaining a “permanent war economy” to control the ebbs and flow of American Capitalism and the masking of “a manipulative social and political order through the mass media.”[17] In a contemporary extension of Mills’ Power Elite, Dr. Asadi [18] suggests that the modern World System is highly militarized and a counterpart of the US permanent war economy where a global division of labor based on military Keynesian stabilization exists concomitant with economic accumulation, and a confluence of interests between (global) military, economic and political elites.
White Collar: The American Middle Classes (1951) offers a rich historical account of the middle classes in the United States and contends that bureaucracies have overwhelmed middle-class workers, robbing them of all independent thought and turning them into near-automatons, oppressed but cheerful. Mills states there are three types of power within the workplace: coercion or physical force; authority; and manipulation.[16] Through this piece, the thoughts of Mills and Weber seem to coincide in their belief that Western Society is trapped within the iron cage of bureaucratic rationality, which would lead society to focus more on rationality and less on reason.[16] Mills’s fear was that the middle class was becoming “politically emasculated and culturally stultified,” which would allow a shift in power from the middle class to the strong social elite.[17] Middle-class workers receive an adequate salary but have become alienated from the world because of their inability to affect or change it.