Mills, C. Wright (1916–1962)

Sociologist C. Wright Mills, a Texan who spent most of his career at Columbia University in New York, was a perennial outsider in ways both superficial and substantive. Standing more than 6 feet tall, Mills's gruff and direct manner, his intentionally accented Texas drawl, and his passion for German motorcycles put him at odds with the mores of the Eastern establishment in which he worked. More important, his intellectual work went against the grain of the postwar liberal consensus that dominated American thought. His books emphasized the alienating and politically dangerous effects of Cold War society—on the integrity of the individual, the democratic potential of American culture, and the realization of global stability. Though Mills died in 1962, he would become one of the intellectual fathers of the New Left, his work presciently setting the stage for the larger cultural critique of the 1960s counterculture.

Charles Wright Mills was born in Waco, Texas, in 1916. He attended the University of Texas at Austin and earned his Ph.D. in 1941 from the University of Wisconsin. In graduate school, he befriended Hans Gerth, through whom he discovered the writings of Max Weber. Gerth and Mills collaborated on a translation of Weber's work, and the imprint of Weber's thought can be seen in Mills's writings. Mills worked at the University of Maryland until 1946, when he accepted a job at Columbia University. Throughout his short career, he was a prolific writer, publishing a number of books, anthologies, pamphlets, and articles. He died of a heart attack in 1962.

Mills's career began at a time when sociology as a discipline was focused on micro studies, rich in empirical data, or on expositions of theories of society that elided historical or cultural variation. For Mills, this turn was antithetical to what he imagined sociologists could accomplish. In The Sociological Imagination (1959), Mills argued for a scholarship that links history and biography, examines the impact of institutions on personal lives, composed of macro studies that make visible the impact of structures of power on individuals. He identified three kinds of inquiries that social science should make: what the structure of the society is and what the impact of this arrangement is; how this society fits into a historical narrative—how it compares to what has come before and what implications it will have for the future; which kinds of people succeed in this society and what factors account for their success. In sum, Mills insisted that to understand the lives of individuals within a society, one must examine the broader institutions and cultural beliefs that undergird them. Many of his books took aim at American Cold War society, unpacking the impact of economic and political changes on people living within it.

Specifically, Mills challenged the liberal consensus that was forming after World War II. This line of thinking posited that class conflict was a thing of the past, eradicated by the increased economic growth of the postwar era. Free-market capitalism was considered to be fundamentally democratic and capable of greatly expanding the middle class, freeing American society from the social clashes of the Depression era. Postwar liberalism also was strenuously opposed to communism and advocated the spread of American [Page 961]institutions abroad. Mills, in his work, attacked not only the rosy picture of American society asserted by the liberal consensus but illustrated how postwar institutions undermined democratic principles and devastated the integrity and dignity of the individual.

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