Mills, C. Wright

C. Wright Mills (1916–1962), the prolific and controversial American sociologist, is best known for his work on the structure and distribution of power in the United States and his critique of theory and method in mainstream sociology. Between 1940 and 1962, he authored or edited twelve books, published nearly 200 articles, commentaries, and reviews, and was working on several major projects when he died of a heart attack at age 45.

Mills was born in Waco, Texas, to a doting mother and a father who was a rising insurance salesman. Mills describes himself as a shy and introverted youngster who admired his father's intelligence and integrity. He was sent to Texas [Page 504]A&M but transferred to the University of Texas, Austin, where he studied philosophy and economics.

Mills left Texas with both a BA and an MA for the interdisciplinary program at the University of Wisconsin in the 1940s, where he worked most closely with Hans Gerth, a German émigré influenced by the Frankfurt school, with its varying blends of Marx, Weber, and Freud. Several commentators suggest that Mills's work is a unique blend of midwestern populism, American pragmatism, and German sociology.

Mills defined himself as a political radical in the early 1940s by the time he came out of graduate school to take an assistant professor position in sociology at the University of Maryland. He moved in left political circles when he relocated to New York in 1945, where he worked at the Bureau of Applied Research and then joined the Columbia faculty in 1946, working his way to an appointment as full professor in 1956.

Mills's first major book, the New Men of Power (1948), assessed the radical political potential of union leaders and found it limited. Mills soon thereafter abandoned the Marxian hope for the working class as the key agent of major social change, calling it a “labor metaphysic.” White Collar (1952) soon followed, a comparison of the old middle class of small businesspeople with the new middle class of white-collar employees, seeing the latter as trapped between unions and big business, politically dependent and directionless, and driven by a new status. He later described the book as an attempt to make sense of his experience in New York; others thought the experiences of salespeople like his father influenced this work.

Mills next folded his analyses of union leaders and white-collar workers into his major empirical and theoretical work, The Power Elite (1956), which rejected both pluralist and Marxist analyses of the American power structure in favor of an institutional analysis that placed power in the hands of an increasingly intermingled leadership group based at the top of large corporations, the executive branch, and the military services. This “power elite” shared similar experiences in managing large institutions and their desire to keep the system running smoothly. The people at the top did what they wanted to, and were increasingly irresponsible, practicing a “higher immorality.”

The book received strong reactions from those Mills criticized as well as more disinterested observers, and made Mills into something of a celebrity. He then wrote a little-known reply that became the basis for The Sociological Imagination (1959). Mills attacked the overly abstract “grand theories,” and in particular the work of Talcott Parsons, the leading theorist of the day. For Mills, Parsons's ahistorical attempt to classify concepts in order to develop a general theory provided little if any understanding of social reality or pressing social issues. Mills also was very critical of the use of a narrow survey method he called “abstracted empiricism,” arguing that it tends to lead to mundane research of no consequence in creating a theory or understanding of social problems. Instead, Mills spoke of the need to define sociology as the intersection of biography and history, employ a wide range of methods, strive for intellectual craftsmanship, and engage the general public on the basis of both rational values and solid social science.

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