Mills's The Power Elite 50 Years Later

trilogy on American society with the publication of The Power Elite, which encompassed, updated, and greatly added to everything he had said in The New Men of Power (1948) and White Collar (1951). The book caused a firestorm in academic and political circles, leading to innumerable reviews in scholarly journals and the popular press, most of them negative. Bristling with terms like “the warlords,” “the higher immorality,” “the power elite,” “crackpot realism,” and “organized irresponsibility,” it nonetheless contained a very large amount of research, much of it in the 47 pages of Notes. It became a classic because it was the first full-scale study of the structure and distribution of power in the United States by a sociologist using the full panoply of modern-day sociological theory and methods. The Power Elite also broke new ground because it was one of the few critical studies of the American power structure inside or outside the academy that did not start with a class-struggle perspective, which caused it to be criticized as vigorously by Marxists as it was by liberals and conservatives. According to Mills, there was “political determinism,” i.e., a potentially autonomous state in today’s terms, and “military determinism” as well as “economic determinism,” the concepts he used to criticize what he saw as the overemphasis on the primacy of the forces and relations of production within the Marxian mode of production framework. The book thereby opened space for and helped create the field of power structure research, which employs a range of empirical methods in an attempt to synthesize competing theoretical views. Although seldom read or cited today by those studying power structures, The Power Elite has achieved iconic status in most introductory sociology textbooks, where it is usually compared with the pluralist and Marxist perspectives on power and politics. How do its main claims look today in light of subsequent events and research? From the perspective of this power structure researcher, the book still has an astonishing relevance and freshness in many of its characterizations of how the country operates. For anyone who thinks that there have been major changes in the nature and functioning of the corporate community, or that individualistic and relatively issueless political campaigns are something new, or that the current “high and mighty” are more arrogant or corrupted by power than in the past, re-reading it is a sobering reminder that some things have not changed as much as many people might think due to our tendency to mythologize and romanticize the past. As for the more important matter of theoretical soundness, it appears that Mills was mostly right about the top levels of the power structure, but mostly wrong about the other levels of American society. Most of all, his synthesis of Max Weber, Karl Mannheim, Karl Marx, Franz Neumann, Harold Lasswell, and Progressive-Era historians underestimated the volatility and capacity for change within a capitalist society, including a possibility few, if any, social scientists anticipated: a successful corporate counterattack that would reverse the gains made by organized labor. Today, Mills looks even better than he did 50 years ago in his characterization of the benefactors of American capitalism as a corporate rich led by the chief executives of large corporations and financial institutions, who by now can be clearly seen as the driving force within the power elite. His analysis also remains right on target as far as the nature of the political directorate, who circulate between corporations, corporate law firms, and government positions in the same