••

THE INCOHERENCE
OF THE INTELLECTUAL
L:tI

C. Wright Mills' Struggle to Unite

InI

Knowledge and Action
Ir

Fredy Perlman

Black & Red

DETROIT
1970

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Contents
Introduction

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The Search for Radical Strategy
1939-1948

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No copyrightNo rights reserved:,......

~~"='I)~....._N_,.,,,

6

A Political Commit~ent and a Definition of Strategy
Elements for a Retreat from Political Commitment
The Powerless Intellectual
A Radical Strategy and a Liberating Agency of Change

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2
The Mindless Years
1950-19~6

38

The Cheerful Robot and the Rift between Thought and Action
Intellectual Default and Escape into Academic Cynicism
Rejection of Crackpot Realism and Academic Incoherence

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12
16

40

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49

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59

3
The lnteHectual as Historical Agency of Change
1958-1962

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The Showdown between Idiocy and Coherence
The Whole Man as Promethean History-Maker
The Intellectual as Revolutionary
An Ambiguous Retreat and an Incomplete Task

86
95
106

74

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Black & Red
Box 9546
Detroit, Mich. 48202

LINTRODUCTION
Man as History-Maker~~

The philosophers have only interpreted the world
1n various ways, the point, however, 1s to change 1t.

For C. Wright Mills, the most important issue of politicalreflection-and of political action-in our time is the problem of thehistorical agency of change, of the social and institutional means of1structural change.
The problem of social change, of revolutionary
practice, occupies a central place in Mills? writings, which stretch
over a period of two decades. For Mills, this is not a speculative
problem; it is not a subject for contemplation. It is an intensely
It raises questions about thepractical and personal problem.
relation of the individual to history, about the relevance of intellectual
activity to the making of history , about the unity of thought and action,
theory and practice. It raises questions about the difference or lack ofdifference an individual's life makes, and questions about man's choiceof himself as practical or meditative, active or passive, whole or fragmented. It raises questions about the professor's relations to his job
and to his contemporaries, and questions about the insurgent's relations to those to whom he tries to communicate a revolutionary
strategy. Mills did not answer these questions; he posed them, andfor posing them he was left standing alone in a United States whichcontained no revolutionaries during a period he called the mindlessyears. A!one, he could not always defend his positions, and was
frequently pushed back. He died a short time before he would havebeen joined by a new American left prepared to act boldly and win over2
the less bold by their success.
He did not leave the new insurgentsclear answers; he left them lucidly posed questions. And he left theworld revolutionary movement the model of a rebel who continued to
struggle in complete isolation, and the task of finding answers to thequestions he posed.

7C. Wri!tit Mills, "Letter to the New Left," New Left Revw,w, No. 5 (September-October, 196\)).
pp. 18-23; republished in Po-,, Politics and People: The Collected Essays of C. Wright Mills(edited by Irving L. Horowitz), New York : Oxford University Press, 1963, p. 254.
2
Mills, The New Men of Po-r: America's Labor Leaders, New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1948,
p. 274.

5political struggle: Neumann's book will move all of us into deeper
levels of analysis and strategy. It had better. Behemoth is everywhere
3
united.

Mills committed himself to political struggle publicly in 1942, in a1
review of Franz Neumann's analysis of Nazi Germany . Mills did notread Neumann's dissection of the Nazi Behemoth as a description of a
distant enemy: The analysis of Behemoth casts light upon capitalism indemocracies. .. if you read his book thoroughly, you see the harshoutlines of possible futures close around you. With leftwing thought
confused and split and dribbling trivialities, he locates the enemy with2
a 500 watt glare. And Nazi is only one of his names.
The enemy isMills' choice of the words analysis and strategy is significant:it is an early statement of a problem that becomes central in later
works: the link between thought and action, between consciousness
and existence, between theory and practice. This choice of words isalso significant as a political application of words he had used anddefined earlier in purely academic contexts.
In an article published two years before the review of Behemoth,Mills had defined strategies of action as motives which appeal toothers. 4 Motives are defined as named consequences of action. 5(In later works, Mills called such motives ideals or goals.) The motives
do not originate in the individual's biology; they are provided by his
culture, through his interactions with others. (This is the main pointof Mills' first published article,6 an article which illustrates that at
twenty-three Mills was already master of the dull and bureaucratic
writing style of professional acadenucs, a style which, he later observed,
has little or nothing to do with the complexity of subject matter, andnothing at all with profundity of thought. It has to do almost entirely
7with certain confusions of the academic writer about his own status.
THE AMERICAN

JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY\'umu1Xl..\"I

NOVEMBI\ R l9-10

Ml:. Tll(ll)(;1LO(::ICAL CO~";;EQt£NC'KS OF TKE
St.Clt_lL(K;\ ' or K.\"OWLl-::OCt-l

3

not located as a spectacle, as an object for passive contemplation andacademic dissection. Locating the enemy is the first step toward
locating oneself in the face of the enemy, it is the first step towardlbid., p. 178.
4 "Situated Actions and Vocabularies of Motive," American Sociological Review, Vol. V, No. 6 (December, 1940), in Power, Politics and People,

5

p: 443.

lbid., p. 441 .

6 "Language, Logic and Culture," American Sociological Review, Vol. IV, No. 5 (October, 1939),
1Mills, "Locating the Enemy : The Nazi Behemoth Dissected." (Review of Franz Neumann's Behemoth:
The Structure and Practice of National Socialism.) Vol. 4, Partisan Review (September-October,1942), pp. 432-437; in Power, Politics and People, pp. 170-178.
2lbid., p. 177.

Power, Politics and People, pp. 423-438.
7
The Sociological Imagination, New York : Oxford University Press, 1959, p. 218.

9

8

in

As soon as he illustrated how easily one can master the academic style,Mills abandoned it and wrote his works in a clear and straightforward
language.)
Since a strategy consists of the named consequences of an action
undertaken with others in a particular situation, the situation has to be
defined in such a way that the consequences of action can be named.
This is the task of analysis. If the strategy had better cope with theenemy described by Neumann, then the situation to be analyzed iscapitalism in democracy. It has to be shown that certain kinds ofaction can change the social situation; if this cannot be shown, thenthe consequences of action cannot be named, and there can be neither
motives nor strategies.
Elements for such analysis of the social situation (Mills latercalled such analysis a definition of realitY) can be found in Mills'
doctoral dissertation. 8 Here Mills follows John Dewey's rejectionof an unchanging ..human nature," and of a psychology of "instincts,"
as explanations of the continuity of social institutions. The continuity
is explained in terms of socially acquired "customs" and "habits." .
Furthermore, "habit means will," so that the repeated daily activitiesof people are voluntary acts. 9 This means that "institutions" can bechanged through human activity, that collective actions can have social
consequences, and therefore that "strategies of action" can beformulated. Mills points out that Dewey applies his concept of action
only to independent craftsmen and farmers: His concept of action isof an individual; it is not political action. 10 However, political action,
SOCIOLOGY AND

PRAGMATISM

namely collective practice based on named consequences ( or on theory)is also possible, since It is obvious that Marxism as a doctrine and move-

ment has linked practice and theory. 11

8

A Sociological Account of Pragmatism, 1942. Published as Sociology and Pragmatism: The Hi/lierLeaming in America, New York : OKford University Press, 1966.

9

Thus a political strategy is based on a definition of a social
situation which can be changed by collective activity , and it consistsof the named consequences of action which appeal to others. The
others, in Dewey's language, are the "Public," a community of selfdirected individuals. 1 2 The activity which links the individual toa public is communication, and for Dewey communication takes the
specific form of education, since this psychology's stress on themodifiabilitY of human nature opens wide the possibilitY of improvement by means of the educational enterprise; it is slanted specificallyto educationat endeavors. 13 Dewey's strategy was social reform throughTeacher in America
JAffJU:<!.110:7.1.._

educational reform; one of the named consequences of this activit~
was to be "that of building up an intelligent and capable civil-service." 4
In Dewey's view, the only alternative to social reformism "seems to bea concentration of power that points toward ultimate dictatorship . . ." 15
Although Mills rejected Dewey's sryle of liberalism 16 and educational reformism, he seems, at least partially, to have shared Dewey's
conception of "publics" composed of self-directed individuals, since
Dewey's conception of "The Eclipse of the Public" 17 reappears as
Mills' own conception in works he is to write more than a decade later ;even Dewey's reformist program of installing a civil service reappears
in works where Mills exposes and rejects all shades of liberalism. The
conception of others as potentially self-directed individuals implies a
non-manipulative view of communication and seems to exclude thecynical and manipulative conception which crept into Mills' thoughtfrom other influences.
However, the specific public, the community to whom Mills
is to communicate a political strategy, the historical agency which canpotentially transform the social situation, is not yet mentioned, and thestrategy itself has not yet been formulated.

12lbid. , p. 437.
13tbid. , p, 455.
14John Dewey, Freedom and CulllJrtJ, quoted in Ibid., p. 434.

15lbid.
16
tbid., p, 461.
17
tbid., p. 436.

sociology and Pragmatism, pp, 452-453.

IOlbid., pp, 392-393.
11
Ibid., p. 428.

1011

ambiguity; the following sentence says, For Weber, impersonalrationality stands as a polar opposite to personal charisma, the extraordinary gift of leaders. 22

According to Professor Irving Louis Horowitz, "Mills benefited
from his contact with European trained scholars at the University of
18
Wisconsin-especially Hans H. Gerth."
In 1942, the same year hepublished his review of Neumann's Behemoth, Mills published another19
book review, written with Gerth.
Some of the questions raised byMills in his earlier writings are treated very differently in this article.
Mills benefited from his contact with Gerth to sharpen, yet also
to blunt, his definitions of the social context of human activity. In theplace of Dewey's ideas about "custom" and "habit" as voluntary
activities which account for the continuity of institutions, the Mills-Gertharticle puts "historical drift." 20 The article develops Max Weber's thesisthat the "historical drift" of industrial societies is bureaucratization.

The bureaucratization and routinization of life takes place
within three dominant structures of power, military, industrial andgovernmental, and it is the leaders of these structures who make theultimate decisions. 23 The view of history which emerges is one where

It is this form of organization which is taken to be the substance ofhistory. 21 The two authors mention the fact that this drift is not aforce of nature which imposes itself over human beings. It is the men
who nurse the big machines, the industrial population, who implementthat which makes history. This distinction between those who implement history and that which makes history is not a grammatical78

active leaders decide and passive followers implement. It is notpointed out that if the followers did not repeatedly decide to continue
following (habit means will), the leaders would not have the power tomake any ultimate decisions.
With this definition of social reality, historical change is still
possible; furthermore, the historic agencies who transform social
reality, the revolutionary masses, can be defined. However, these1rving Louis Horowitz. "'Introduction: The Intellectual Genesis of C. Wright Mills," Ibid., p, 23.

79

Mills, "'A Marx for the Manage"" (with H. H. Gerth), Ethics: An International Journal of Legal, Political and Social Thought, Vol , 52, No. 2 (January, 1942), inPo-r,PoliticsandPeople, pp, 53-71 .

20lbid., p, 53.
21
lbid.

22

Jbid., pp. 53-54.
231bid., p. 67.

12

13

revolutionary strategy is to lead to a struggle against the enemy locatedby Neumann with a 500 watt glare, then the Mills-Gerth article does
not move into deeper levels of analysis and strategy. In fact, it is hard
to see just how "Mills benefited from his contact with European trained
scholars at the University of Wisconsin-especially Hans R Gerth,"
The historical drift cannot be stopped; the masses who are fragmentsof bureaucratic structures of power cannot destroy these structures tobecome self-determined human beings. The masses can, at best, implement a revolution, which in this article means that they can be manipulated into pushing new leaders and elites, like the Nazi Party, into
the dominant bureaucracies; the most that radical strategy can accomplish in the face of Behemoth is: radical shifts in the distributionof po~er and in the composition of personnel. 25... •~ JI' - ,--.:.--.~ ...

••~:W~!!~"masses" are not active subjects; they arindividuals mentioned earlier. The masses are objects, they arefollowers, they "implement" history, it is they who make revolutionary leaders successful, and it is the leaders who make ultimate
decisions. In modern history always behind the elites and parties
there are revolutionary masses. 24
This conception of elites and masses drives a wedge into theheart of the community mentioned by Mills earlier. The elite and themass are two separate communities, only one of which consists ofself-determined individuals. The dominant activities of these separate
communities are different: one decides and the other implements.
The separation between these two sets of people and activities issimilar to the separation between the "academic community" and the"world outside."
In this context, strategy cannot take the form of motives ofaction which are shared by people in a common situation, since theelite and the mass are not in the same situation. Furthermore, thelink between the leader and the masses does not consist of communication within a community of individuals, but of that kind of manipulation of the masses that makes the leader successful.
This conception of historical change in fact excludes the possibility of significant change. If bureaucratization is the historical drift
and the substanCB. of history, if Behemoth is everywhere united, and if

24Ibid., p, 71.

15

tuh.onaD»w.mtoLOGYOY--·.¥,:·~7-,.=.,.,.....,.

cannot control what he is able to foresee. 28 This powerlessness andhelplessness are not attributes of the intellectual as a member of amanipulated and dependent mass; they are due to a failure of nerve 29(since habit means will.) Neither a leader nor a follower the intellectual is also not an academic spectator who observes hum~n history
from outside. The "detache'! spectator" does not know his helplessness

Jt.1\1.t\TI...

'

Two years after his excursion with Gerth, in an article titled"The Powerless People: The Role of the Intellectual in Society," 26Mills tried to find his way out of the maze where the excursion had
left him in order to move into deeper levels of analysis and strategy.
In "The Powerless People," Mills tries to break out of the worldof leaders and followers, elites and masses, since his own existence
is denied by this type of analysis. He tries to locate himself, and on
this basis to define his social situation.
If he is to think politically in a realistic way, the intellectual
must constantly know his own social position. 27 Mills, the intellectual, is clearly not one of the elite, since he is powerless. We continue toknow more and more about modern society, but we find the centers·of political initiative less and less accessible. This generates a personalmalady that is particularly acute in the intellectual who has laboredunder the illusion that his thinking makes a difference. In the worldof today the more his knowledge of affairs grows, the less effective
the impact of his thinking seems to become. Since he grows more
frustrated as his knowledge increases, it seems that knowledge leads
to powerlessness. He feels helpless in the fundamental sense that hebecause he never tries to surmount it. But the political man is always
aware that while events are not in his hands he must bear their consequences. 30
The intellectual has ~een reduced to an instrument for manipulation and to a manipulated object. He wants his thought to make a difference , but he is in fact politically irrelevant. His power to make adifference, to have consequences, is separate from him and strange tohim. This separation of the individual from his own power, this gap
between a person's decisions and their social consequences, this incoherence or lack of unity between thought and action, characterize
not only the situation of the intellectual, but also that of thewage-worker, the salaried clerk, the student. However, Mills does notanalyze the situation which is common to all these people, a situationin which they alienate their power to shape their environment, tomake a difference in the world. Mills limits his analysis to the intellectual, and does not develop a conception of alienation; for Mills,
alienation means disaffection; it is not a fact about people's situation,
but a feeling about their situation (people are alienated if they don't
believe in the work they're doing 31 ) .

26

28
1bid., p. 293.

1n Po-, Politics Mid People, where it is published under the title "The Social Role of theln1811ectual," pp. 292-304.
21,bid., p. 299.

29'.'The P ~ -. ':'9°Ple: The Role of the Intellectual In Society," Politics, Vol . I; No. 3 (April, 1944),

16

/bid.

JO/bid., p. 294.
31
Ibid., p. 300.

17

Once he is conscious of his own incoherence, of the separation
between his thought and his activity, the intellectual struggles to breakout of this powerlessness, to get to its roots, to unmask and to smash _the stereotypes of vision and intellect with which modern communications swamp us. 32 To get to the roots of his situation, the intellectual
must not only smash the stereotypes which veil the situation, but also
the spectacles of the "future" which divert his attention from the realsituation. The more the antagonisms of the actual present must be
suffered, the more the future is drawn upon as a source of pseudo-unityand synthetic morale. ... Most of these commodities are not plans withany real chance to be realized. They are baits for various strata, andsometimes for quite vested groups, to support contemporary irresponsibilities. ... Discussions of the future which accept the present basis
for it serve either as diversions from immediate realities or as tacit
intellectual sanctions of future disasters. 33
Among the veil makers and obfuscators, Mills singles out
professors for his sharpest critiques in "The Powerless People" and also
in a critique of textbooks published a year earlier. Since professors andtextbooks are important sources of the stereotypes which clutter
people's minds, some of the explanations of the intellectual' s failureof nerve may fruitfully be sought there. What Mills found in a sampleof textbooks on social psychology, all of it perpetrated as some kind of
science, included an emphasis upon the 'processual' and 'organic' character of society. ... From the standpoint of political action, such a view
may mean a reformism dealing with masses of detail and furthers atendency to be apolitical. There can be no bases or points of entry
for larger social action in a structureless flux. . . . The liberal'multiple-factor' view does not lead to a conception which would permit... political action . ... If one fragmentalizes society into 'factors,'

into ele ental bits, naturally one will then need quite a few of themto account for something, and one can never be sure they are all in . ...
The 'organic' orientation of liberalism has stressed all those social
factors which tend to a harmonious balance of elements. . . . In
seeing everything social as a continuous process, changes in pace andrevolutionary dislocations are missed or are taken as signs of the· 'pathological'. . . . The ideally adjusted man of the social pathologists
is "socialized.' This term seems to operate ethically as the opposite of'selfish;' it implies that the adjusted man conforms to middle-classmorality and motives and 'participates' in the gradual progress ofrespectable institutions. If he is not a 'joiner,' he certainly getsaround and into many community organizations. If he is socialized,
the_individual thinks of others and is kindly toward them. He does notbrood or mope about but is somewhat extrovert, eagerly participatingin his community's institutions. His mother and father were notdivorced, nor was his home ever broken. . . . The less abstract thetraits and fulfilled 'needs' of 'the adjusted man' are, the more theygravitate toward the norms of independent middle-class persons
verbally living out Protestant ideals in the small towns of America. 34

The professor who rejects the ideology of the politically impotent clerk, who refuses to trivialize himself and others, but who does
not struggle against his impotence, may seek to escape by becoming apassive spectator whose goal is understanding. However, Simply
34

32/bid., p. 299.
33
lbid., pp. 302-303.

18"The Professional Ideology of Social Pathologists."' AmHican Journal of Sociology, Vol . X LIX, No. 2(September, 1943), in Po-r, Politics and People, pp. 536-537 and pp. 551 -552.

19

B

The philosophers have only interpreted the worldin various ways; the point, however, is to change it.

understanding is an ideal of the man who has a capacity to know truth
but not the chance, the skill, or the guts, as the case may be, to com35·
municate them with political effectiveness.
In this context, when Mills writes that, in ge_neral, the larger
36
universities are still the freest places in which to work,
he seems to beapologizing for his own choice of· career. It is clear that, to Mills,
being free did not mean that professors could publish books about
their own powerlessness. Furthermore, he pointed out that professors
were not even too free to do that, since the deepest problem of freedom
for teachers is not the occasional ousting of a professor, but a vagu~
general fear-sometimes politely known as 'discretion,' 'g~o~ ~ste:or 'balanced judgment.' It is a fear which leads to self-mt1m1dat1oneven more cramped than that of this scared employee. In that case,the community of powerless people is much larger than the academic
community, and there is at least a possibility that the more powerless
will be more interested in political action than the freest. If Mills'
statement about the freedom of the intellectual is taken seriously, thenthe basis on which the intellectual is to engage in political action is notclear: is he to struggle because he's one of the powerless people, or
because he's already the freest member of American society'?
Mills' analysis of the situation of the professor is consistent withthe title of his article, not with the justification of his chosen career.

The professo'j after all, is legally an employee, subject to all that thisfact involves. 9 And what this involves is not different for the professor

than for the worker who sells his labor or for the clerk who sells histime; the only difference is what is sold. When you sell the lies ofothers you are also selling yourself.
40
self into a commodity.

To sell your self is to turn your

THE MARKET FOR COLLEGE TEACHERS

and finally becomes so habitual that the scholar is unaware of it. The
real restraints are not so much external prohibitions as control of the· gentlemen. 37 s·mce 'h. b'insurgent by the agreements of academict e JOis a pervasive political sanction and censorship of most middle-class
intellectuals, the political psychology of the scared employee becomesrelevant 38 If the professor works in the freest place in which to work ,In order to smash the official stereotypes of thought, to go beyound the various forms of academic escape, Mills abandons the worldof charismatic leaders and manipulated masses and returns to Dewey's
community of self-directed individuals; he would like to stand for apolitics of truth in a democratically responsible society. 41 This meansthat the individual does more than make moral evaluations which may
help him enrich his experience, expand his sensitivities, and perhaps
adjust to his own suffering, But he will not solve the problems he isup against. He is not confronting them at their deeper sources. 42 And

it means doing more than making detached, "objective" analyses of aspectacle in which the observer is not engaged, since this is more likea specialized form of retreat than the intellectual orientation of a man,then the situation of other sections of the population is, by implication,
39
tbid., p. 297.
40
tbid., p. 300.
41
lbid., p. 304.
42
tbid., pp. 298-299.

35"The Powerless People," loc. ci t, p, 300.
36tbid., pp, 296-297.
37
1bid., p , 297.
38tbid., p, 300.

21

20

What is involved is a location of oneself and a definition of reality
which make coherent action possible. If the thinker does not relate
himself to the value of truth in political struggle, he cannot responsibly
43
cope with the whole of live experience.

Mills does not formulate a specific strategy in thisarticle, though he does refer to discussion of world affairs thatproceeds in terms of the struggle for power. 45 The agents engaged

The individual is able to formulate a political strategy only after
he has located himself within his social situation. This is necessary inorder that he may be aware of the sphere of strategy that is really open
to his influence. If he forgets this, his thinking may exceed his sphereof strategy so far as to make impo5$ible any translation of his thought
into action, his own or that of others. His thought may thus become
fantastic. If he remembers his powerlessness too well, assumes that
his sphere of strategy is restricted to the point of impotence, then his
thought may easily become politically trivial. And once he has for-in this struggle for power are not defined. Mills clearly does not refer toa struggle between intellectuals and the corporate-military elite.
However, it is not clear if he is refering to a struggle in which intellectual leaders manipulate dependent masses into radical shifts inthe distribution of power and in the composition of personnel,

mulated a strategy, he must communicate it with political effectiveness.
Knowledge that is not communicated has a way of turning the mind
sour, of being obscured, and finally of being forgotten. For the sake ofthe integrity of the discoverer, his discovery must be effectively.
44.
commun,cated.

or a struggle in which all the powerless people, intellectuals as well as
workers, peasants, clerks, and students move to appropriate theiralienated power.

43
1bid., p. 299.
44
/bid., p . 300.

45

22/bid., p. 303.

.

~ StrateTHE
NEW MEN OF POWER
A.Mfl•CA~s IA&Oa llADfaS..C. WRIGHT MILLS

c.'fS

~

~

... ..

~-~&>HICOUII~IIACIAND COMPANY

49encyo\""v~~

In Mills' next two major works,46 the rift between the academic
spectator who takes the dependence of the "mass" and his own
impotence for granted, and the radical intellectual committed topolitically relevant action, becomes so wide that "C. Wright Mills"
seems to become the name of two different authors.
Mills once again collaborated with Professor Hans H. Gerth,this time on a book of essays by Max Weber published in 1946.
Whether he "benefited" primarily from his renewed contact with Weberor with Gerth, the Introduction to the book, written by Mills with
Gerth, provides a frame of reference from which Mills would neveragain completely break loose.
Unlike the highly critical introductions to Veblen and Marx
written by Mills in later years, the introduction to Weber is reverent,"objective," and uncritical. Weber is introduced as a political man anda political intellectual,47 namely as a model of something which
the powerless people are not. As a young man, Weber was a National
Liberal; in the middle 'nineties, Weber was an imperialist, defending
the power-interest of the national state as the ultimate value and using
the vocabulary of social Darwinism. 48 During World War I, He clamoredfor 'military bases' as far flung as Warsaw and to the north of there.

46From lllu Mel»r: £rays in SociolOflY (Translated and aditad fTom the German by Mills with H.H.
Genhl. N- Yont: Oxford Univenity Prea; London: Routledge & Keg., Paul Ltd., 1946, andn. ,.., .,.,, of Po_,_

And he wished the German army to occupy Liege and Namur fortwenty years. 49 When he moved to a "democratic" position, it was
not because he saw democracy as an intrinsically valuable body ofideas. ... He·saw democratic institutions and ideas pragmatically: notin terms of their 'inner worth' but in terms of their consequences in theselection of efficient political leaders. And he felt that in modern society such leaders must be able to build up and control a large, welldisciplined machine, in the American sense. 50 And finally, It is, ofcourse, quite vain to speculate whether Webt?r with his Machiavellian
attitude might ever have turned Nazi. To be sure, his philosophy ofcharisma-his skepticism and his pragmatic view of democratic sentiment- might have given him such affinities. But his humanism, his love forthe underdog, his hatred of sham and lies, and his unceasing campaign
against racism and anti-Semitic demagoguery would have made him atleast as sharp a 'critic', if not a sharper one, of Hitler than hi:; brother
Alfred has been. 51
Weber's definition of reality is one in which the poli tics of truthin a democratically responsible society would have no meaning, because
revolutionary political strategies cannot be formulated. The comprehensive underlying trend of modern society is bureaucratization, aprocess of rationalization identified with mechanism, depersonalization,and oppressive routine. 52 This trend does not consist of voluntary C<?l:49/bid., p. 39.

5ol bid., p. 38 .
51
Ibid., p. 43 .
52
lbid. , p. 50.

47

1ntroduction to From I/lax Mltber, p. 32.
48
lbid. , p. 35.

2,25

lective activities, but of processes which take place behind men's backs
and over which they have no control. Even a revolutionary movement
is, at best, only an instrument of these processes. Socialist class struggles
In short, theare merely a vehicle implementing this trend. 53
comprehensive trend of history, like the law of gravity, is beyond man's
reach, and the political intellectual, like the physicist of nineteenth
century European science, is merely a member of an audience who
observes a spectacle. In this context Mills does not say that simply
understanding is an ideal of the man who has the capacity to know
truth but not the chance, the skill, or the guts, as the case may be, tocommunicate. .. with political effectiveness.
Weber does provide some elements which could lead out of thispassive observation of underlying trends. The bureaucratization takes
place in a context where the wage worker is separated from the meansof production, where The modern soldier is equally 'separated' from them_e~ns of violence; the scientist from the means of enquiry, and the
c1v1/ servant from the means of administration. Mills does not, however,follow this lead into a study of alienation as an activity. Instead, hemerely says that Weber relativizes Marx's conclusions about the alienation of the wage worker. 54
In this world where men are reduced to fragments of bureaucracies whose aims they neither understand nor control there can be no
publics of self-determined individuals whose coll;ctive action hascons~quences on the underlying trend of history. In the place of such
publics, Weber offered an alternative which appealed to large numbers

53tbid.
54

of impotent, fragmented men in the twentieth century. Weber places
great emphasis upon the rise of charismatic leaders. Their movements,

are enthusiastic, and in such extraordinary enthusiasms class and statusbarriers sometimes give way to fraternization and exuberant community
sentiments. Charismatic heroes and prophets are thus viewed as truly
revolutionary forces in history. Bureaucracy and other institutions,especially those of the household, are seen as routines of workaday life;
charisma is opposed to all institutional routines, those of tradition andthose subject to rational management. This holds for the economicorder: Weber characterizes conquistadores and robber barons as
charismatic figures . ... they have in common the fact that people obey
them because of faith in their personally extraordinary qualities. ... themonumentalized individual becomes the sovereign of history. 55 With
detachment and even with reverence, Mills and Gerth obser··~, in 1946,
that in WebeT's view men cannot collectively make their c m history;
even revolutionary movements can merely implement wha t are alreadythe underlying trends of history ; and that Weber introduces a balancing
conception for bureaucracy: the concept of 'charisma,'56 according towhich man nevertheless makes history, but only one man, the charismatic leader, Superman.
551bid., pp. 52-53.

tbid.

56Jbid., p. 52.

26

27

I

***
As if to dissociate himself from Gerth, Weber and the Charismatic
Leader, Mills opens his next major work with the following frontispiece: 57
When that boatload of wobblies comeUp to Everett, the sheriff says
Don't you come no further
Who the hell's yer leader anyhow?
Who's yer leader?
And them wobblies yelled right backWe ain't got no leader
We're all leaders
And they kept right on comin'- From an interview withan unknown worker
Sutfliffe, Nevada
June, 1947.

Rejecting the impotence of the academic intellectual, thispolitically motimed task aims to be politk:ally re/want, 59 to go
beyond those independe~t leftists for whom political alertness is
becoming a contemplative st.ate rather than a spring of action: they
are freqllt!ntly overwhelmed by visioM, but they have no organized
will. _ . they see bureaucracy everywhere and they are afraid. 60
The book aims to expose the labor leader who is walking backwards
into the future envisioned by the sophisticated conservatives. By his
long-term pursuit of the short end, he is helping move the society of
the United States into a corporate form of ga"ison state. 61 In thisbook events are not explained in terms of underlying trends or inevitable historical processes, but in terms of decision and indecision,action and inaction, radical will and failure of nerve. In this context,
political thinking becomei. a praGtical aGt1vity, and -skatGgy once again ·has meaning, because consequential collective action is once again
defined as possible.
To regain his bearings. to locate himself through a fresh perceptionof his context, Mills again undertakes to unmask and to smash thestereotypes of vision and intellect which hide the consequences ofpeople's activity from their view. A chapter is devoted to The Liberal
Rhetoric, which has become the medium of exchange among political,
scholarly, business, and labor sookesmen. 62 The formulas of thisritualized substitute for communication do not clarify the social
situation but obscure it. The rhetoric of liberalism is related neither

Mills' first published book, completed when he was 32, is neither
a contribution to academic sociology nor a detached and apoliticalaccomplishment along the journey of a successful professional career.
It is a politically motivated task, 58 and as such it takes up projects
which had been left unfinished before the second excursion withProfessor Gerth.
57

58

T1>t! New Men of Power, Frontispiece.

n,,, Sociological Imagination, p. 200.

28

to the specific stands taken nor to what might be happening outside
the range of the spokesman's voice. As applied to business-labor
relations the liberal rhetoric is not so much a point of view as a social
phenom;non. . . . The liberal rhetoric personalizes and moralizes
business-labor relations.
It does not talk of any contradiction ofinterests but of highly placed persons. . . 63 Within the framework of
59 n,., New Mt,n of Po...,,, p. 10.
60/bid., p. 18.
61
Ibid., p. 233.
62
1bid., p. 111 .
63
1bid., p. 111 and 113.

29

·'·

this social phenomenon, pious wishes about the personal morals of thehighly placed persons replace political theory and practice : "If only the
spokesmen for both sides were uniformly men of good will and if only
they were in'telligent, then there would be no breach between theinterests of the working people and those of the managers of property." 64
In sharp contrast to the liberal rhetoric, the program of the far left . ..

attempts to get to the root of what is happening and what might bedone about it and consequently, by the public relations-minded
standards of sophisticated conservatives, it is naively outspoken andstupidly rational. 65

To get to the root of what is happening, and to define it in waysthat make clear what might be done about it, Mills has no use for anunderlying trend or a substance of history which runs its course like anincurable disease whatever men decide and do. Instead of the unrelenting and inevitable march of the nearly cosmic process of bureaucratization, Mills now sees big businessmen installing the dominant bureaucracies of post-war America under the very noses of the labor leaders towhom workers had delegated their struggle (and thus alienated theirpower). The -sophisticated conservatives see the world, rather than somea program which consists of nothing less than the establishment of thePower Elite and the Permanent War Economy described in Mills' later
works as the socio-economic system of the United States. From theunion of the military, · the scientific, and the monopoly business elite,'a combined chief of staff' for America's free private enterprise is to be

drawn. ... If the sophisticated conservatives have their way, the next
New Deal will be a war economy rather than a welfare economy,
although the conservative's liberal rhetoric might put the first in theguise of the second. 6 7

There was nothing natural or inevitable about this process toMills in 1948; it was both unnatural and avoidable. Lacking a conceptof alienation, he does not go to the root of the political apathy of theAmerican worker 68 who unmanned himself by allowing labor leaders
to speak and act for him, but Mills does narrate what the labor leaders
did with the worker's alienated power: . . . the labor leader often
assumes the liberal tactics and rhetoric of big business co-operation; heasks for the program of the sophisticated conservative; he asks for aplace in the new society. .. 69 and thus, he is helping move the society

sector of it, as an object of profit. They have planned a se.ries of next
steps which amount to a New Deal on a world scale operated by big
businessmen. 66 This is no natural law; it is The Program of the Right,of the United States into a corporate form of garrison state. Watching

the labor leader bow and crawl, the political in tellectuaJ chooses his own
course of action-the intellectual who , as Mills knew well in 1948, was
not made powerless by underlying historical trends but by his own
decisions; whose situation as a scared employee was not imposed on him
67

64/bid., p. 114.
65
/bid., p. 240.
66
lbid., pp. 24~241 .

/bid.• pp. 248-249.

68

tbid., p. 269.

69,bid., p. 249 .-.ct p. 233.

30

31

The

from abo..-e or below, but WU delibecately chosen.
two greatest
blinders of the intallectual who today might fight again6t the main
drift are new and fascinating career chances, which o~M int10ltie

T.W.. !

Excess r>emaril"r.: l'rolesson
1947-48 to 1961-<12-.....=.....
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185,103

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187,350

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ol 0aiarp - ia amMCdaa widt the War CDmmwuallOIU
h,joa at ... LI,._., o f ~ The Proj,ct
wa bp a ... lladddla Foundat""':c~:.-::c.:;;'u......,..== ~~... u - ,, ... , _ _s.c,aa of tbe Fouadatioa. ~ facilitia maclt anilabk byu,d theof~0
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1-11. C.., ~...S Smid, (Ullioa,;ty o f . , _ ..._•"51-

opportunities to practice his skill rather freely, and the ideology ofliberalism, which tends to exprOtJriate his chance to think straight.

The two go together, for the liberal ideology, as now used by intellectuals, acts as a device whereby he can take advantage of the newcareer chances but retain the illusion that his soul remains his own.
As the labor leader moves from ideas to politics, so the intellectual
moves from ideas to career. 70 As a result of the choices made by
those to whom workers had given up their power to act and think,the main and constant function of a union is to contract labor to an
employer and to have a voice in the terms of that contract. . .. the labor
leader is a business entrepreneur in the important and specialized business of contracting a supply of trained labor. . . . The labor leader organizes and sells wage workers to the highest bidder on the best terms
available. He is a jobber of labor power. He accepts the general conditions of labor under capitalism and then, as a contracting agent

operating within that system, he higgles and bargains over wages,
hours and working conditions for the members of his union. The
labor leader is the worker's entrepreneur in a way sometimes similar
to the way the corporation manager is the stockholder's entrepreneur. 71
In later works, Mills is going to write about the collapse ofhistorical agencies of change, about a Labor Metaphysic which holds
that workers are going to arise spontaneously, about a promise oflabor which was not fulfilled; 72 he is going to describe these false hopes
as if they were traps into which he had once fallen, as if he had once
believed that American workers were about to initiate a vast anticapitalist struggle, which Mills would join as soon as the workers
began it. But, whatever traps the straw men of the labor movement
may have fallen into, Mills was never in such traps (at least not in his
published works). He had not even mentioned the American worker asa revolutionary force before The New Men of Power, and in this bookhe considers the American worker politically apathetic. He does saythat the U.S. worker may, under certain circumstances, be willing totake steps toward his own humanization, but by saying this he merely
gives the U.S. worker attributes which, after all, this person shareswith all normal human beings. In the light of the analysis he makes in
The New Men of Power, Mills' later pronouncements about the automatic agency of change which collapsed, his disclaimers of any Labor
Metaphysic, his "disappointments" with the promise of labor, can only
be interpreted as excuses for his own movement from ideas to career, as
liberal ideological devices which he used to take advantage of newcareer chances while retaining the illusion that his soul remained hisown.
In 1948 Mills does not seem to have been waiting for thepolitically apathetic workers to "arise." He was concerned, rather,with defining the circumstances in which workers might be willing to71
72

lO/bid.• p. 281.

32

Ibid., p, 6.

S.."°-r, Politics and People, pages 187, 105-108, 232, 255-259.

33

move. And the first condition for such movement was to cope withthe apathy, the dependence, the lack of initiative and self-determination which largely account for the worker's powerlessness anddehumanization: . . . the power of democratic initiation must beallowed and fostered in the rank and file. ... During their struggle,73
the people involved would become humanly and politically alert.

On the basis of a definition of reality which clarifies the activities responsible for people's powerlessness, and the location ofpotential historical subjects who may be willing to struggle for their lost
power, Mills is able, for the first time, to link thought with projectedaction, to formulate a general political strategy. In its broadest form ,the strategy is To have an American labor movement capable of carryingout the program of the left, making allies among the middle class, andOnly then can the left be linked securely with large forces of rebellion. 74
However, forces of rebellion do not "arise" any more automaticallythan individuals who strive to communicate radical goals and strategies,
and workers do not become apathetic any more automatically than theprofessors or labor leaders who abandon these political tasks in orderto enjoy academic or political privileges with the explanation thatthe historical agency "collapsed." Yet it is somehow easier to excuse

moving upstream against the main drift. .. 76 Before the program of theleft can be carried out, it must be communicated- and this communication is precisely one of the tasks of Mills' book. We shall attempt to do
only one thing: to make the collective dream of the left manifest. 77

in the others; they are not leaders of a protest of such proportion; they
follow the main drift with a certain fitness and pleasure, feeling there
is something to gain from it, which there often is. But the labor leader
represents the only potentially liberating mass force; and as he becomesa man in politics, like the rest, he forgets about political ideas. ...
Programs take time; of the long meantime, the labor leader is afraid;
he crawls again into politics-as-usual. 75

Only after the strategy has been communicated with political effectiveness will it be possible to speak of workers as a potential agency ofchange, and then only because the strategy consists of a commonly
73

11>eNt1wMen of Po-,, pp. 252-253.

76
Jbid. , p. 291 .
77
Jbid., p. 251 .

74

Ibid.• p. 250.
75
Jbid., pp. 169-170.

34

35

undertaken project.

The American worker has a high potential
their success. The labor leaders and the U.S. workers are not alone ifthey choose to fight. They have potential allies of pivotal importance.
All those who suffer the results of irresponsible social decisions and who
hold a disproportionately small share of the values available to man inmodern society are potential members of the left. The U.S. public is by
no means a compact reactionary mass. If labor and the left are not tolose the fight against the main drift by default and out of timidity,
they will have to choose with whom they will stand up and against
whom they will stand. 79

In spite of the lucidity with which Mills exposes the choice
confronting the political intellectual, he is frequently at pains to build
himself an escape hatch, and he closes the book with it : It is the task of
the labor leaders to allow and to initiate a union of the power and theintellect. They are the only ones who can do it; that is why they are

militancy when he is pushed, and if he kno ws what the issue is. Such aman, identified with unions as communities and gi ven a chance tobuild them, will not respond apathetically when outside politicalforces attempt to molest what is his. 78 Whatever promise there is in

this perspective, it is not based on the expectation that a Savior in the
shape of a class conscious proletariat will descend from heaven to pullmankind out of the main drift, but rather on one' s own determination
to fight and on one's ability to define a field of strategy within which
the struggle can be effective. Consequently, one cannot later be"disappointed" by the fact that the Savior did not arrive , but only by
one's own timidity, indecision and failure to choose. The American
labor unions and a new
develop real hopefulne
only if they are prepat<

now the strategic elite in American society.
ever as so much depended upon men who are so ill-prepared and so little inclined toassume the responsibility. 80 This last paragraph of the book flatly

contradicts much of the book's content, and particularly the frontispiece in which the wobblies yell We're all leaders-and they kept rightmerican left can release political energies,nd open matters up for counter-symbols
o act bpldly and win over the less boldbr

The last paragraph is not written by the same
inserted the frontispiece , nor by the member of a new American left
who is determined to act boldly and win over the less bold; it is written
by a more passive type of man, a sociology professor who benefitted
from his contact with Max Weber and Hans Gerth. The rift between
the frontispiece and the last paragraph was never bridged by Mills; it
seems that the Weberian leaders and the leaderless Wobblies occupied
separate compartments in Mills' mind , and since either one, or theother, emerged from a compartment at any given time, the two neverdirectly confronted each other.

on comin!

78

79
1bid., p. 274.

tbid., pp. 269-270.

BO/bid. , last paraw-aph of the book, p. 291 .

36
37... .

,:.. ;,t~".;. ..

In this essay, I will focus attention to the controversial n:iargins,because this is where Mills analyzed himself, his fellow academics, andhis ·dehumanizing experience in the white collar hierarchy.
.
The int roduction to White Collar contains the most comprehensive
analysis of alienation that Mills ever made. In the case of the whit~collar man the alienation of the wage-worker from the products of his
work is ca:ried one step nearer to its Kafka-like completion. The salaried

C. WIIIGffTGU

Sl.7!1~.;:;....,;:...__.

___- ____.

:.-.: :"'." ··...._,,. :~·r---rr:..

Abandoning workers to labor leaders who have crawled again into
politics-as-usual, Mills took up new and fascinating career chances which
involved opportunities to practice his skill rather freely. Between 1950
and 1956, he wrote two major books and numerous articles, and took
his third, largest and last excursion with Professor Gerth. In all theseworks, the influence of Weber and Gerth is dominant; the independent
political radical is pushed to the margins, and in the work with Gerth isaltogether absent. Yet this framework cannot hold the man who once
comitted himself to deeper levels of analysis and strategy, and at the endof this period the margins expand and once again become the central
concerns. However, like the earlier interruptions of Mills' search forpolitical coherence, the new excursions and retreats are not overcome,and as a result they leave large scars.
To professors of sociology, the period which Mills later called
the mindless years is Mills' most "creative" period : he wrote asociology textbook with Gerth, plus two original contributions to the"profession." Although the well documented observations of theoriginal works are somewhat marred by marginal observations which are
cryptic and controversial, the textbook clearly lives up to the expectations or the head scholars of the profession: "Whether use of the bookprecedes, accompanies, or follows intensive study of the short-run
present in the laboratory. field and clinic. it should broaden the horizonof the student who generally comes into social psychology either
through the gateway of psychology or of sociology.••/1
Robert K. Merton's Foreword to C. Wri!t,t Mills and H. H. Gerth, Characll!r and S<x:ial Structure: The
Psychology of S<x:ial Institutions, New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1953, pp, vii -viii.

✓,~_.....,__ ..,.•~ - --

employee does not make anything, although he may handle much that
he greatly desires but cannot have. No product of craftsmanship can_ b~
his to contemplate with pleasure as it is being created and after it 1s
made. Being alienated from any product of his labor, and going year
after year through the same paper routine, he turns his leisure all themore frenziedly to the ersatz diversion that is sold him, and partakesof the synthetic excitement that neither eases nor releases. He is boredat work and restless at play, and this terrible alternation vvears him out

11.... When white-collar people get jobs, they sell not only their time andenergy, but their personalities as well.
They sell by the week orwrite that Our knowledge of this is firmer than any strict proof availIt rests, first of all, upon our awareness, as politicallyable to us.
conscious men ourselves, of the discrepancy between the meaning andstature of public events and what people seem most interested in, 4~Itheir smiles and their kindly gestures, and they must practice
the prompt repression of resentment and aggression . ... Self-alienationis thus an accompaniment of his alienated labor. 2 The separation of theindividual from his own activity and even from his gestures, the individual's lack of power over his own self, is accompanied by a feelingof general powerlessness, by political indifference. To be politicallyindifferent is to see no political meaning in one's life or in the world
THB

RBFERBNCE

SHELF

FRsliDoM AND LoYALTYIN OUR Cow;GES

in the - ..,. ,-r of its
system,d Chicago.
William E.

·ma1. pcnc-trati
in 19, 2 under the
chainnanlhip of Senator Pat McCarran (Democrat, Nevada).

in which one lives, to avoid any political disappointments or gratifications. So political symbols have lost their effectiveness as motives foraction and as justifications for institutions. Mills characterizes various(Whenever in this book, I have written 'we' I mean my wife, Ruth
Harper, and myself. .. ' 5 ) It is a sense of our general condition thatlies back of our conviction that political estrangement in America iswidespread and decisive. 6 Thought is separated from living experience,and the formerly political intellectual becomes a passive spectator.
Most of us now live as spectators in a world without political interlude:
fear of total permanent war stops our kind of morally oriented politics.
Our spectatorship means that personal, active experience often seems
politically useless and even unreal. 7
Mills does not accept this condition. In a section on The Moraleof the Cheerful Robot he writes, whatever satisfaction alienated men

forms of poli-tical indifference among the white collar people; some ofthe people whose lives make no difference escape an awareness of thisfact by means of animal thrill, sensation, and fun . However, politicalindifference may also be a reasoned cynicism, which distrusts anddebunks all available political loyalties and hopes as lack of sophistication. Or it may be the product of an extra-rational consideration of
the opportunities available to men, who, with Max Weber, assert thatthey can live without belief in a political world gone meaningless, but
in which detached intellectual work is still possible. 3 This analysis ofgain from work occurs within the framework of alienation; whateversatisfaction they gain from life occurs outside the boundaries of work;
work and life are sharply split. 8 Furthermore, Mills does not apologize
4lbid., p. 328.

political indifference is not based on statistical studies of white collar
people. It is based on personal experience. Mills and Ruth Harper

52Mills. m>ite Collar: The American Middle Clasa,s, New York : Oxford Universi ty Press. pp. xvi -xvii.
3
lbid., p. 327.

and Student Partisan !Winter, 19521, in Po-r, Politics and People, p . 187.
8
W7>ite Collar, p. 235.

lbid., p. 355.

6 Jbid., p. 331 .
' "'Liberal Values in the Modem World: The Relevance of 19th Century Liberalism Today.'" Anvil

43for this split as the legitimate attitude of the "objective," detachedscholar. For Mills such a pose is the pose of an idiot , and Mills remains
a different kind of man: we are now in a situation in which many who

are disengaged from prevailing allegiances have not acquired new ones,
and so are distracted from and inattentive to political concerns of eny
kind. They are strangers to politics. They are not radical, not liberal,
not conservative, not reactionary; they are inactionary; they are out of
it. If we accept the Greek's definition of the idiot as a privatized man,then we must conclude that the U.S. citizenry is now largely composedof idiots. 9very little discussion of political meanings, not to speak of their dra:'?atization or sharp demands and expectations. . . . The preva,tmg
symbol; are presented in such a contrived and pompou~ civi~s-bookmanner, or in such a falsely human light, as to preclude /Jvely mvolvement and deep-felt loyalties. . . . The mass media hold a monopoly of
the ideologically dead; they spin records of political emptiness.
THE OPEIATIONAL CODEOf
THE POLITIUIO) \\ hh 11, iii.ml du ,1 1tl, t>I dn \111.1h
lntt 111.tl ~111111\,1ln-

l l,11h1 ( 111!111\llltt:

Ac t l\ 1111, ,1111! tlu· '4. 11,111 1'1 1111,IIH Ill \ 11 I M
1iga 11,,11,

1111

1hn1

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Ust,11111

I am 111cld1111l 111 ( IJu l..1 1111. 111 \\' 1\h.11
on 1h1· ,1111111 1 ul 111, I 11111 \ 111, 11d1111111,

Instead of accepting this mass incapacity, Mills seeks to understand it, so as to get out of it. He asks why men accept themselves,
with a smile and a cheer, as dependent robots and helpless idiots whose
lives make no difference, and he begins to answer. Between conscious-

1h ~ qu,,1.1111,11,1,,1111111111~ II 1h.11

I h.tH t

md 1;

The Webof Subversion
UNDERGROUND NETWORKS
IN THE U. S. GOVERNMENT

The attention absorbed by the images on the screen's rectangle
dominates the darkened public. . . The image of success and its

ness and existence stand communications, which influence suchconsciousness as men have of their existence. 10 And the communications provided by the cultural apparatus of the U.S. , consisting of
mindless commodity propaganda, obfuscating liberal rhetoric anddebilitating entertainment, helps explain why the U.S. citizenry is now
largely composed of idiots:
The forms and contents of politicalconsciousness, or their absence, cannot be understood without reference
to the world created and sustained by these media . ... Contents of themass media seep into our images of self, becoming that which istaken for granted.
The world created by the mass media contains
9

Jbid. , p, 328.

TO/bid.• pp. 332-333.

individuated psychology are the most lively aspects of popular culture
and the greatest diversion from politics. . . . The easy identification
with private success finds its obverse side, Gunnar Myrdal has observed,
in 'the remarkable lack of a self-generating, self-disciplined, organizedpeople's movement in America. ' 11 The ideals of liberalism have been
divorced from any realities of modern social structure that might serveas the means of their realization. ... The detachment of liberalism fromthe facts of a going society make it an excellent mask for those who donot, cannot, or will not do what would have to be done to realize its
ideals. 1 2 In his Diagnosis of Our Moral Uneasiness, Mills turns to the
1T Ibid., pp. 334-337.

12•·Uberal Values in the Modem World," /oc. cit. p , 189.

effects of leisure on the drugged and deluded spectators: ... leisureitself has largely become merely a part of consumption, no longer panof a full life, but a substitute for it For to this sphere also, the meansof mass production-the machineries of amusement-have been applied
Rather than allow and encourage men to develop their sensibilities andunfold their creativities, their leisure merely wears them out. 13

Bazaar in the World, while What goes on domestically may briefly bedescribed in terms of the main drift toward a permanent war economy

in a garrison state. 15

Yet even though Mills rejects the passivity with which men accept
their own fragmentation, he no longer struggles against it. The coherent
self-determined man becomes an exotic creature who Jived in a distantpast and in extremely different material circumstances. The first partof White Collar opens with the following quotation from R.H. Tawney:

The main drift is no longer the program of theright which can be opposed by the program of the left; it is now an
external spectacle which follows its course like a disease.
The American labor movement capable of moving upstream
against the main drift, and the leaderless men who kept right on comin' ,are abandoned to the media of mass distraction, and to labor leaders.
Mills does not excuse this in terms of the political detachment of theobjective scholar; he excuses it in terms of the political default ofothers, even in terms of the default of the workers themselves: theSavior did not arrive. Whatever the political promises of labor andleftward forces 15 years ago, they have not been fulfilled... 16"Whatever the future may contain, the past has shown no more
excellent social order than that in which the mass of the people werethe masters of the holdings which they plowed and of the tools withwhich they worked. .. " 14 As for the present, cheerful robots, buyers,

floorwalkers and salesgirls, professors and managers , shuffle between the
Enormous File and The Great Salesroom, purge what remains of their
humanity by running in The Status Panic and shopping in The Biggest7374

As a result, it is not possible to see oneself as a demanding
political force 17 since one }, -, ~ not defined a social contextin which men
willfully modify and create their institutions. 18 The field of strategy
has been restricted to the point of impotence, since the powerless intellectual has no strategy and no one to communicate it to. Thus re•stricted, the impotent professor can no longer remain coherent ; therift between theory and prac tice , thought and action , widens; political
15 "liberal Values in the Modem World ," foe. ci t. , p. 187.
16··A Diagnosis of Our Moral Uneasiness," New York Times Magazine (November 23, 1952);
complete version published for the first time in Power, Politics and People, pp, 332-333.
R.H. Tawney, quoted in Mills, 1-W>ire Collar, p. 1.

/bid.,
17

W>ire Collar, p. 327.
18 •·A Diag,osis of Our Moral Uneasiness," foe. ci t.p. 33 7 .

ideals can no longer be translated into practical projects, and projected
acl!ons are no longer related to any ideals. Thus the same writer who
spe_aks of men_ wilfully creating their own institutions refers to politicalaction as haVJng real demands to make of those in key positions ofcharacter and social structuretlle,.W.U.t..Win1lhllllat

19

Wilful) self-determination characterizes angels in a city builtwith words, whereas political acti\·:ty in the city of men consists of submi~sion to those in key positions of power. Behemoth is everywhereunited. But the man who was once moved by this fact into deeper
levels of analysis and strategy, now retreats to a post-World War II
formulation of Max Weber's salvation from impotence and routine:p~wer.

. . . there is in America today no set of Representative Men whose
conduct and c?aracter are above the taint of the pecuniary morality,
and who constitute models for American imitation and asoiration
Yet it is the moral man-and especially the set of socially visibie. ~~Representative Men- wha by demanding mo,al change can best
dramatize issues. 20

In the early 1950s, Mills seems to have been in the right frame ofmind for his major project with Professor Gerth. Character and Social
Structure is not a political task, it is not a strategy of action addressed
to a democratically responsible public; its aim is not to make the collective dream of the left manifest to potential forces of rebellion. It isa textbook, an encyclopedic compilation of other people's though ts, anadministrative classification of fragmentary observations, addressed tothe powerless people, the status seeking academic bureaucrats who may
use it on students who come "either through the gateway of psychology
or of sociology" for wisdom which "precedes, accompanies or follows
intensive study of the short-run present in the laboratory, field andclinic." An ironic result of this rational compartmentalization of fragments is that one compartment's fragments may affirm what is deniedby the fragments classified into another compartment. This rationalizedincoherence provides a framework in which most of Mills' eariier observations coexist with their opposites in politically trivial contexts. The
book even contains a devastating critique of the bureaucratic structure
it is designed to serve. The demand of the state and of corporations fortrained civil servants and qualified experts of all sorts has been decisive
for the modern development of universities. . . . Lorenz van Steincorrectly called the modern university 'a school for bureaucrats.' 21

19,.U,e al' r Values in the Modem World," loc. cit, p. 187.
20
"A 0i"!11osis of Our Moral Uneasiness." loc. cit., pp. 336-337.

,48

21 Mills and Gerth, Character and Social Strucrure, p . 254.

49

On the basis uf the dd1nitions of realit y whid1 emerge from thiswork . a reader cannot responsibly cope with the whole of live experience. J:! Instead of askin g why people allow themselves to be dehumanized. to be forced to live out their lives on a stage playing theroles or cheerful robots, the authors simply lean back and abandon
themselves to the enjoyment of the grand spectacle for which sociologists
have fashioned analytical tools. Long-used phrases readily come to mind:'playing a role' in the 'great theater of public life,' to move 'in thealso mentioned. Authority, or legitimate power, involves voluntary
obedience based on some idea which the obedient holds of thepowerful or of his pos1t1on.
'The strongest,' wrote Rousseau,
is never strong enough to be always master, unless he transforms

limelight,' the 'theater of War,' the 'stage is all set. ,':JJ
Instead or
attempts to get to the root of what is happening and what might be done
about it, this textbook provides cold descriptions of what usually

happens, presented in such a way that one cannot imagine what might
be done about it. An institution is thus (1) an organization of roles,(2) one or more of which is understood to serve the maintenance ofthe total set of roles. 24 Herc slaves, clerks and wage workers arenothing more than obedient sheep, or roles, and the de gradation andself-annihilation involved in every act of submission is merely the partassigned to supporting characters by the script. The 'head role' of an
institution is very importailt 'iri the psychic life 'of the other m'embers' of
the institution.
What 'the head' thinks of them in their respectiveroles, or what they conceive him to think, is internalized, that is,

his strength into right, and obedience into duty. ' 26

But Rousseau's
lead is not followed; the voluntary alienation of self-powers is notanalyzed in any politically meaningful context.
The authors mention that the social activities in which people
engage are not determined by people's biology, but are specificvoluntary responses to particular situations; they are historical, not"natural." The routinized activities which account for most people's
daily life may well be "roles" which they voluntarily perform in theface of specific obstacles; it may well be true that, in the past, people
voluntarily performed the same roles all life long, and thus alienatedtheir selves. However, even if an actor puts on the mask of Oedipus
and remains on stage reciting the same lines for the rest of his life,
the actor's self cannot be confused with his mask. Yet this is precisely
what the professors confuse. They point out that man as a person is asocial-historical creation, and they specify that a person (from theLatin persona, meaning 'mask') is composed of the specific roles whichtaken over, by them. 25

The fact that the head role has power only
because, and only so long as the others voluntarily separate themselvesfrom their own power, and thus annihilate their own humanity, is22
23

Mills, "The Powerless People," Joe. cit , p. 299.
Mills and Gerth, Character and Social Strvcruff!, p. 10.

24

Jbid., p , 13.
25
Jbid. ,

50

51

he enacts, although the word composed already introduces an ambiguity.
But then they say that In order to understand men's conduct andexperience we must reconstruct the historical social structures inwhich they play roles and acquire selves. 2 7 In other words, by playing
the role of Oedipus a man acquires a self, whereas in actual fact, by
playing the role of Oedipus the man becomes a character in a play, aspectacle, a dead thing: he alienates his self, and acquires a mask. Byc_o~~using the man with his masks, the professors close the very poss1b1hty of analyzing man's self-alienation in roles and masks. But inthat case they cannot study social institutions as historical forms ofr~utinized activity, as masks which people voluntarily put on in specificcircumstances. Consequently, their frequent use of the term historicalconveys nothing more than the superficial observation that people
perform different activities in different periods of time.
Armed with a conception which reduces man to his particular"behavior" in particular circumstances (which coexists with a fragment
f~om Rousseau whjch points in the opposite direction from this conception), the professors describe social activity as a grand theatrical performance, a vast spectacle. In this enormous drama, there are notmerely roles, but bureaucratically arranged sets of roles, or Institutional
Orders. These Orders, or Spheres, are named in terms of the types ofro_l~s played within them: the main Orders are political, economic andmilitary; other Orders contrun rel1gious, kinshlp and educational roles.
Each Institutional Order has a corresponding script, or symbol sphere.
Standard scenes performed in the political and military orders are?escribed in the following dramatic terms: Once a national community

is fully a state, it monopolizes the use of legitimate violence within its
domain, dP.fends its domain against other states, and may attempt to
expand it. 28 . . . When a nation-state extends political protection to

the u:ading areas of its businessmen we speak of 'imperialism.' The most
expl1_c it types of imperialism involve the acquisition of a colonial
empire by purchase, or conquest, or both. 29
The violence of a modern national army is legitimated by thesymbols and sentiments of the nation and its cause; the men of thisarrn_y are d1sc1plmed for obedience to a hierarchy of staff and line
officers. The following sentence explains that Discipline rests upon
27
lbid. , p. 14.

28

lbid., p. 203.
29
lbid., p. 204.

acceptance of the nation's cause and is guaranteed by sanctionsincluding loss of status and career chances and, in the last analysis,
capital punishment. 30 This explanation of discipline, not merely interms of force, but in terms of the nation's cause, in terms of right,
obscures the meaning of the statement from Rousseau whlch wasquoted with approval by the professors. The strongest is neverstrong enough to be always master, unless he transforms his force
into right and obedience into duty. This is the origin of the right ofthe strongest, a right seemingly accepted in irony, and actually established in principle. But will this word never be explained to us?

Force is a physical power; I don't see what morality can result from its
effects. To give in to force is an act of necessity, not of will; it's atbest an act of prudence. In what sense could it be a duty? asked
Rousseau after the statement quoted by the professors.... What kindof a right perishes when force ceases? If one has to obey because offorce, one need not obey because of duty; and if one is no longer
forced to obey, one is no longer obliged. We can see that this wordright does not add anything to force; here it means nothing at all. .. .
Obey power! If that means: give in to force, the precept is good but
superfluous; I answer that it will never be violated. . . . Since no man
has any natural authority over his equal, and since force produces noright. only conventions remain as the basis of all legitimate authority
among men. . . . To alienate is to give or sell. ... ( But) to say that a
man gives himself freely is to say something absurd and inconceivable;
such an act is illegitimate and void if only because the man who does
this is not in his right mind. To say the same thing about a population
is to suppose a population of madmen; but madness does not create
right. . . . To renounce one's liberty is to renounce one's quality as aman, the rights of humanity as well as the duties. . . . In short, it is avain and contradictory convention which stipulates absolute authority
for one and unlimited obedience for the others. 31 If Rousseau's
3 0lbid., p. 229.
31 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du ContratSocial, Paris: Union Generale d'Editions, 1963, pp. 54-56.

52

53

argument had been re-thought coherently, and not included bureaucratically as a fragment from a file, the professors would have explainedthat military discipline rests on a complete renunciation of one's
quality as a man, that even a modern national army is rtever strong
enough to be always master , and consequently that the continued
renunciation of one's humanity cannot be guJr:mteed by anything.
If obedience and discipline could be gu aranteed, man would have
But this is not the poin t of the last paragraph ofno history.
Character and S ocial Structure, where it is said that man not only has ahistory , but creates it. Neither his am, tr nw nor his psyche fix his
destin y. He creates his own destiny as he sponds to his experienced

situation, and both his situation and his experiences of it are thecomplicated products of the historical epoch which he enacts. That is
why he does not create his destiny as an individual but as a member ofa society. Only withm the limits of his place in an historical epoch can
man as an individ 11 shape himself, but we do not yet krlow, we cannever know, the limits to whici men collectively might remake themselves. 32 This conclusion is unde rmined by most of what precedes it.
According to paragraphs which immediately precede the conclusion, it
is not men, but nations, namely frozen concentrations of men'salienated powers , that make modern history. On the one hand, there is
the U.S.S. R., the world's greatest land power. . . On the other hand,
there is the US.A., the world's greatest industrial and naval power. .

All countries are now interdependent, but all countries are also now
directly or indirectly dependent upon the dollar or the ruble standard,
upon what the United States or the Soviet Union does or fails to do. 33
It is a spectacle with two superhuman heroes; they act, and men o~ey,
The very possibility of collective projects based on shared perspectives
and strategies is dismissed by a reasoned cynicism which distrusts anddebunks all political activity. In the professional jargon of theseauthors, reference to straightforward communication among self-determined individuals would lack sophistication; instead of community,
there are roles, and the verbal exchange between roles is not communication but manipulation; the manipulator has a monopoly on his skill:
he is a symbol expert; his manipulated audience consists of men who
are not specialists in symbols but in other '.'disciplines" (i.e. they haveeven alienated their powl:, to express themselves): Skill groups, suchas poets and novelists, specialize in fashioning and developing vocabularies for emotional states and gestures; they specialize in telling us

how we feel, as well as how we should or might feel, in various
situations. 34 In terms of this type of language, political action is
reduced to efficient manipulation, because the world consists of rat-likemasses who move and shift in response to particular symbolic stimuli.
In the scholar's study ot the agita tor's den the symbols which legitimate
various kinds of political systems may be rearranged, debunked, or
elaborated. . . . For changes in the legitimating symbols to be realized,

The RAND Series

THI OPIIATIONAL co nOF

This is one of a series ,)f puh!Kat1ons \\ h1d1 will
present results of research unJertaken h\ The R :\ :\' D
Corporation. a nonprofit or~anization. charrcrcJ · tn
further anJ prnmotc scientific eJucational. and char1tahlc purposes. all for the puhlK welfare anJ scc"urlt\of the L'nited States o f America ...

32

Mills and Genh. Character and Social Structure, p. 480.

54

33
Jbid .• pp, 472-473.
34/bid.• p. 56.

55

masses of people must shift their allegiances. 35

In this political world
gone meaningless, in which detached intellectual work is still possible,
the detached scholar soars so high above human activity that he can nolonger distinguish men from things. The lines get blurred , and what had
once been political programs and strategies of action now becomecommodities on a nineteenth century Smithian market ruled by aninvisible hand; what was once called the politics of truth in a demo. -- ·- - - - . ··········. ·:._____:-:- ..
- ·-- - - -··.. ···· ·., -- -· ···~~~~ --e.~-·· - --=-=- --- - -

--

- __

--=--=---~ - ~- --- -::,:.:~-:::.. .··-·;-:-···--:::.._;:-:. --:-;-::~:-·~ . -::..
.- _: - - :--~ ~ - - .... - ·--- - - -~- - ._- :.- --------___

motive is part of the attempt to motivate the act for the other persons
involved in our conduct, which is here translated to mean that We

----·

...

~~~·-.:_: -... -:::-_-=-··- -.- - -- •- .. ---- ··- ··--··---- - '~: . . . .:--:.. .: --..-..,;,;,_ _control another man by manipulating the premiums which theaccepts. 37•.

cratically responsible society is now seen as big units competing withsmall fry on a political market where competition leads to concentration
and results in the formation 0f duopolies, monopolies and cartels:
If the rival creed cannot be liquidated and is itself not strong enough toestablish another monopoly in the symbol sphere, a 'duopoly' mayarise.
This is a situation of accommodation to a tolerant thoughother

The sale of motives on a strategy market does not, however,explain historical change. To explain that, the professors return to
Max Weber, and the fourth part of the book, on Dynamics, deals withThe Sociology of Leadership. This part repeats and elaborates the
cynical comments of Mills' first article with Professor Gerth. The
detached professors, one of whom is said to have benefited from contact
with the academic wisdom of the other, are once again passive
spectators of a familiar drama, the Nazi "revolution," which has now
become, for them, the archetype of all historical change and a synonymft is convenient to grasp the psychological andfor revolution.
ideological aspects of revolutionary movements by focusing upon theirdefinition of historical time and reality and upon their conception of
freedom. . . . A keen sense of a new unheard-of mission inspires thecharismatic leader and his followers. ... Optimism, of a previously unheard-of surge, lifts up the followers of the charismatic leader. With

competitive co-existence. . . . Thus out of competition there occurs amove toward concentration. One or several competitors increasingly
wins out, and the smaller units, eager to avail themselves of the prestigeof the big winner, will jump on the band wagon. Symbol cartels willthus be formed. . . . Another general mode of concentration occurs by
the alliance of a few big units for the more effective suppression of anumber of small fry who are thus gobbled up. 3 6On ce the detached debunkers who wrote these lines are off theground , they stop at nothing. Even Mills' early definition of politicalstrat~gy is so restated that it can be reduced to the manipulative commodity propaganda of a public relations man . Strategic choice of
35
tbid., p. 298.
36
tbid., pp. 289-290. Ital ics added.

·s...w:...;....i,.;;.v:-•❖:..-••:.:••::;...;.~.; :.:.::· -N: · < .>►. · 1«0<····

eyes fixed on the distant yet foreshortened goal, they move ahead withthe certainty of the sleepwalker, often immunized against the costs ofblood, self-sacrifice and terror which the deliberate destruction of theold entails. . . . These experiences of time and reality dovetail withthose of the freedom which is to come through detachment in action.
Freedom means liberation, and with the increasing size and power ofthe charismatic following, freedom is felt to increase. For freedo m is37
tbid., pp. 117-118.

56

57

seen and felt to be a sharing in the expanding movement of the leader.
The enthusiasm of the faithful follower is experienced as essential to38
freedom.
As for the outcome of such a "revolution": the professors
restate their conclusion to the article they wrote a decade earlier
clarifying it for those who had not understood its implications the'first time: Revolution involves a turnover in personnel; but such aturnover is not by itself a revolution. A circulation of elites is notenough; there must also be a restructuring of a system of domination
and authority. 39...:z:...

A Ml'fVTOA ROOte.

.,,

~ere

0
~

Ill
:ig

r.,O

TH

;:,

V

,..

-....
Ill

ffl

Character and Social Structure may be seen as an index ofa society coming apart. Neither a cure nor a diagnosis, it is itself asymptom of an age when sensitive minds experience stress and strain.
It is_ a sign of times of distress, of a state of normlessness, written bypassive spectators of an erupting vulcano who do not know or would
rather not know that the eruption they're watching is not natural but
social, and that human motion, including their own, is what creates theheat and maintains the flames. Then occurs in intellectual circles trial
and ~r~or, criticism and countercriticism, self-searching and doubt,
skepticism and enlightenment, desperate attempts to revive and to
reaffirm what proves in the end to be outlived and hollow. Words anddeeds fail to jibe, and boredom overcomes many who feel weary ofuninspiring days. 40

Mills spent the rest of the mindless years, from 1953 to 1958,
recovering from his desperate attempt to revive and to reaffirm whatproved in the end to be outlived and hollow. As if to dissociate himself
once again from the normless, detached, cynical Spirit that floats above
a world of masses shifting enthusiastically under the wands ofcharismatic leaders, Mills wrote an introduction to the work of a man
who was the very antithesis of Max Weber, a man who would have dismissed The Sociology of Leadership as a second rate mid-nineteenth
century farce, a man who, according to Mills, is nevertheless the bestsocial scientist America has produced, 41 Thorstein Veblen . He was amaster/ess, recalcitrant man, and if we must group him somewhere in
the American scene, it is with those most recalcitrant Americans, theWobblies. On the edges of the higher learning, Veblen tried to live like a
Wobbly. It was a strange place for such an attempt. The Wobblies were
not learned, but they were, like Veblen, masterless men, and the only
non-middle class movement of revolt in twentieth-century America. 4 2

FllREDOJl-1-AT LONG LAST ===-... ..:.::=--~·:.~_- _..._~-~--'....."''"'·

. ..,

38
tbid., p , 445 and p , 447.
39
tbid., p , 442.
40
tbid., p. 430.

41Mills, Images of Man: The Classic Tradition in Sociological Thinking (anthology with introduction),
New York : George Braziller, Inc., 1960, p. 13.
421ntroduction to the Mentor edition of Thon;tein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class, New York :New American Library, 1953, p. ix.

58

59

_The trip into academic incoherence, or rather the journey to a~arad1se where man could be seen through the eyes of God, was aninterruption of Mills' development, but not the end of the road; thetrip left deep scars, but did not stunt him. Mills was after all amasterless, recalcitrant man, at times almost a sort of lntellect~al
Wobbly. He seems to have been two different men, and it is significant
that the longest quotation from Veblen's works which he chose forhis introduction says, "The current situation in America is by way of

THE END OF
IDEOLOGY
Cll'\ '-1 U\ \ I h\1

being something of a psychiatrical clinic. . . . Perhaps the commonest

U1.\hl11.I>
lh• ll, ,.,/, •~·""'' ff,.,,./1

THE END OF

THE

END OFIDEOLOGY

l'Mr, \..,,,. 1,

IDEOLOGY

relaxation of the political will. The intellectual core of the groping forconservatism is a giving up of the central goal of the secular impulse in
the West: the control through reason of man's fate. 44 In what seems

like a desperate attempt to revive the early framework which had once
served as a starting point, Mills returns, in 1954, to what he had called
Dewey's style of liberalism in his doctoral dissertation. Men in masses
have troubles although they are not always aware of their true meaningand source. Men in publics confront issues, and they are aware of theirterms. It is the task of the liberal institution, as of the liberally educatedand plainest evidence of this unbalanced mentality is to be seen in acertain fearsome and feverish credulity with which a large proportion of
the Americans are affected. 43

Credulity is a state of delusion; it represents a rift between thought
and action. The behavior of a credulous person lacks coherence: hecannot act in terms of what he thinks, and his thoughts are not relatedt? anything he does. It did not take Mills long to remember that his
hfe go_al ~ad not been to become a detached inmate in a psychiatricward; 1t did not take him long to begin to break loose. He tried to getto the heart of the absence of mind in politics, the failure of nerve andconservative mood which had dropped over people like a drugged sleep.
The psychological heart of this mood is a feeling of powerlessness-but
with the old edge taken off, for it is a mood of acceptance and of aman, continually to translate troubles into issues and issues into theterms of their human meaning for the individual. 45 The following year,

1955, he reintroduces into the center of his work the ideals he had
tried to translate into projects in 1948. Among these values none has
been held higher than the grand role of reason in civilization and in the
lives of its civilized members. And none has been more sullied anddistorted by men of power in the mindless years we have been enduring.

44•'The Conservative Mood," Dissent, Vol. I, No. 1 (Winter, 1954), in Po-,,, Politics and People, p. 200.

45Mass SocietY and Liberal Education, Chicago: Center for the Study of liberal Education for Adu lts,
1954, pamphlet republished in Power, Politics and,,,,,,,,_, p. 370.

43
lbid., p. viii.

60

61

Given the caliber of the American elite, and the immorality of accomplishment in terms of which they are selected, perhaps we shouldhave expected this. But political intellectuals too have been giving up
the old ideal of the public relevance of knowledge. Among them aconservative mood-a mood that is quite appropriate for men living in apolitical vacuum-has come to prevail. 46 The same man who two

years earlier had not opposed a passive, detached, "realistic" descriptionof the state as it monopolizes the use of legitimate violence within its
domain, now indignantly writes: There is no opposition to public

The second-rate mind is in command of the ponderously spoken
platitude. In the liberal rhetoric, vagueness, and in the conservativemood, irrationality, are raised to principle. Public relations and theofficial secret, the trivializing campaign and the terrible fact clumsily
accomplished, are replacing the reasoned debate of political ideas in theprivately incorporated economy, the military ascendancy, and thepolitical vacuum of modern America. 4 8

mindlessness in all its forms nor to all those forces and men that would
further it. But above all-among the men of knowledge, there is little or

AND LoYALTY

IN 0uR CowlGES._.,
IOOD1'1.suMMDS....~~

no opposition to the divorce of knowledge from power, of sensibilities
47
from men of power, no opposition to the divorce of mind from reality.
The reality which these men of knowledge accept without opposition
is described in The Power t:lite. America-a conservative country. . R~jecting the divorce of mind from reality, Mills is able tod1stmgmsh t~e men f~om the masks, he cart see the human beings whorenounce theu humanity and alienate their selves in roles instead of creating their own lives; he does not call it alienation but he describes it
as a dominant fact about everyday life in Ameri~an society. Today
many people have to trivialize their true interests into 'hobbies 'which
are socially considered as unserious pastimes rather than the c;nter of
their real existence. But only by a craftsman!ike style of life can the......

- ·.

•~-· ..

- · -- .

- . - - - -··.
.... _ . ···- --=--·..

without any conservative ideology-appears now before the world anaked and arbitrary power, as, in the name of realism, its men ofdecision enforce their often crackpot definitions upon world reality.

:...

--- ---=-=--------

46" 0n Knowledge and Power:· Dissen t, Vol. II , No. 3 (Summer. 19551. in Power, Politics and People,
p. 599.
47
lbid. , p , 604.

48

62n,,, Power Elite, New York : Oxford University Press, 1956, pp. 360-361 .

63split domains of work and leisure become unified; and only by suchself-cultivation can the everyday life become a medium for genuine
culture. . . . The mere chronological fact of more time on our hands isa necessary condition for the cultivation of individuality, but by nomeans guarantees it. As people have more time on their hands, most of
it is taken away from them by the debilitating quality of their work, by_

I A_The height of such mindless communications to masses, or what
are thought to be masses, is the commercial propaganda for toothpasteand soap and cigarettes and automobiles. 51

And when he looks at the intellectuals, Mills does not findthem detached : by the work they do not do they uphold the official
definitions of reality, and, by the work they do, even elaborate it.5 2
DAVID J. OAL li N

the pace of their everyday routine, and by the ever-present media ofmass distraction. 49 Mills continues to look for the vehicles betweena•OA M.IN

existence and consciousness, the media which guide men to find the aimof life in that tired frenzy by which we strive for the animated glee wecall fun. 50'UO!llO!ld
AaJ PJJOM. ~l 1noq• »uµq p(lkM\:, JO pe<u .llfl OJ A . I ~ ' {-a~~uoqAl)S.I

11!·. ._11,.._.U.w>J
uo,q lp,o - ffll 1111><i>-1'1""" ...

U!AoS JOO u! IUS!ler->os JO 1uatu
SIJ1uoddns .._ "-'opq lluo1,q 1ou!M. l! ~Jae aAC\I aM. 1nq "pUnOJl"fl ptJI 'pomd 1>!-fnJU>:) l'(JO~--'u!>lu.s •....,... .,.,.,•If>;.(-IO mp .JIDWOlD PaJ!

. ue: UJ ~ 8 'fl~ aotJ S aR (''1!......-S >II.I. • .

.....,., 11'1' .Jl'II I"' ..,..

sp,&MOl...,&,xJJ>ljU

JO>dO~SPIOJO• JO ><loH ...SOI{ JO >ll• >ljl ,. puy

10,......uzpp.....

WOJj

wlllllil.w lll!ll'l.\ llu,puy

11J'iqi"'of: ~l\lb~ Aucw

us JO H>L"f...-':1
P.!i Ill.I.0 ~ :.0.J!)I...,_NU l>t<lt:d

The colleagues to whom he devoted a portion of his life, especiallythose engaged in Scientific Sociology, do not fit Mills' definiti onof mast~rless men. Many of them are engaged in molecular work, andHis analysis of the mediators between consciousness andexistence now has nothing in common with the skill groups thatspecialize in telling us how we feel or with the symbol c~rtels selling
motives to shifting masses which he had seen from his vantage point on
Mt. Olympus. Public relations displace reasoned argument; manipula-molecular work has no illustrious antecedents, but, by virtue ofhistorical accident and the unfortunate facts of research finance, hasbeen developed a great deal from studies of marketinj and problems connected with media of mass communications. 5
His own chosention and undebated decisions of power replace democratic authority.
More and more, as administration has replaced politics, decisions ofimportance do not carry even the panoply of reasonable discussion in
public, but are made by God, by experts, and by men like Mr. Wilson.
49

5

I I I I_ (, L , L R .-\ l

OF PROFI~~~OI"',

51•'The Unity of Work and Leisun,;• Jouma/ of the Na tional Association of Deans of Women((January. 1954), in Power, Politics .,d Pttople, pp. 348-349.

oThe Sociological Imagination, p. 348.

' , \ R C I I 'I

"On Knowledge and Power," lac. cit., p. 609.
52
lbid. , p . 612.
53''Two Styles o f Research in Current Social Studies," Philosophy of Science, Vol. 20, No. 4 (October,1953), in Power, Politics and People, p. 554.

65

"discipline" is split into two schools of equally alienated men, in
whose hands the social studies become an elaborate method of
insuring that no one learns too much about man and society, theft-._,IWll">9T TUE tt'r.t.

-. a.EJlldllr..

disappeared. With a renewed will to move against the main drift,
Mills seems to have been left completely alone, scarred, but notmastered. He begins, once again, to locate himself in his social context,
and thus also to locate his task. What knowledge does to a man (inclarifying what he is, and setting it free)-that is the personal ideal ofknowledge. What knowledge does to a civilization (in revealing its
human meaning, and setting it free)-that is the social ideal of~r,,,bem ,,,,d Cnilr_.,ioa, bf lktbcn ~tnd And,-. W . Manhall, 19U
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first by formal but empty ingenuity; the second, by formal and ~loudy
obscurantism. One group engages in the large-scale bureaucratic styleof research into small-scale problems, 5 4 while the other group consistsof Grand Theorists busy with a seemingly arbitrary elaboration of
distinctions which do not enlarge one's understanding of recognizably

knowledge. 56

Neither a charismatic nor a hereditary member of thePower Elite, and clearly neither a self-sold nor a lucky new arrival,
this recalcitrant man who was at times sort of an intellectual
Wobbly, cannot find either personal or social meaning in the Higher
Circles: I certainly am not aware of any desire to be more like the"If I would be a young man again and had todecide how to make my living, I would not try
to become a scientist or scholar or teacher. I
would rather choose to be a plumber or apeddler in the hope to find that rrwdest degree of
independence still available under present circumstances. "-Albert Einstein
Nov. 10. 1954

human problems or experience. 55 Professors claiming to be detachedadapt to the requirements of the dominant bureaucracies; their privateinterests just happen to coincide with the interests of men with money
and power, so that their research is at once a contribution to Pure
Science and the source of a comfortable income. These experts are infact hired technicians and salesmen of knowledge, middlemen who
derive their livelihood and status from transforming and processing thediscoveries of science, philosophy and art for their employer and customer, the Power Elite, the warlords, corporate chieftains and politicaldirectorate of the United States.
The one-time program of the right has become an accomplishedfact, and the left which was to move upstream against the main drift has

rich in the sense that I am sometimes aware of wanting to be more likesome of the crack mechanics I know. 57 He defines himself as a third
type of man, one whose work does have a distinct kind of politicalrelevance: his politics, in the first instance, are the politics of truth,for his job is the maintenance of an adequate definition of reality.
In so far as he is politically adroit, the main tenet of his politics is tofind out as much of the truth as he can, and to tell it to the rightpeople, at the right time, and in the right way. . . . The intellectual
ought to be the moral conscience of society. .. 58 This is the role ofmind, of intellect, of reason, of ideas: to define reality adequately andin a publicly relevant way. The role of education. .. is to build and_sustain publics that will 'go for,' and develop, and live with, and act
upon, adequate definitions of realitv. 59
56

54 "1BM Plus Reality Plus Humanism • Sociology," Satllrday Review of litera ture (May 1, 1954),
in Power, Politics and People, p. 570.
55!bid., p. 571.

••on Knowledge and Power," foe. cit, p. 606.
57C. Wright Mills and The Power Elite, compiled by G. William Domhoff and Hoyt B. Ballard, Boston:
Beacon Press, 1968, p. 239.
58
Mills, "On Knowledge and P0111&r," foe. cit , p, 611 .

59Mass Society and liberal Education, foe. cit, p. 373.

66

67

.:

However, the major work of this period, The Power Elite, was nota politically motivated task; it was suggested by friends that I ought toround out a trilogy by writing a book on the upper classes. ... And yetthat is not 'really' how 'the project' arose; what really happened is(1) that the idea and the plan came out of my files, for all projects withme begin and end with them, and books are simply organized releases
from the continuous work that goes into them . .. 60 The definition ofreality which emerges from these files locates the enemy with a 500
watt glare. And Nazi is only one of his names. The top of modern
American society is increasingly unified, and often seems willfully
co-ordinated: at the top there has emerged an elite of power. The

middle levels art! a drifting set of stalemated, balancing forces: themiddle does not link the bottom with the top. The bottom of thissociety is politically fragmented, and even as a passive fact, increasingly
powerless: at the bottom there is emerging a mass society. 61 However,this large analysis of possible futures which have turned into harshrealities, does not even cast the beam of a pocket flashlight on thealienation of activity, power and intellect, on the comprehensive
renunciation of humanity which accounts for, but does not guarantee ,the power of the elite. It does not proceed in terms of the struggle
between the Power Elite and the alienated population, a struggle in
60
61

The Sociological Imagination, p. 200

which the right has temporarily realized its program; it does not create
an awareness of the field of strategy still open to the left. In his critical
introduction to Veblen, Mills even chastizes Veblen for overlooking
the "social functions" of upper class leisure, status and prestige, sayingthat leisure activities are one way of securing a coordination ofdecision between various sections and elements of the upper class,that status activities provide a marriage market, and that prestige
buttresses power. 62 Mills repeats this critique in The Power Elite. 63

But he thereby completely obfuscates Veblen's carefully drawn
distinction between "social functions" . which serve human life andthose which stunt it. Indignation about the stunted development andpathological condition of the American population does not become
analysis in Mills' work. He continues to repeat what he already knew in1948, namely that the "social functions" of the upper cla~s are notgoing to be destroyed by labor leaders, that the current crop of labor

leaders is pretty well set up as a dependent variable in the main drift, 64
and that within the present framework of political economy. .. unions
are less levers for change of that general framework than they are
instruments for more advantageous integration with it 65 Mills ends an
62
63

1ntroduction to Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the leisure Class, p. xvi.
The Power Elite, pp. 88-89.

64"The labor Leaders and the Power Elite," Roots of Industrial Conflict, edited by Arthur Kornhauser,
Robert Durbin and Arthur M. Ross. New York : McGraw Hill Book Company, 1954; in Power, Politics
and People, p. 105.
65
lbid. , p . 1 OB.

The Power Elite, p. 324.

69
68

article with the statement that, For the businessman, the politician, andthe labor leader-each in curiously different ways-the more apathetic

the members of their mass organizations. .. the more operating power
the leaders have as members of the national power elite. 66 But Mills
does not go into the me;ming of that apathy as a profound renunciationof self. He seems, rather, to take the apathy as an original datum, as
the starting point for analysis, but not itself subject to analysis. As aresult, he confines historical change to- events which take place within

1-

we have moved a considerable distance along the road to a mass society. 6 7

He realizes that the manipulated man of the "mass" is a human being
who has alienated what is "inalienable," his humanity. However, heseems to assume that the "social functions" which serve the Power Elite
can guarantee and even deepen the transformation of publics into
masses, 68 and as a result he does not regard the appropriation of thelost humanity as the road to historical change . He turns, instead, toDewey's style of liberalism, to "historical change" initiated at the top andby the top, to men selected and formed by a civil service that is linked
with the world of knowledge and sensibility. 69

the higher circles, and cannot focus on the potential initiative of thealienated, on historical change which consists of de-alienation andconsequently deals with the pathological condition, the unbalanced
mentality with which a large portion of the Americans are affected.
Mills is aware of the gap between the centrai goal. . .: the control
through reason of man's fate, and the actual condition of the American
population. He no longer accepts that stunted condition as the full
human stature of the mass, as a realization of self in the mask and therole. He writes that, From almost any angle of vision that we mightassume, when we look upon the community of publics, we realize that
67
Mass Society and Liberal Education, Joe. cit,p. 358.
68

69

66
lbid., p. 109.

70

The Power Elite, Chapter 13.

Jbid., p. 361.

71

d

when confronted with moral horror. 5

SJSO·.1 · 1.1.1.:

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IHi~ 6~~ NATION~•u•• · ..

CAUSESOF \WO!!L!WAil
THREE

C. Wright Mills
A . - . . . ,.,., C..... ... flM ,,_., lltt•

Mills looks for historicalorigins of this mental illness, and locates some of them in World War 11,
when Man had become an object; and insofar as those to whom he,._lo the UIHISTI \ \ CLEIU ;,

-c.

o•

1111 11\1 \\I I
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Co,;,et'e,eMills locates the root of the unbalanced mentality, the cause of
the intellectual deficiency of the complacent, in the alienation of
personal from political life,1 in the divorce of political reflection fromwas an object felt about the spectacle at all, they felt powerless, inthe grip of larger forces, with no part in those affairs that lay beyond
their immediate areas of daily demand and gratification. It was a timeof moral somnambulance. 6 In The Causes of World War Three, Mills

makes it lucidly clear that the enemy, whose name was Nazi during
World War Two, was not defeated in 1945: In the expanded world of
mechanically vivified communication the individual becomes the
spectator of everything but the human witness of nothing. Having

cultural work. 2 This separation creates a context in which humandevelopment will continue to be trivialized, human sensibilities blunted,
and the quality of life distorted and impoverished. 3 This trivialized,
blunted, distorted and altogether private human being is an idiot andI should not be surprised, although I do not know, if there were notsome such idiots even in Germany. This-and I use the word with carethis spiritual condition seems to me the key to many modern troublesof political intellectuals, as well as the key to much political bewilderment in modern society. 4 The idiocy is characterized by mute acceptance-or even unawareness-of moral atrocity; the lack of indignation

700

The Complacent Young Men: Reasons for Anger, 00(1958), in Power, Politics and People, p, 389,

2
3

no plain targets of revolt, men feel no moral springs of revolt The
cold manner enters their souls and they are made private andblase. . . . It is not the number of victims or the degree of cruelty
that is distinctive; it is the fact that the acts committed and the actsthat nobody protests are split from the consciousness of men in an
uncanny, even a schizophrenic, manner. The atrocities of our time

Anvil and Student Panisan, Vol. IX, No, 1

lbid., p. 390.

·'The Man in the Middle: The Oesigner, 00 Industrial Design (November, 1958), in Power, Poli tics
and People, p , 386.
400
The Structure of Power in American Society," The British Journal of Sociology, Vol. IX , No. 1(March, 1958), in Power, Politics and People, p, 24.

5 -,,,,, Causes of World War Three, New York: Simon & Schuster. 1958, p. 77.

6

1bid., p. 78.

75

are done by men as 'functions' of a social machinery-men possessedby an abstracted view that hides from them the human beings who aretheir victims and, as well, their own humanity. They are inhuman acts
because they are impersonal. They are not sadistic but merely businesslike; they are not aggressive but merely efficient; they are notemotional at all but technically clean cut

craftsmanship . .. as t e centra
penence o t e una iena ted humanbeing and the very root of free human development. 9 Craftsmanship ischaracterized by a unity o f design, production and enj oym ent. 10 Assoon as this unity is destroyed, as soon as these activities become
separate masks which "compose" a person, and separate roles which" compose" a social structure, the individual loses coherence and thesociety lacks reason. This cleavage or rupture, this split between
thought, action and feeling, creates a rift, a great cultural vacuum, and
it is this vacuum that the mass distributor, and his artistic and intellec11
tual satrap, have filled up with frenzy and trash and fraud.
Just like

This insensibility was made dramatic by the Nazis; but the samelack of human morality prevailed among fighter pilots in Korea, with
their petroleum-jelly broiling of children and women and men. And
is not this lack raised to a higher and technically more adequate level
among the brisk generals and gentle scientists who are now planning theweapons and the strategy of World War Ill? 7

COP'· J 954. U\' Tllli. RA.

l) CORPORATl0"'

profiteers and cap1t ist octors who manage to extort enormous personal gain from war and illness, the cultural middlemen-professional
designers, advertisers and propagandists, hired professors, scientists andartists-have managed to extort enormous personal gain from schizophrenia. The world men are going to believe they understand is now,in this cultural apparatus, being defined and bu il t, made into a slogan,. . The schizophrenia of the cheerful robot, of the technological
1d,ot, of the crackpot realist, all of whom embody a common ethos:rationality wi thout reason 8 is contrasted by Mills with the ethos o f
78

lbid., pp, 78-79.

"'The Complacent Young Men;• Joe. cit, p. 393.

76

9--The Man in the Middle,.. /oc. cit, p. 386.
10/bid., p. 383.
11
Ibid., pp, 383-384.

77

a story, a diagram, a release, a dream, a fact, a blue-print, a tune, asketch, a formula; and presented to them. Such part as reason may
htJve in human affairs, this apparatus, this put-together contraption,

aspiration.
In The Causes of World War Three, Mills observes
that Most cultural workmen are fighting a cold war in which theyecho and elaborate the confusions of officialdoms. . . . They havegenerally become the Swiss Guard of the power elite-russian orAmerican, as the case happens to be. Unofficial spokesmen of themilitary metaphysic, they have not lifted the level of moral sensibility;
D A \" 10

J 0ALL1N

JA ME S BUR N HAM

The New Soviet Empire
F ~ AND LciYALTY
..,_~

0

UR CoUEGES

C.Orp.n-WOO. • nonprolir oiganiut.ion. chartmd ..IDfurthu and promote oci<ntific. educational. ud di&r-

F or Sidney Hook :;i,',:.~s.:1.',!0;/~."'.'e1wun<1""'1UiJ
they have further depressed it. They have not tried to put responsible
content into the political vacuum; they have helped to empty it and tokeep it empty. 13 • •. many, perhaps in fear of being thought Unpatriotic, become nationalist propagandists; others, perhaps in fear
14of being thought Unscientific, become nationalist technicians.

fulfills; such role as sensibility may play in the human drama, itenacts; such use as technique may have in history and in biography,
it provides. ... In the USA the cultural apparatus is established commercially: it is part of an ascendent capitalist economy. This fact
is the major key to understanding both the quality of everyday life
and the situation of culture in America today. 12

Among the new profiteers, the cultural , artistic and scientificentrepreneurs, Mills' colleagues are not a set of Representative Men
whose conduct and character are above the taint of the pecuniary
morality, and who constitute models for American imitation and

The first step away from social schizophrenia is to unite one's
split self, or at least to define the conditions for one's own coherence.
Mills tries to define these conditions by referring to the model ofthe craftsman, whose mind and body are both his own, whose thought
and action are inseparable components of projects which consist ofintelligent practical activity. In craftsmanship, plan and performance
are unified, and in both, the craftsman is master of the activity andof himself in the process. The craftsman is free to begin his working
according to his own plan, and during the work he is free to modify
its shape and the manner of its shaping. The continual joining of planand performance brings even more firmly together the consummationof work and its instrumental activities, infusing the latter with the joyof the former. Work is a rational sphere of independent action . . . Since
he works freely, the craftsman is able to learn from his work, toFor e wo r dJlubh-.lm l RAND RC!K::U'<:hr,...:.:~ofnlM__<-..----

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beau Demond fo.- Professors
19~7-~8 to 1961-62
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13
12

lbid., p. 377.

14

71

·;\

n,e Causes of World War Three, p. 85.
lbid.. p. 7.

79

I

I r-

develop as well as use his capacities. His work is thus a means of developing himself as a man as well as developing his skill. 15 In politicalactivity, this type of craftsmanly cohe rence, this unity of plan andperformance, requires a definition of reality which sheds light onavailable courses of action and on obstacles which prevent or block
their realization. The less adequate one's definitions of reality andthe less apt one's program for changing it, the more complex does
the scene of action appear. 'Complexity' is not inherent in any phenomena; it is relative to the conceptions with which we approach reality.

It is the task of those who want peace to identify causes and toclarify them to the point of action. 16 However, even though Mills

refers to the model of craftsmanship, he does not suggest that social
critique is "constructive thinking" in the sense that it finds solutions
to the problems of the ruling class, since then we are foolishlytrapped by the difficulties those now at the top have got us into.
They do not want us to identify their difficulties as theirs; they want
us to think of their difficulties as if these were everybody's. That
is what they call 'constructive thinking about public problems.'

To be constructive in their sense is merely to stick our heads further
into their sack. So many of us have already stuck our heads in therethat our first job is to pull them out and look around again for genuine
alternatives. In this sense it must be said: the first job of the intellectuals today is to be consistently and a/together unconstructive.
For to be constructive within the going scheme of affairs is to consent
to the continuation of precisely what we ought to be against. 17 What
15
"The Man in the Middle," loc. cit, pp. 384-385.

Mills prophetically called for was a confrontation between idiocy andcoherence, a showdown between the fully developed human being
and the cheerful robot, technological idiot, crackpot realist, a destruction of the rationality without reason which degrades and deranges
the modern human being: that is the real, even the ultimate, showdown

PREAMBLE
TI1e working class and the employingclass have nothing in common. There can beno peace so long as hunger and want arefound among millions of the working pi!ople
and the few, who make up the 1..•mployingclass, have all the gllod things of lift.:.

on 'socialism' in our time. For it is a showdown on what kinds ofhuman beings and what kinds of culture are going to become themodels of the immediate future, the commanding models of humanaspiration. . . . To make that showdown clear, as it affects every
region of the world and every intimate recess of the self, requires
a union of political reflection and cultural sensibility of a sort notreally known before. l8
Be twee n t he se two c la sses a strug e
mus t go o n un t i l t he wo r ke rs ot the w r ld
o rgan i ze as a class . t ake pas , ssion vf
t he ear t h and t he machi nery of p r,,duction ,and abo l ish the wage sys t em .

Mills lucidly defined a large goal, and shortly after his premature
death a new left began to take concrete steps toward its realizationin every region of the world; even a new American left began to move
upstream against the main drift. However, in order to define theavailable courses of action and the obstacles on the way, Mills himself had to struggle against the frenzy and trash and fraud which had
been stuffed into his mind and file by academic bureaucrats and theirhired and scared satraps. In this struggle, he had to spend vast amountsof energy to reach a level of coherence ahd clarity which he had aireadyreached in 1948.
In The Causes of World War Three, his analysis' of the collective self-alienation, the daily activity which reproduces the Po"_Ver
Elite, does not go beyond insights into the apathy of the populat~on
and the powerlessness of intellectuals developed a decade earlier.

16

The Causes of World War Three, p. 82.
17/bid., p. 137.

8
' "The Complacent Young Men," loc. cit., p. 393.

80

81

They are allowed to occupy such positions, and to use them in accordance with crackpot realism, because of the powerlessness, theapathy, the insensibility of publics and masses; they are able to do so,
in part, because of the inactionary posture of intellectuals, scientists,

pathetic than silly. This mid-twentieth century radical in his early
forties is able to write, What man of God can claim to partake of the
Holv Spirit, to know the life of Jesus, to grasp the meaning of that

THE OPERATIONAL CODEOF

THE POLITBURO

NIW"'•• • · " " • 1""11>'"•
M,( , ,•W •I~• • •' " " ' ••'1and other cultural workmen. 19

Mills does not regard the daily
self-renunciation as a practical activity (the sale of one's productive
power for a wa3e) or even as an intelligent practical activity (the saleof one's mental skills for a salary or a grant), but as a passive condition(apathy, powerlessness, insensitivity). As a result, he is unable · togive meaning to a phrase which he believes to be profoundly true
but which he cannot substantiate, namely that men are free to makehistory. 20 The years devoted to Max Weber and Professor Gerth now
drive him to repress Rousseau, the Wobblies, Veblen, Marx, and his
own experience, and keep him from asking how and why men makepower elites through their daily acts of self-alienation. Mills compulsively repeats: elites of power make history. 21

Sunday phrase 'the brotherhood of man'-and yet sanction theinsensibility, the immorality, the spiritual irresponsibility of the
Caesars of our time?22 The same man who raises the goal of unifying

plan and performance seeks to implement his plan by appealing to
the very men who profiteer from the rift between plan and performance,
the culture salesmen, the creators of weapons, the makers of images,
the perpetrators of religion, the trivializers of knowledge. 23 It is tothese men that Mills says, if we are to act as public intellectuals,
we must realize ourselves as an independent and oppositional group.

Each of us, in brief, ought to act as if he were a political party. 24

It is to the men who specialize in adapting men to what they haveThis definition of reality does not adequately clarify how reality
can be changed. If the elites of power make history, then the elites
of power change history, and the very possibility of changing thereality dominated by The Power Elite is excluded by definition. Mills'
attempt to emerge from this paradox created by his training is lessbecome in the modern United States that Mills writes about a showdown on all the modern expectations about what man can want toMills appeals to the symbol experts, the fragmented
become. 25
men who occupy the freest places in which to work precisely becauseof their fragmentation , as if they were c-0herent craftsmen, yet he22lbid., p. 125.
23
/bid., Part Four.
24lbid., p. 135.
25
Jbid., p. 172.

19 n,e Causes of World War Tnree, p. 89.

20

tbid. , p. 14.
21 Jbid.

82

83

knows that it is the absence of such a stratum of cultural workmen,
in close interplay with such a participating public, that is the signal
fault of the American cultural scene today. 26
Mills' dilemma
deepens: not only are the cultural workmen who could define astrategy of change absent; there is, in addition, no real public forsuch programs. 27 In the absence of both, Mills calls on scientists,
priests and professors to tell the Power Elite what they are doing
to the United States. To those with power and awareness of it, wemust publicly impute varying measures of responsibility for suchconsequences as we find by our work to be decisively influenced bytheir actions and defaults. 28 Mills then questions the point of doing
this. Any such public role for the intellectual workman makes sense
only on the assumption that the decisions and the defaults ofdesignatable circles are now history-making; for only then can the

takes the sometime "radical" too far, and he backs up. To appeal
to the powerful, on the basis of any knowledge we now have, isutopian in the silly sense of that term. 31 Yet, finding no otheralternative in his file, We must accept what perhaps used to be theutopian way. . . 32

In 1958, Mills had not achieved a unity of plan and performance.
Looking for a properly developing society. .. built around craftsmanship as the central experience of the unalienated human being and the
XI

The philosophers have only intupr~t~d the world, in van ·ous wayJi.; the point, however. is to c/1au,;e 11.
Writtm In th, ,pril'l9 ol 1845

:l .It ~"'~J.
very root of free human development,3 3 he convinced himself that
It is now sociologically realistic, morally fair, and politically imperative
to make demands upon men of power and to hold them responsible forinference be drawn that the ideas and the knowledge-and also themorality and the character-of these higher circles are immediately
relevant to the human events we are witnessing. 29 But even theMills influenced by Max Weber is a recalcitrant man, and he calls on
inexistent cultural workmen and on profiteering culture experts tochange history by changing the ideas of the Power Elite. I am contend-

specific courses of events. 34 And C. Wright Mills pulled his head out

ing that the ideology and the lack of ideology of the powerful havebecome quite relevant to history-making, and that therefore it ispolitically relevant for intellectuals to examine it, to argue about it,
and to propose new terms for the world encounter. 30 But this positiona senior civil service firmly linked to the world of knowledge andof the sand in an isolated spot of the U.S. desert, and he shouted
guidelines and conditions which included "demands" ranging fromsensibility to a complete dismantling of the corporate-military structureof the United States. 35
31/bid.
32ibid., p. 93.

260'The Man in the Middle."" foe. cit, p. 386.
27
28
29

The Causes of World War Thm,, p. 93.

33•-n,e Man in the Middle."" foe. cit, p. 386
34 n.e Causes of World War Three, p. 95.
35/bid., pp. 118-121.

/bid.• p. 132.
/bid., p. 133.

30/bid.

85
84

To the helpless spectator, the political non-man who watches humanlife from a distance, the servant who considers himself free the very
moment he's bought, Mills opposes the man who creates his own
environment, the man who steals his self-powers whenever they're not
at his free disposal, the man who bows · neither to Zeus nor any
master. The values involved in the political problem of history-making•The Sociological Imagination
By C. Wright Mills1

In 1959 Mills writes, I do not know the answer to the question ofpolitical irresponsibility in our time or to the cultural and political question of The Cheerful Robot 36 Yet he tries, once again, to locate
are embodied in the Promethean ideal of its human making. 3 8

For
Mills, the fully developed man is not a passive spectator engaged incontemplating all that is human, nor is the creative man a detachedintellectual whose spirit creates freely. Both are aspects of a practicalman whose coherence does not reside in the comprehensive rationalityof his grand theory, but in the unity between his thought and his
action. They are symbols of practical-critical activity, revolutionary
activity; they are the two aspects of craftsmanship, the central ex-perience of the unalienated human being and the very root of freehimself in the midst of impotent spectators, apolitical idiots, expert
apologists, sophisticated escapists, detached complacents; he tries,
once again, to find an exit from a world of rationality without reason.
He finds spectacular symbols which embody precisely the opposite
traits from those of his friends, his colleagues, his contemporaries.
To the clerk with a title, the fragment of a vast project whose sense hecannot grasp, the incapacitated expert, Mills opposes the fully developedman, the man for whom nothing human is alien. The values involved_.._______ ___..._____---·---_____ _______ . ..._

in the cultural problem of freedom and individuality are conveniently
embodied in all that is suggested by the ideal of the Renaissance Man. 37_..,_ _________ ,__.

- •.,•- C ......
- ■ loll.b,ay.
..,_.,_.,..;..

0o1or.•---., .. _ _ _ _ ......,..,....,..
==··:::.:-..::::--..:....~

36"'Culture and Politics: The Fourth Epoch,"' The Lisll!ner, Vol. LXI, No. 1563 (March 12, 1959),
in Powr,r, Politics and hople, p. 246.
31
/bid., p. 245.

86human development.
In the previous year's article, Mills had
written, Craftsmanship cannot prevail without a properly developing
society. 39 In the article on Renaissance Man and Prometheus, headds that a properly developing society is one in which men deliberately

develop their lives to a level which corresponds to the available instruments, namely a society in a permanent state of revolution. In a
381bid.

39"The Man in the Middle," /oc. cit. , p. 386.

87

Properly Developing Society, one might suppose that
deliberately
cultivated styles of life would be central; decisions about standards ofliving would be made in terms of debated choices among such styles;
the industrial equipment of such a society would be maintained as an
instrument to increase the range of choice among styles of life. 4 0

i I'

.
I l
L> , I I
I

PREAMBLE

, .I

\ •

1

, ;- \

I

1·he working class and the empl :,ying: l. lass have nothing in common . There can be1~o peace so long as hunge r and want are
1 ound among i Llion s of the working pl•oplc.>
1nd the few, \Jho make up the e;np loyi n ,c..·lass, have all the good things of life.

I I

1:

,

i :

II
I
I

! \

: ! 'I I

.' ;

i:

f

!;

! !

.,

!

8t.•tw1:tm

1·

Ithese two classes a strug.
until the workers of the wo
1.'rg inize as a class 1 take possession "'th t:arth and the achinery of product1 n,\ 1J bol ish the "''age system.
must go on

If I t_\In his next major work, Mills tries to put these precepts into
practice. The Sociological Imagination is a work about craftsmanship.
It is the work of a fully developed twentieth century man attempting
to link his practical activity to the history of his time. It is an attempt
to join thought and action, to unite power with sensibility, to becoherent and not just to think rationally. Mills brings the problem into
focus by turning his attention to those nearest to him who are under the
impression that they practice a craft, the sociology professors. He
exposes them as professional escapists, obfuscators and bureaucrats.
Mills again turns to the two dominant schools of social "scientists."
The first rationally constructs a society where abstractions ("values,""order") relate to each other as in a medieval Great Chain of Being.
In the grand schema of Talcott Parsons, main representative of thisschool, the idea of conflict cannot effectively be formulated. Structural antagonisms, large-scale revolts, revolutions-they cannot be
imagined.

In fact, it is assumed that 'the system,' once established,

is not only stable but intrinsically harmonious; disturbances must,in his language, be 'introduced into the system.: . . The magicalelimination of conflict, and the wondrous achievement of harmony,
remo,,e from this ~stematic' and 'general' theory the possibilities ofdealing with social change. With history_ Not only does the 'collective
behavior of terrorized maaes and excitl!d mobs, crowds and movements-with which our era is so filled-find no place in the normatively
created social structures of grand theorists. But any systematic ideasof how history itJit!lf occurs, of its mechanics and processes, are unavailable to grand theory• .. 41 The "scientific" practice of the second

school is as old as the scribes and tax collectors of the Pharaoh, thebureaucrats hired to gather data which the monarch needs to administer
his empire. In so far as such research efforts are effective in theirdeclared practical aims, they serve to increase the efficiency and thereputation-and to that extent, the prevalence-of bureaucratic forms

cridci m froQ1 Harold Lasswell,

The authors are gratef
Margaret Mead, Philip M
their colleagues of the Sotion, Herbert Dinerstein,
The work underlying
Corporation as a part of i
The authors received m
Culture, a research proje
New York. We are also
Culture, a project at Col.,_..,_,,-\"~ .andanha Wolfenstein, and toof The RAND CurporaGoldsen, and Hans Speier.
dertaken by The RAND
t e United States Air Force.
·ons in Studies in Soviet
um of Natural History in
Research in Contemporaryof domination in modem society. But whether or not effective inthese explicit aims (the question is open), they do serve to spread theethos of bureaucracy into other spheres of cultural, moral and intellectual life. Mills notes that it is precisely the men whose work serves

administration and repression who claim to be morally neutral, to makeno value judgments in their work. It might seem ironic that precisely
COPYRIGHT,

1954, BY THE RAND C OR

THE OPHATIONAL CODEOF
THE POLITIUI Ol' RJNTED IN THE UNITED STAT E S OF A-........
T_,_

TIii• lAHO Ce ,.,..• ,._•

the people most urgently concerned to develop morally antisep~ic
methods are among those most deeply engaged in 'applied social
science' and 'human engineering. ' 42 The result is that professors
40•·culture and Politics: The Fourth Epoch," foe. cit. , p, 240,

88

4
' ~ Sociological lmaginaaon, p. 42.
42tbid., p. 101 .

89

·hec~me ·administrative technicians, agents of the ruling bureaucracies.
Their positions change-from the academic to the bureaucratic; their
publics change-from movements of reformers to circles of decisionmakers; and their problems change-from those of their own choice
to those of their new clients.. The scholars themselves tend to becomeless intellectually
insurgent and more administratively practical.
Mou o( the '-Ork rcportied hnc was dont" at t~ Un1 u·o11\
Ctuago or in connttt.ion with the War Communicatioru
Rcstuch Projca at tht Library of Congrm. The ProJN t
was financed by a gn.nt from the Rod.dclln Founcbt1onu part or a program for the adVJnccmmt of rc1tarch m thl'
field of communiacion initiated by John Man~II and Oa,id
Stevens of the founda1ion . Th( facili1ic1 nude anilablc by
the Univcn1t_y, the Foundation and the Libn1ry of C.Ongrru(unckr the librarianship of both Archibald MacUuh andL~thcr H . Ev.ans) •~c gnt.dully ad,nowltdged. The rduion
dup of these atud,cs of poh1 ical communia110n to 1hc
rapidly expanding field of rrscarch on mus communication
can be uccrtained by consulung the articlrs and liten:turt
an PtoP4&•n_rJ., Comm11n1cat1on , and Public Opinion; A
Comprt:l,e,uu,Jt Rt/ere.nee Cu11U, by Bruce Lanna Smuh
Harold O. La.Qll.elJ and Ralph D. Ca.K'f (Princeton Uni\trsity Pre». 1946),. and tht earlier survey, Prop,agu1da andPromotional Actwitat.s; An Annolaltd B1bl1ograph1, ht
Lauwcll , Cuev and Smith (Uni\trtiiv of Mmnt10ta Prt~,

LANOUAOI OF f'OLITICI

o(

....
--

understand his own experience and gauge his own fate only by locating
himself within his period, that he can know his own chances in life
only by becoming aware of those of all individuals in his circumstances. This understanding leads to the awareness that the constraints

to his own development are not rooted in his deficiencies, but in theaccepted daily activities of others, and with this awareness he is ab le totranslate personal uneasiness into social troubles and public is ucs.
By such means the personal uneasiness of individuals is focused upon
explicit troubles and the indifference of publics is transformed into.., ...... 0 . 1--'1.
,_

The IAND SerlHii one of • xries of. publications wtudl will"of ........t. undaul«n bf The llAND, a oonprof,t organi:rauon, cha.rtcttd "tod promotic tcmittflC, educational, and cbu·
rposcs. all for the public welfare and teeurity
nited Stat« of America."

Generally accepting the status quo, they tend to formulate problems
out of the troubles and issues that administrators believe they face.
They study. . . workers who are restless and without morale, andmanagers who 'do not understand' the art of managing human relations. They also diligently serve the commercial and corporate endsof the communications and advertising industries. 43

It is into this world of hired clerks and servants of repressionthat Mills sticks his ideal of the intellectual craftsman, the fully
developed human being whose knowledge is the basis for changing theworld. The projects of such a man are chosen in terms of their contribution to the quality of life , not in terms of their contribution to his
personal career. The quality and content of available styles of life
among which he can choose are displayed to him by the daily activities
of his contemporaries; his ability to see a possible self in the lives ofothers, an ability acquired by a child when he becomes aware of himself
as a choice-making individual, is what Mills calls the sociologicalimagination. The first fruit of this imagination-and the first lesson of

involvement with public issues. 44

Aware of the connection between
personal constraints and social activities, the individual learns that thecollective transformation of the structure of social activity is the condition for his own liberation. He understands that what he thinks andfeels to be personal troubles are very often also problems shared byothers, and more importantly, not capable of solution by any one individual but only by modifications of the structure of the groups inwhich he lives and sometimes the structure of the entire society.

the social science that embodies it-is the idea that the individual can

Men in masses have troubles, but they are not usually aware of theirtrue meaning and source; men in publics confront issues, and theyusually come to be aware of their public terms. 45 Mills has said much

44
lbid., p. 5.
45/bid.. p. 187.

43
lbid.• p. 96.

9091

of this before, but in 1959 he is impatient to exit from the $0dety

not translate private troubles into public issues; he does not link his
own activity with the daily activities of the underlying population;
he does not formulate strategies which can lead to modifications of thestructure of the entire society. According to his files elites make history, and consequently Mills addresses himself to the people characterized by Veblen as "the noble and the priestly classes, together withmuch of their retinue," 49 the intellectuals, artists, ministers, scholars,yfull of private people in a state of public lethargy. In a speech delivered
over the Canadian Broadcasting Company (The Big City: Private
Troubles and Public Issues) he is very clear about the connection
between people's daily activities and the shape of their social environment: We must realize, in a word, that i,,w need not drift blindly; that46 he ends the speech with
i,,w can take matters into our own hands,the statement, Let us begfn this here and now. 47

ave favored sellers.
since the early 1950's,s who had pursued
the market, college

In recent years
Jobs have outnum
when large cohorts
graduate studies unteachers have beenand scientists. 50 Mills himself had called them the Swiss Guard of thePower Elite, yet he calls on these fragmentary men whose social posi•tions rest on their service to power to annihilate their own "roles,"their "persons," by becoming Renaissance Men and Prometheanhistory-makers; Mills calls on Carpetbaggers to overthrow the slave
system of the South. He justifies his choice of these profiteering
middlemen as a historical agency of change on the grounds that noother group, just now is as strategically placed for possible innovation
as those whose work joins them to the cultural apparatus; to the
Yet in spite of the lucidity with which he points to the connection between people's personal constraints and their daily activities,
Mills does not begin here and now by cleaning out his files ; he leaves
matters in the hands of the Poi,,wr Elite. 48 Consequently, Mills does

fREEDoM AND LoYAL1Y

IN ()uR. Col.J..llGES.... .,--~~. . . , . .. IIJIOOISTHI H . W. WILSON

46'. 'The Big Ci~: _Private Troubles .,d Public Issues" (Speech over the c.,adian Broadcasting Comr,a-,y1,n Power, Politics and ~ l e, p. 399.
47
lbid., p. 402.
48

The SociologiCJJI Imagination, pp. 182-183.

) am ·indeblcd ,o C. Dickerman Williams for illumination•
an the subject or the fifll1 Amrndmcm. and ~or supplying l l - - - - --l llhe q µotat1ons conccrnmg it that I ha,•e used m Chapters •U:~--=:---=._~ ~~ gnttful to Random llowc for pcnni»ion to quote lk=====c:.llrGm Wttnl'u, by Whiuakcr Chambers ( t95t ).
.
M)! wire has helped me throughom , 111 the analysis or the!IIOfmous mu, of evidtnce upon which this boot.. is bastd as
CO MPA.,;e" as in the technical prcp,m1tion or U1c manuscnpt .
JAMES f\U&NIIAM

means of information and knowledge; to the means by which realities
are defined, by which programs and politics are elaborated and presented
49Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class, New York : New American Library, p. 21.
50

92

God~ C-,J ish , 0 1h,nk the Sl>ffs of the Scna1c Snbcommn«c on ll--_'_M_.,.
_--II
1Dlcn1al Scnirity, the ltou~ C:ommiucc on _Un-American
Activiti~ and the Senate Pcnnancnt Sutxomnuucc on ln\C'S- ll--•- - -- - ---II~ tiul'\S for their invari;ahly nrnnrous and informed as-Mills, The Sociological Imagination, p. 183.

93

LISTEf!:

51

to publics.
Mills further justifies his choice by adding that, I do notbelieve, for example, that it is only 'Labor' or 'The Working Class'that can transform American society and change its role in world affairs. . . . I, for one, do not believe in abstract social forces-such as
The Working Class-as the universal historical agent. 52 In other words,

YANIE■IN SOCJOl{)(i(M 1t-«NGTBll

asvoi.UTrox nrOUBA

e THE OUTBPOIB•.
CORTB.OVBB.BIA.L BOOK:ABOUT WHAT 18 llllLLT
BAPPEIUNG 1• CUBA.

J.t is profiteers who are chosen as historical agents of change; furthermore, it is not because they are manipulated that the ideological
middlemen are to struggle for liberation, but because they manipulate.
This appeal to the consciences of fragmentary men who live off thescraps of social power they receive in exchange for faithful service tothe ruling class has nothing in common with Mills' definition of the

In 1960, The Fourth Epoch 53 suddenly begins; fully developed
human beings take matters into their own hands and start to makehistory here and now.

unafienated human being.

Isn't all this, isn't it something of what we are trying to mean by
the phrase, 'The New Left?' Let the old men ask sourly, 'Out of Apathy-into what?' The Age of Complacency is ending. Let the old women
51"The Oecline of the Left," The List1mer v.
' ol, LXI , No. 1566 (April 2, 1959), in Power, Politics

and People, pp. 231 -23 2.
52
Jbid., p , 232.

53 from th e title of " Culture and Pol itics: The Fourth Epoch," loc. cit.

95

complain wisely about 'the end of ideology.' We are beginning to moveagain. 54 Yankee "intellectuals" continue to do what they've been doing:
They see the good, they see the bad, the yes, the no, the maybe-andthey cannot take a stand. So instead they take up a tone. But they arenever in it; they are just spectators. And as spectators they are condescending, with such little reason to be . .. 55 They continue to be"detached" while serving power. But they no longer matter. In the
showdown these days such people are just no good-for the hungry

Cod's Ctmuf1yarul Miuehe began to see it; The only real politics possible for honest men_ in
the old Cuba was the politics of the gun, the politics of the guemlla.
57
The revolution was the only 'politics' for an honest man.
The human
stature of this refusal and this struggle is in sharp contrast to the weariness of many NA TO intellectuals with what they call 'ideology,' andtheir proclamation of 'the end of ideology.' The end-of-ideology isin reality the ideology of an ending: the ending of political reflection'

itself as a public fact. It is a iNeary now:ft-a lf Justtflcati'on-by _t~neof voice rather than by explicit argument-of the cultural and po!ttfcal
default of the NA TO intellectuals. 58 The elaborate verbal schemas ofthe experts who serve corporate and military bureaucracies aredestroyed by practical activity, because The revolution. •.• sm~5!1es
whatever is mere artifice. 59 Revolutionary practice, practical-cnticalactivity, is the test of the politics of troth, the test of the adequacy of
one's definition of reality:
The revolution is a way of defining reality.

A DU:LUATIO'.\ Of lJ•\E
Sl'IC7.D,,m,

A FD\" IIAR~I \\URI>"JA CQ.UF.S BAR7.LX

world. 56 While they were busy intimidating the powerless with theenormity of the spectacle, while they accumulated career and status byserving the bureaucracy, A man said No! to a monster. ... And then
5400Lener to the New Lett;• foe. cit, p. 259.

57
fbid.• p. 40.

55

58.. Letter to the N- Left." foe. cit,PP- 247-249.
59usten, y.,,kt,e, p. 133.

Listffl. Y.,,ktle: Tht, Revolution in Cuba, New Yori< : McGraw Hill Book Company, 1960, p. 150.
56
fbid.

96

97

The revolution is a way of changing reality-and so of changing
the definitions of it.
The revolution in Cuba is a great moment of truth. 60

This is why the activity of the intellectual craftsman who unifies
plan and performance, the practice of the Renaissance Man who is alsoa P~~methean hist~ry-maker, is revolutionary practice. In revolutionary
actJVJty, self-changing and the changing of circumstances are part of thesame process, the creation of the fully developed individual and of theproperly de~eloping society. So it is only, we think, in a revolutionarysocial scientist America has produced, who probably. . . was at heart
an anarchist and syndicalist, 65 stands awkwardly next to, or slightly
behind, the father of The Sociology of Leadership. Rousseau isconspicuously absent among The Classics. The man who rebelled against

the fact that ..Man is born free, yet everywhere he's in chains," 66 is
replaced by a man who takes this fact for granted : In all societies- fromsocieties that are very meagerly developed and have barely attained thedawningsofcivilization, down to the most advanced and powerful societies-two classes of people appear-a class that rules and a class that is

epoch that mtellectuals can do their real work, and it is only by intellectual effort that revolutionaries can be truly successful. 61

Th~ same year that he wrote about the revolutionary moment oftrut~ which changed reality and so changed the definitions of it, Mills
pu~hs~ed 62anoth~r book? on Th~ ~lassie Tradition in SociologicalT~mkmg.
This book ts not Mills attempt to begin here and now.

ruled, 67 and by another man for whom the separation between masses
and elites is the basic characteristic of social life: So we get two strata ina population: (1) A lower stratum, the non-elite, with whose possible influence on government we are not just here concerned; then (2) a higher

It is a return to his files, where all projects with me begin and end 63~~I~.c~tlban re~olution did not smash whatever was mere artifice. in1

es. M_1lls' "clas~ics" are not the men who defined reality insways that clanfied poss1bl~ s,trategies for revolutionary change. Theya_re th e ten ':"_ho sh_aped Mills definition of reality- or rather his defini~on; 0 realities, since the book contains the intellectual ancestry ofot men who wrote under the name of C. Wright Mills. Here KarlMarx and Max Weber. .. stand up above the rest, 64 and Veblen, the best
stratum, the elite, which is divided into two: (a) a governing elit~·(b) a non-governing elite.6 8 The image of man defined by revolutionary practice is obscured by images of man which make it impossible todefine revolutionary practice. Mills the independent revolutionary
continues to coexist with Mills the academic cynic, even though he is
at pains to find justifications for this peaceful coexistence: Back in
the American thirties, there was quite a craze for Pareto. .. I have neverunderstood why, unless it was some kind of attempted antidote tof () 1\, I! 11 ,,-t

PRl'-lllll'

1111

I' \

I ll 1( I l h I'll I '-' I' 1 '\THE OPERATIONAL CODE

60lbid., p. 114.
61
Ibid., p. 133.
62
1,,,_. of Man: n,,, Classic Tnd;tion ;n Soc;0I

OF
THE POLITBURO.
. .
og,CIII Thmkmg (anthology with intrOductionJ, Nt!W

Yori< : George Braziller. Inc.• 1960.
63
P. 200.
64 Thi! soc;ological lmaginar;on.
lm-s of Man, p. 12; following quotation on page 13.

98

l'llffl<..r\ll"lll

65 n,,, Marxisrs, New Yori< : Dell Publishing CompMV. 1962, p. 35.
66 Rousseau. Du Contrat Soc;sl, p. 50.
61GaetMo Mosca. "The Ruling Class;• in Mills, Images of Man, p . 192.
68v11fredo Pareto. "Elites. Force and Governments."' in Ibid., p. 264.

99\\11h[I\Marxism which was so fashionable at the time. Pareto's is one of thetougher, even cynical, styles of thought; he seems to relish this posturefor its own sake, although he disguises it, I imagine, by supposing it to bean essential part of Science. Of course it is nothing of the sort. As awhole, I find his work pretentious, dull and disorderly. Yet if one digs
hard, one does find useful reflections. 6 9This is the year when Mills comes face to face with the mostimportant issue of political reflection-and of political action-in ourtime: the problem of the historical agency of change, of the social andthe Cuban revolution he underlines the fact that The revolution was
incubated at the university 74 and that its leaders have been young

intellectuals and students from the University of Havana. 75 However,Mills' documentation is not a proof of his thesis, but an apology forit. Neither the Cuban revolutionaries nor the revolutionary students
around the world have anything in common with the intellectuals,
artists, ministers, scholars and scientists• .• fighting a cold war ininstitutional means of stroctural change. 70 But instead of dealing withthe problem in terms of the living experience of revolutionary practice,
he pulls dead arguments out of old files. He repeats earlier observations
about the collapse of our historical agencies of change 71 (by which hemeans trans-historical Levers which he never believed in, and whichth~ref~re co~d not collapse for him), and then he states, unambiguously,
It 1s with this problem of agency in mind that I have been studying, for
seWJral years now, the cultural apparatus, the intellectuals-as a possible,

which

•
ss· . Id
they echo and elaborate the confusionso f 0111c1a
oms. 76

The young revolutionaries are clearly not the people who. ~eTo document his thesis, helists the activities of students all over the world, 73 and in his book on

strategically placed for possible innovation as those whose work Joms
them to the cultural apparatus; to the means of information and knowledge; to the means by which realities are defined, by which progra'!1s
and politics are elaborated and presented to publics 77 ; the st~ggling69

students are the victims of these people, the ones who are marupulatedby them.

immediate, radical agency of change. 72

Mills in Ibid., p. 14.

lO,.Letter to the New Left." loc. cit., p. 254.
l1 Ibid.• p. 255.

74 usttm Yankee, p. 39.

72
lbid., p. 256.

73.
.
'"LtStrln Yan/c.,,, pp. 33-34. and in .. Letter to lhe N- Left." foe. cit, pp. 257-259.

75
tbid., p. 46.
76 n,,, Sociological Imagination, p. 183.
77•-rhe Decline of the Left." foe. cit, pp, 231 -232.

100
101

_J

Mills' inability to distinguish the bureaucratic agent of repression
from his victim does not prove that the Classic Sociology helps one tounderstand what is happening in the world, nor that its relevance to thethat the liberation of one individual requires a collective transformationof the structure of the entire society because his problems are notcapable of solution by any one individual. , . 81 Furthermore, Mills
already knew twenty years earlier that such an individual is able toformulate a political strategy, namely motives for action which appeal
to others. 82 Yet he does not, in any of his last works, ask about therelationship between the radical individual and the individuals withwhom he communicates. Years of interrupted development haveclosed this question for Mills; it is replaced by a question given toMills by his intellectual benefactors; the question is,
Who the hell's yer leader anyhow?
Who's yer leader?

life-ways of the individual and to the ways of history-making in ourepoch is ob~ious and immediate. 78 Concerned with documenting

the role of intellectuals as a revolutionary agency of change andwith applying the Sociology of Leadership, Mills does not apply his
own analysis of the social function of the university, nor his own
an~yse~ of the Leading Roles of academics, to explain why theumverstty was the cradle of the revolutionary ideas, nor why the
FRU:DO~! .-\ND LOYALTY

J:-.; OL'k

Teacher in Amcric:1

C0LLEGl:SJ\1I

IIAUI ..,_

politics made there were the politics of revolt and insurgency ofrebellion-the politics of the revolution. 79 Mills mentions the fac t thatth_e Cuban pe~~ts are the people our learned young men joined up
with, and mobtltzed, to make our revolution. Know that tNe/1: these

Mills poses this question " in spite of himself," or rather, because ofan uncritical acceptance of an image of man based on a separation ofmen into leaders and led , elites and masses. But he is not comfortablein this framework ; he is incoherent: there is a rift between his theory
and his practice; his definition of reality does not guide his activity.
His single critique of the New Cuban government is: I do not like suchdependence upon one man as exists in Cuba today, nor the virtuallypeople are the base, the thrust, the power. It is from them that therebel soldiers came. They are the revolutionaries. 80 He is also aware
78
tmagas ofMllfl, pp, 16-17.
79
Lisll!II, y.,kee, p, 39.
80tbid., P. 45.

BtTheSoaolOfliu/ l~Mtion, p. 187.
82•-s.lUIIOd Actions and V ocabularies of Mo tive" ( 1940), toe. cit, o. 443.

102

103

fluences which pulled him in the opposite direction, Mills tried toremain a masterless, recalcitrant man, a sort of intellectual Wobbly.

eleven companeros to take up the politics of the guerrilla, the only'politics' for an honest man, but what peered back was the cold stareof the scared employee, the hostile indifference of the only agentsof change he had found among the Yankees, theintellectuals,

What knowledge does to a man (in clarifying what he is, and setting it

artists, ministers, scholars and scientists.

absolute povver that this one man possesses. 83

In spite of rigid in-

For Mills it
remained a personal ideal. What he was is perhaps clarified by thesuggestion he puts into the words of the Cuban speaker in Listenfree)-that is the personal ideal of knowledge. .. 84

And you Yankees are a vigorous people, or at least once upon atime you were. ~ ~- ·- .•• _' - " ' . . , w l ' ~ ~ Y • ...o._Yankee: We Cuban revolutionaries don't really know just exactly how
you could best go about this transforming of your Yankee imperialism.
For us, with our problems, it was simple: In Cuba, we had to take to our'Rocky Mountains'-you couldn't do that, could you? Not yet, vve
suppose. (We're joking-vve suppose. But if in ten years, in five years-.

.-.,.-~.
IE MA ~FOR COLLEGE TEACI.f\':r:;z-~. .

·.-· ~ ~,. rJ'ti;.

~~..;·_, .. ~forget the money-Mother of God, haven't you

If you'd just abandon the fear-aren't you strong.n.o.PJIIJ!l to?

if things go as vve think they might inside your country, if it comes tothat, then know this, Yankee: some of us will be with you. God
almighty, those are great mountains/) 85 Mills' knowledge did not set

THE END OF
IDEOLOGY

him free for the struggle; it locked him up in a conceptual framework
without exit. Unable to think of himself as a leader precisely because
he could not accept the "role" of a follower, his knowledge did notinform him that man-all men, not 'elites' - can make history. Unable
to take on the Yankee imperialism by himself, he looked around for83
Li$r.n, Yank•, p. 182.
B4 ..

o;_ Knowledge and Power, '" loc. cit , p. 606.

85
Li6r.n, Yanicee, p. 166.

On 1bt Edi111SUOSI of Polmcil Ideas'-thef•ltacs

If you'd just stop being so altogether private and become public
men and women of the world-you could do great things in theworld. 86
86ibid., p. 167.

104

105

\

Tradition in Sociological Thinking. By storing Marx and the Marxists in
the Hall of Classical Fame, Mills enlarged his menagerie of images ofMarx, Trotsky, Lenin, Stalin,
Mao Tse-tung, Khrushchev,"Che" Guevara, and others whose
Ideas have shaken our worldpresented and analyzed by oneof America's leadinl soclolotiats.

Bent by several men, Mills bowed to no man. If he sometimes
admired the independence and self-determination of elites, he felt
nothing but contempt for official keepers of seals, and among thekeepers, he singled out NATO intellectuals and Stalinists for his
greatest contempt. He kept far away from the Talmudic scholars, thehigh priests and the grand executioners for whom Marx was a Prophet
who wrote numerous testaments of a new Bible. And to keep his
distance from them, Mills kept his distance from Marx as well. Consequently, when he turns to Marx in his last book, he does not "useMarx" as an occasion for rethinking questions he has not been able toanswer, or at times even to pose. He keeps his distance. As a result, hedoes not read Marx in the clear light of fresh and living revolutionary
experience, but through the obscure veil of stale files and deadarguments. Mills' last book is not a final struggle for coherence; it is
not a confrontation between incompatible, never-synthesized elements
which pulled him in opposite directions. It is a retreat from this confrontation. Mills' The Marxists, published two years after Listen
Yankee, does not show that, for Mills, the revolution is a way ofdefining reality, nor that, for Mills, the revolution in Cuba is a great
moment of truth. The Cuban revolution, and the beginning of student
rebellions all over the world, stimulated Mills, not to change his definitions of-reality, but to append revolutionary experience to The Classic
106

man; he did not emerge with a coherent synthesis of his own.
For eighteen years, from his attempt to characterize The Powerless People, through his analysis of White Collar to his essay on crafts
manship, Mills tried, at times successfully, to deal with the alienationof the individual's power over his circumstances as a fact about social
life in capitalist society. Yet in his last work he reduces the problem ofalienation to The question of the attitude of men toward the workI

they do.
He reduces alienation to psychic exploitation, and using
this definition he adds, alienation does not necessarily, or evenusually, resultin revolutionary impulses. On the contrary, often it seems
more likely to be accompanied by political apathy than by insurgencyof either the left or right 88 This superfici definition is a pub1ic-re1ations man's concept of alienation: it means disaffection with thedominant symbols, and can be remedied by changing the image with
87T1HI Marxists, p. 112.
881bid., pp. 112-113.

107

mass circulation newspapers, television, and expensiw advertising; if
this campaign does not succeed in transforming disaffection to happy
acceptance, it can at least channel it into political apathy and thus
avoid insurgency. .This is not, however, the · way ·Mills-had •definedalienation in White Collar. When white-collar people get jobs, theysell not only their time and energy but their personalities as well.

various ¼inds of political systems may be rearranged, debunked, or
elaborated. . . . For changes in the legitimating symbols to be realized,
masses of people must shift their allegiances. 90

In his Celebration of Marx, 91 Mills says that Marx's structural
view of a total society results from a classic sociological technique of
XI

The white collar man sells his creative power and his gestures nomatter what attitude he has toward the work he does. Self-alienationis thus an accompaniment of his alienated labor. 89 In other words
the salesgirl at Macy's sells (alienates, separates herself from) her time:energy and gestures even if she enjoys selling herself and thinks she's
Supergirl or Elizabeth Taylor. Public relations men are hired to change
her attitude toward her work, and they sometimes succeed, but she
remains alienated, because the alienation is a fact about her social
situation and not about her image of it. Mills must have thrown away
his file cards for White Collar, or perhaps he wrote that work before
he had developed his files. In either case, the trivial conception ofalienation presented in The Marxists is unrelated to the ideas developedin White Collar. It is related to the textbook Mills wrote with Gerthnine years before The Marxists. It was in that book that alienation was
treated as a psychic phenomenon, as a concept which did not refer to
man's daily life but to the symbol sphere, the image of life. It was therethat Mills agreed to put his name over a description of a public relations
world where detachment is a step towards alienation, a world where, In
the scholar's study or the agitator's den the symbols which legitimate

The philosophers have only_ intupreted _the world, in v
ous ways; the point, however, 1s to c/1a11ge 1t.

thinking. With its aid Marx translated the abstract conceptions of contemporary political economy into the concrete terms of the social relations of men. However, rejecting even his own structural view ofalienation, or forgetting his own characterization of the alienation ofliving power, time, and gesture which accompany the sale of one's
labor, Mills cannot emerge with a structural view of the total society
even in this last work where he directly confronts Marx's structuralview. Having reduced alienation to an attitude, Mills is unable torelate the state or the corporation or the military to people's daily
activities, he cannot see these "forces" as concentrations of the alienatedself-powers of a population. He need not have taken his clue from Marx;
he could have taken it from Roussei>u. In his twenty year long struggle
to find the roots of the powerlessness, the private idiocy, Mills might
have traced the process through which the voluntarily alienated powersof people become transformed into economic, ;iolitical and military"institutions." But Mills retreats from such an analysis once again;
he again backs into the textbook he wrote with Gerth. Instead of
reducing the "institutions" to the daily activities of people, the daily
routines through which they alienate their powers, Mills retreats to theinstitutional orders which stand, sui generis, as structures separate from
90Mi11s and Ger1h, Charact11r and Social Structure, p. 298.

91 Chapter ~ of The Marxists;89

the quotation which follows is from page 36.

v.t,i111 Collar. p. xvii.

109
108

the activities of daily life which create and reproduce them. Eachinstitutional order contains decision-making elites and passive masses;
the higher circles of these orders are the ones who make history; since
a population's alienation of energy, mind and time is not seen by Mills
as voluntary activity, but as a state of mind, an attitude, these masses
do nothing voluntarily, they do not make history, they simply shift
under the symbols dangled before them by the intellectuals who serve
the higher circles. On the basis of this definition of reality, Mills statesthat it follows that our conception of the higher circles in capitalist

socie,ty must be seen as "!ore complex than the rather simple 'rulingclass _of Ma~x, and espec,al/y later marxists. 92 And especially latermarx,sts. Mills seems to have forgotten that the later marxists who
apparently "interpreted" Marx for him in the 1930s, and against whom
he reacted for the rest of his life, turned up among the noisiest NA TO

intellectuals of the 1950s. Yet Mills continues to respond to the stale
marx of the later marxists with the stale arguments in his files, andfinally he evades the problem of alienation altogether by stating flatlythat the problem is to define the state, with Max Weber, simply as an
92

n. M.rxists, p . 118.

110

organization that 'monopolizes legitimate violence over a given territory. , 93 With this statement, Mills chooses to keep a bureaucratic conception of reality: society consists of three separate hierarchies, which
are not themselves explained in terms of people's activities; they aredefined, and as definitions they are the starting point for analysis:
people's activities are explained in terms of the hierarchies.
Mills insists on the principle of historical specificity, 94 although
it has little meaning in his conception. He cannot study the historicalforms of concentration of people's alienated powers, the historicalforms of social activity. His framework reduces him to the study ofhistorical successions of institutional orders; historical problems are reduced to questions about the wpremacy of one or another order, andhis more complex analysis consists of nothing more than the observationthat the economic order is not always supreme. 95
With this definition of reality, Mills cannot come face to face withthe most important issue of political reflection~and of political J!Ction-of our time: the problem of the historical agency of change, of the social
and institutional means of structural change. If Mills does not see thatpeople create their institutions through their daily activities, then hecannot see how they can change the social system by changing their
daily activities, and a historical agency of change must be introduced
into the system. In other words, Mills' historical agency is an abstraction
which is separate from people's daily activities; it is some kind of
mechanical lever generated by a social machine, and at some point inhistory the lever automatically destroys the machine. Since such alever has not overthrown the West European or American capitalist
93
tbid., p . 119.
94
tbid., p. 38.
95
tbid., pp. 116-126.

111

machine, Mills concludes that the agency collapsed. The trends supposed to facilitate the development and the role of the agency havenot generally come off-and when they have occurred, episodically andin_ part, they have not led to the results expected. 96

In other words,
Mills defines an entity which cannot exist, projects an event which cannot take place, and then concludes that the entity collapsed because
the event did not take place.
In order to prove that the agency which collapsed was Marx's
agency, Mills has to prove that Marx had such a conception of an agency.
To prove this, Mills has to disprove much of what he learned from Marx.
Mills' often-repeated proposition that men make their own history
within given though transformable material circumstances, comes from
Marx. 97 However, in order to attribute the theory of the mechanicallever to Marx, Mills has to show that, for Marx, men do not maketheir own history; that history is inevitable. But in all of the vast tomesof Marx's writings, stretching over half a century of creative activity,
Mills could not find a conclusive statement to that effect by Marx.
Mills is too intellectually honest to yank out of context a statement
which proves Marx said something which is denied by what precedes
and follows it. Consequently, in order to prove that history is inevitable according to Marx, Mills quotes a statement about the inevitability of history written by Engels. 98 But this method of proof is not
so honest either, since Engels is Marx and Marx, Engels only for the"marxologists" of the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow, and not evenfor all of them. The fact is that men do not make history according
to the theory Mills derived from Max Weber; it is because of theinfluence of Weber that we must construct another model in which

96/bid., p. 128.
97/bid., p. 122. Mills gives a fuller statement of this view in the last paragraph of Character and Social
Structure, and also in the first seven chapters of nie Causes of World War Three98.

The Mancisc, p. 91.

events may be understood in closer and in more conscious relati on to
the decisions and lack of decisions of powerful elites, political andmilitary as yvell as economic. 99 It is this theory which keeps Mills

from seeing that the decisions and lack of decisions of underlying
populations 'create the power of the elites, and consequently that thedecisions of these people can also abolish the power of the elites andthus change history. (Mills even suggests that it is the higher ciri::les of
the Soviet bureaucracy who might institute socialism. 100 ) Since Mills
does not regard the alienation of people's self-powers as a daily activity
but as a psychic condition, he cannot regard the de-alienation ofthese powers as revolutionary activity but merely as another p sychic
condition . In other words, people are doomed to eternal alienation.
All that can change is the institutional form of alienation, the type of
bureaucratic orders within which people perform their roles. And suchchange can take place either through the intervention of a mechanicallever, which collapsed, or through the morally inspired initiation of
the very elites whose power is the inverse reflection of the powerlessness
Mills struggled against for over two decades.
The last year of his life, Mills refers nostalgically to the seemingly

insignificant groups of scholarly insurgents in the nineteenth-century
capitals of Europe- a kind of man we do not kno w so well today... 101

This is the kind of man Mills did not become when he chose the new andfascinating career chances which often involved opportunities topractice his skill rather freely. 102 And in the intervening years, Mills
developed a definition of reality which failed to define what such ascholarly insurgent could possibly do: neither a mechanical agencyof change, nor a member of the power elite, such an insurgen t isreduced to the impotence of a passive spectator critically observing the
moves of elites and the shifts of masses from the fringes of society.
Mills' nostalgia is not related to his theory; he has not achieved theunity of thought, action and feeling which characterizes his ideal of an
intellectual craftsman. In terms of his theory one cannot imagine whatthese scholarly insurgents accomplished in the nineteenth-century
99ibid., p. 122.
tOOlbid. , p. 474.

1011bid., p. 27.
102 nie New Men of Power, p . 281 .

112

113

capitals of Europe. Perhaps because of the influence of his intellectual
benefactors, or perhaps in order to justify his chosen career as professor,
Mills has removed the very possibility of politically relevant action fromsuch scholarly insurgents. Throughout his writings, a different Mills
had crept into the margins, and at times to the very center of his work:a masterless man, a Promethean history-maker. But in his last book, abook about revolution; the Promethean history-maker is conspicuously
absent; all that remains is the nostalgia. And even the nostalgia is nolonger propped up with theoretical support: whatever might have supported it is beaten and removed from sight. Mills is at pains to remove
the very possibility that the practical activity of an insurgent can leadto a transformation of his circwnstances. In the process he has to denymuch that he once knew. In The Marxists he returns to a problem
which he had treated throughout his works, but which he never developed further than he had taken it in 1942 (in his dissertation), theproblem of strategy, of motives of action which appeal to others. He
uses different words in 1962. This connection of ideal or goal withagency isatonceamoral and an intellectual strategy. But he immediately restates this proposition using the terms of the theory constructedduring the intervening period: This connection between built-in
agency and socialist ideal is the political pivot around which turn thedecisive features of his [Marx's] model of society and many specifictheories of historical trend going on within it. IOJ And on the basisof this formulation, Mills reduces the motives for action into the
103 -,,,,, Marxists, p, 81 .

\marxian doctrine of later marxis'ts, and he transforms the others into abuilt-in agency, the mechanical lever which collapsed. In this con text,
an analysis of society which defines the conditions for social change,
namely the required material instruments and the required knowledge,
is not a statement about necessary conditions, but a prediction about
the future. And in this context, an individual's practical attempt tocreate some of the conditions, namely to provide the required knowledge, to define reality, to formulate a strategy and communicate it toothers, is not practical activity at all; it is speculation about what isgoing to happen in the future, automatically, all by itself. In terms ofthese cynical, detached and apolitical criteria, Marx was not a committed
scholarly insurgent trying to create those conditions for social change
which were within his reach; he was a nineteenth century me taphysician
who devoted fifty years to speculations, expectations and predictions
about the inevitable- future. This being so, it must immediately be said
that Marx's major political expectation about advanced capitalist societies has collapsed: the central agency which he designates has notdeveloped as expected; the role he expected that agency to enact has
not been enacted. 104 In other words, if I state that in order to write
an article I need certain materials and certain knowledge, I am notstating conditions but making predictions about my future; if I add
that my goal is to write an essay on Mills, then this is not a commitment
to a project but an expectation that in the face of the books, pen andpaper, my mind and hand will mechanically write the essay. If for oneof various reasons I fail to write it, then my expectations about myself
have collapsed; the central agency which I designated for the task ofwriting the essay (my hand) has not developed as expected; the role
which I expected my mind and hand to enact has not been enacted.
Perhaps because he stood alone for too long, perhaps because he
was recovering from his first heart attack , Mills the detached academic
can now only imagine intellectual activity as de tached academic activity.
Gone is the intellectual craftsman as Promethean history-maker. Goneis the intellectual architect who wrote, We must realize, in a word, thatI04/bid., p. 128.

11-4

115

Mills makes no reference to this selection despite the fact that it takes up
questions he regarded as central during more than two decades, anddespite the fact that it explicitly denies the main theses he tries touphold in The Marxists.

\

vve need not drift blindly; that we can take matters into our own
hands. 1 os What is left is a detached academic who can merely interpretmatters from a distance; who cannot define the conditions requiredfor changing reality, but can only guess about the future; who cannot
commit himself to political tasks, but can only have speculative
expectations about what others are going to do. Mills' anthology of
Marxist writings contains a short selection which he has either neverread or which he has forgotten; in any case, he makes no reference to its
presence in the book despite the fact that it is a selection about
intellectual craftsmanship, about Promethean history-making, about therelationship between defining reality, self-making and history-making.

. . . he does not understand human activity
itself as objective activity. . . • He therefore does not comprehend
the significance of 'revolutionary,' or practical-critical' activity. The
question whether objective truth is an attribute of human thought- is
not a theoretical but a practical question. Man must prove the truth, i.e.
the reality and power, the 'this-sidedness' of his thinking in practice.
The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated
from practice is a purely scholastic question. . • . The coincidence of thechanging of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing canonly be comprehended and rationally understood as revolutionary
practice. . . . All social life is essentially practical. All the mysteries
which urge theory into mysticism find their rational solution in humanpractice and in the comprehension of this practice. . . . The philosophers
have only interpreted the world differently, the point is, to change it. 106
106 K.-1 Marx, "Theses on Feuerbach," in Mills, The Marxists, pp. 70-71.

105"The Big City: Private Troubles .,d Public Issues," foe. cit, p. 399.

117
116

It was in the spirit of these statements that Mills had written, twenty
years earlier, that Franz Neumann's book on Nazi Germany will move
all of us into deeper levels of analysis and strategy.

Behemoth is everywhere united.

Kalamazoo

April, 1969111

It had better.

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