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| Charles Wright Mills |
by Mike ODonnell, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Westminster University, in The Sociological Imagination:
http://sociologicalimagination.org/archives/238
Mike
O’Donnell is Emeritus Prof of Sociology at Westminster University - See
more at:
http://sociologicalimagination.org/archives/238#sthash.laum7Dwi.dpuf
Mike
O’Donnell is Emeritus Prof of Sociology at Westminster University - See
more at:
http://sociologicalimagination.org/archives/238#sthash.laum7Dwi.dpuf
Mike
O’Donnell is Emeritus Prof of Sociology at Westminster University - See
more at:
http://sociologicalimagination.org/archives/238#sthash.laum7Dwi.dpuf
Charles Wright Mills’ body of work was substantial by any standards
but for someone who died at the age of forty-five it was remarkable.
The
range and substance of Mills’ work is impressive but even more so is
its originality, vitality and humanistic motivation: in short, its
sociological imagination.
In his still celebrated if now less
influential work,
The Sociological Imagination (1959), Mills
addresses issues of sociological theory and method and particularly the
practical application of the subject.
However, in this piece I refer to a
wide range of Mills’ work to illustrate that he was not only a great
sociological mentor but also practised what he advocated.
Mills’ own sociological imagination was inspired by what he referred
to as the classic sociological tradition the main feature of which is
‘the concern with historical social structures: and that its problems
are of direct relevance to urgent public issues and insistent human
troubles (
S I: 28).
Mills links personal troubles with public
issues and threads biography into the historical structural dynamic. The
achievement of the classic tradition lies in the creation of models of
society that illuminate the impact of social change on people and on
their potential for response.
These models generate and inform theory
but are developed at a more general level than specific theories. Thus
Marx’s dialectical model of historical change and Weber’s concept of the
role of ideas in history give orientation to theory and research.
For
Mills the issue is not about which model is ‘correct’ but their ability
to illuminate large vistas of the social landscape.
In addition to
clarifying the relationships of the triad of social structure,
historical change and biography, Mills argues that sociological
imagination necessarily generates political perspective because of the
understanding it gives of the human condition (
S I chapter 10).
Mills himself was emphatic in drawing practical conclusions from his
sociological work. This brought him into sharp conflict with what he
referred to as the ‘crack-pot realism’ of managerial liberals such as
Daniel Bell whom he felt were reducing social issues to mere matters of
‘expert’ planning and administration.
Similarly, he attacked ‘abstracted
empiricism’ within sociology - the gathering of facts with little
reference to their wider meaning or application. Mills’ Ph.D. was on
American pragmatism and all his work carries the tone of someone who
intended to make a difference.
Mills’ work amply demonstrates the principles underpinning his
concept of the sociological imagination. In less than ten years he
published three books that substantially analysed the social structure
of the United States. The first, New Men of Power (1948)
presented the leadership of the American trade union movement as
integrated within rather than a challenging the American economic
establishment. The second, White Collar (1951), analysed the
rise of the new American middle class largely employed in the
proliferating offices of the public and private sectors. This was
followed by his magnum opus of structural analysis The Power Elite
(1956) that remains a standard reference for understanding the workings
and overlaps of the American economic, military, and political elites. This triad of publications had almost an anticipatory as well as
contemporary relevance. It describes a declining and weakened industrial
working class with an increasingly self-interested leadership; a
white-collar class cemented within a still highly unequal occupational
structure by media-led consumerism and its own desire for security; and a
substantially autonomous elite only marginally disrupted in its pursuit
of power, wealth and status by democratic processes. This was a very
different vision of the United States and of Western societies than that
adopted by those he saw as ‘conservative liberals’ such as Talcott
Parsons and Daniel Bell who declared an ‘end of ideology’ long before
Francis Fukuyama made the same mistaken judgement.
As Mills’ edited collection of classic sociological reading, Images of Man
(1960) shows, he particularly admired European sociology. He was less
impressed with his contemporary American colleagues. The one structural
model that Mills found utterly wanting was Parsons’ social systems
theory which he saw as prime example of ‘grand theory’. Mills’
ridiculing of Parsons’ abstract style had a serious point behind it -
that such abstraction can take on a life of its own, divorced from the
realities of everyday social life. More substantively, Mills argued that
Parsons’ emphasis on consensus legitimised the social status quo and
failed to address what for Mills is fundamental to the social dynamic -
power conflict. In contrast to Parsons, he focused on who takes
decisions and in whose interest and argued that elites invariably pursue
their own self-interest (‘the idea of the responsibility of the
powerful is foolish’ SI: 213). As he succinctly observed: ‘Men (sic) are free to make history, but some men are freer than others’ (S I: 201).
Mills regarded ‘abstracted empiricism’ as the mirror opposite of
‘grand theory’ but as having a similar outcome - a failure critically to
address the status quo and therefore a tacit endorsement of it. He
associated abstracted empiricism with the proliferation of bureaucracy
and what he saw as the reduction of social and moral matters to issues
of management. Mills was as suspicious of ‘experts’ and ‘managers’ as of
the elites they served arguing - again contra Daniel Bell - that
fundamental matters of domestic and foreign policy should be widely
debated. Like Habermas, and perhaps a little romantically, he
occasionally harked back to a period when better-informed ‘publics’
debated key issues of policy. Mills certainly made his contribution to
re-igniting such debates.
Mills’ model of society was an elites/mass rather than a class one.
It is very much the first part of this dual model that Mills is
remembered for - whether or not one agrees with it. A problem with the
elites/mass model is that it tends to see the ‘mass’ as somewhat inert.
In fact, Mills did share the view of many of his ‘conservative liberal’
antagonists as well as that other luminary of the left, Herbert Marcuse,
that the masses were indeed rendered dully somnolent by the tedium of
routine work and the soporific effect of the mass media. However, unlike
his liberal critics, Mills embarked on an intellectual struggle to
produce a new radical analysis of social change in the distinctly
discouraging context of the conservative and reactionary nineteen
fifties. His own analysis precluded him from privileging the traditional
working class or, still less, the new white-collar class in the search
for a key agency for change. However, Mills demonstrated a consistent
concern for both the new poor of mature capitalist society and for those
of the emerging world. As far as the former are concerned he had a
prescient understanding of how what came to be referred to variously as
‘the dependent population’, ‘the underclass’ and ‘the marginal’ would
become perceived as almost the residual ‘problem’ of modern society -
resistant to endless plans to organise them. About the poor of the
emerging world Mills was able in his later writings to be more
optimistic. Although he railed against what he saw as the abuse of power
in the bullying of Castro’s Cuba (Listen Yankee, 1960) and American
militarism (The Causes of World War Three, 1958) he realised that in
time the balance of power would shift - as, indeed, we are now seeing.
In so far as Mills did tentatively observe an emerging agency for
change in Western societies, it was among intellectuals, particularly
young intellectuals. This was not mere wishful thinking on his part as
he lived long enough to witness the stirrings of radicalism among young
people in higher education both in the United States and Europe. As the
following quotation from Mills’ Letter to the (British) New Left
shows, he was sensitive to the need to re-explore the ethical and
cultural values of radicalism: ‘As for the articulation of ideals, there
I think your magazines have done there best work so far. That is your
meaning - is it not - of the emphasis on cultural affairs.’ Mills had an
enormous influence on the values and thinking of American student
movement of the early nineteen sixties and had he lived might have been
able to guide it away from the excesses of the late sixties.The Port Huron Statement
(1962), the manifesto of the newly formed Students for a Democratic
Society (SDS) amply reflected Mills’ belief in participatory democracy
and practical humanism.
It is not difficult to imagine that Mills might have found himself at
odds with the dominant contemporary state and corporate directed
regimes of research and of the constraints they put on young scholars. His comments in The Sociological Imagination on research and
the problem of funding remain relevant. He of course recognises the need
for funds but also warns against the conditions that can come with it. He suggests that sometimes it may be better to work small-scale but
independently rather than chase expensively funded research whose
findings and interpretation may be ‘managed’ by the funding agency. What
he MIGHT have made of the current state dominated research regimes is
anybody’s guess. In a piece of advice that may seem trite and simplistic
in the light of the complexity of the contemporary context of research,
Mills’ advocates that the researcher should think and observe. But it is precisely because Mills’ makes what he terms ‘the craft of sociology’ accessible that is his genius. Mills’ book, The Sociological Imagination, has inspired
generations of young and not so young social scientists. This is partly
because he wrote a great book - once voted the second most important
sociological book of the twentieth century after Weber’s Economy and Society,
partly because he practised what he advocated, but also because he was
an inspiring and, in the best sense of the word, idealistic human being. Mills the sociologist, campaigner and character fused to generate a
charisma to which there is no recent or present comparison in social
science.He retained a grounded utopianism that he defined as a
commitment to an attainable but radically fairer and more equal future.
His message is no less relevant now.
Mills, C.W. (1948) New Men of Power: America’s Labor Leaders. Oxford University Press.
Mills, C.W. (1951) White Collar: The American Middle Classes. Oxford University Press.
Mills, C.W. (1956). The Power Elite. Oxford University Press.
Mills, C.W. (1958) The Causes of World War Three. Simon and Schuster.
Mills, C.W. (1970 (1959)). The Sociological Imagination. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Mills, C.W. (1960) Listen Yankee: The Revolution in Cuba. Ballantine Books.
Mills, C. W. (1967 (1962)) Letter to the New Left. In Horowitz
I. (ed.), Power, Politics and People: The Collected Essays of C. Wright Mills. Oxford University Press, pp. 247-259.
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