Looking back at the legacy of C. Wright Mills, 60 years after his death
His view on power and democracy still captures the imagination.
American sociologist Charles Wright Mills was a prominent figure for the intellectual left during the 1960s and 1970s. Although sixty years have passed since his death, his sociological ideas on imagination and power and his views on the decline of democracy continue to be relevant today.
As a sociologist, he strongly criticized conservative ideologies and aimed to raise awareness of those in power, regardless of their political leanings. Mills’ insights on power and democracy still resonate with readers today, as his democratic ideals, analysis of the American power structure, perspective on the deterioration of politics, critique of American militarism and Cold War policies, and ideas on reviving participatory democracy remain pertinent in 2022.
Mills believed that citizenship and democratic participation were essential for human well-being. He argued that the democratic ideal, which opposes manipulation and interference, was necessary to establish human freedom.
Mills is renowned for his insights into the American power elite and the new middle class. He is also the champion of the ‘sociological imagination’, a concept connecting individual experience to historical processes. For instance, unemployment says something about an individual’s situation, but if many others are unemployed, it says something about society.
The individual experience is intertwined with the collective experience. As Mills summarized in the Sociological Imagination, “Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both.”
Through this interwoven interaction between the individual and society, we can comprehend the motives of history. In other words, you can only understand the individual if you understand the culture, and vice versa.
While this might seem normal to us today, it was remarkably innovative when it first appeared in The Sociological Imagination in 1959. This concept became so essential that it has been included in numerous introductions to sociology to explain why this field is relevant to our daily lives.
The sociological imagination is a powerful tool for comprehending the forces that shape society. By examining an individual’s experience with burnout, we can gain insights into the broader issues plaguing our labor market. The rise of burnout in Western societies indicates a more significant problem with how we approach work and job fulfillment. According to Mills, this is where we can identify the schizophrenic situations that exist within our communities.
One possible solution to this problem is to increase democratic participation at all levels, including in decision-making processes in industry, politics, and the workplace. Mills argued for a radical and comprehensive form of democracy.
Although he became more interested in Marxism as time went on (as reflected in his book “The Marxists”), his vision for a democratic society was heavily influenced by the American traditions of pragmatism and liberalism. While his ideas were certainly radical, they represent a distinctly American approach to politics and social change.
Rebel and utopian
Wright Mills was born in Waco, Texas, on August 28, 1916. He was born into a middle-class Anglo-Irish Catholic family. His father was an insurance salesman, which caused the family to move often. Mills had few friends growing up, and despite his Christian upbringing, he became an atheist.
While in college, he developed an interest in the writings and thoughts of George Herbert Mead, John Dewey, Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and Thorstein Veblen. He attended the University of Texas and developed a fondness for books, music, and theatre.
Mills was known on campus as a flamboyant rebel, and he began making a name for himself in sociology after publishing some clever ideas. After studying philosophy, he focused further on sociology. The role of Hans Gerth, a German political refugee, would become crucial. With Gerth’s help, he mastered the work of Max Weber, another sociological superpower.
In 1942, Mills became a sociology professor at the University of Maryland, where he became politically radicalized. He was against the US’s involvement in World War II and had a problematic relationship with American unions at the time, as he found them too bureaucratic and unwieldy. He reluctantly sought a conceptual framework for a more radical left-wing movement that would empower the ordinary worker.
According to the critical British historian EP Thompson, Mills rebelled against the current view of sociology at the time through his intellectual craftsmanship. He believed it was too easygoing and uninvolved. Mills stood out for his utopian, moral thinking, but he was hard to categorize on the political spectrum.
Like Marx or Weber, he was not a “system thinker” and did not inspire a school of followers. Some saw him as a Marxist, a left-wing pessimist, a Freudian, a Weberian, a Machiavellian, or even a rabid humanist. Mills was many things. Although he had a coherent vision of society, which helped dissect it, no Millsism was created after his death.
C. Wright Mills was a controversial figure among American intellectuals. Some of his critics felt that he was vain and a follower of Marxism that always necessitated the sacrifice of the living. He was often accused of being arrogant and superficial, and they claimed he had no idea what an accurate sociological analysis looked like.
Nevertheless, Mills gained a solid academic reputation through his controversial books like White Collar and The Power Elite. He proved his critics wrong by becoming an intellectual rebel who tackled issues like social inequality, power and control, and the shrinking middle class, all of which remain hot topics today.
Mills led a tumultuous personal life, which included three marriages and three children. He was known to quarrel with his colleagues and other thinkers constantly. He also suffered from severe health problems due to his hard work, bad eating habits, and heavy smoking, all of which took a toll on his body. He pushed himself too hard, and his heart gave up in March 1962 when he was only 45.
Economy, war, and power
There are valuable lessons to be learned from Mills’ ideas, which remain relevant today. He admired Castro’s Cuba and firmly rejected the American economic and political model. This made him a source of inspiration for left-wing intellectuals, especially in Western Europe.
Although he craved public attention during his lifetime, he only achieved a worldwide reputation after his death. In The Power Elite (1956), he systematically and critically analyzes the American ruling class.
Mills believed power could be found in three interconnected domains: politics, economics, and the military. Together, these three domains controlled our daily lives and eroded our democracy. He was particularly concerned about the rise of technological reasoning and increased bureaucratization after World War II.
The intertwining of big business and defense led to horrific wars and deadly military interventions, which he believed did not benefit society. It’s important to remember that Mills wrote these ideas during the Cold War. According to Mills, big business sought to survive through this intertwining, permeating all societal layers, including the church, education, and family life. These entities were viewed as a means to an end.
As a result, in his view, there was no true democracy because everything had to give way to “the economic” or “the military.” These trends remain in major global powers like the US, China, and Russia. Mills’ ideas particularly influenced the New Left movement of the 1960s and 1970s.
The term ‘New Left’ was coined by Mills in his letter to the New Left, which was published in the first year of the New Left Review in 1960. It referred to various individuals, groups, political movements, and parties from Western and Northern Europe advocating socialist, anarchist, and leftist ideas with revolutionary demands since the second half of the 1960s. Mills inspired a generation of left-wing intellectuals who still shape the debate today.
However, Mills was more than just a leftist agitator against power. In his book The Sociological Imagination (1959), he discussed humans' incredible imaginative power. Our imagination lets us sense and summarize the world and empathize with others. Empathy and imagination are critical in creating a sense of solidarity with those unfamiliar or different from us, and they are essential components of our understanding of injustice.
Mills aimed to understand and expose the social structure underlying our society. He believed that human behavior provides a framework through which we can comprehend our society's social, cultural, and institutional aspects. Imagination helps us to see the positive relationship between our experiences and the wider society.
According to Mills, the ability to commute between what makes us human and the broad structure of society is one of the essential components of imagination. Insights from other disciplines can also help us to gain a better understanding of the bigger picture.
The intellectual as a craftsman
According to him, the central task lies in connecting the individual level with the social structure and historical change. Power had to be deconstructed, as he described in The Power Elite. More than other sociologists, he looked at society through the prism of history and current events. For Mills, it was the intellectual’s task to lift this slumber. It was its privilege and moral duty, and they were in a position to preserve and protect our democracy.
In the appendix ‘On Intellectual Craftsmanship’ in his book Sociological Imagination, Mills explained how you could and should use this approach to write about emotional and meaningful things. Always with political and moral autonomy on critical subjects, searching for the truth. This was a sacred attitude to him.
He got rid of the ivory tower mentality of many academic contemporaries. He found them detached from reality and pretentious. I wrote it before: Mills eagerly kicked around to make his point. The intellectual, the writer, and the academic were meant to be a significant voice in the public debate. The masses, he thought, should be correctly informed and emotionally touched and moved.
So, what do you get then? An elite vanguard of thinking and writing fanatics? Is that what Mills had in mind? No. He wrote of a ‘cultural workman’ almost as an intellectual blue-collar worker. The craftsman pursued the profession-as-a-thing as the highest good, not for their own greater glory and ego. It sounds odd in these Twitter-, Retweet- and ego times. Altogether, it is an attitude that helps us halt further digital and social alienation to make our democracy more robust and better protected.
