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C. Wright Mills

1916–1962

A first way ina deliberate simplification – the portrait says more

Your private problems – losing a job, a failing marriage – are often public issues, and seeing that connection is the heart of sociology.

Placement

Sociology & Social Theory · North America · Society & History, Politics & Law

Rebel of American sociology: the sociological imagination connects personal troubles with public issues, and an unaccountable “power elite” rules post-war America.

Key ideas

  • The sociological imagination
  • Personal troubles vs. public issues
  • The power elite
  • Critique of grand theory

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Influence

Influenced by 5

  • Karl Marx

    influenced by

    Mills used Marx’s class analysis but replaced ‘ruling class’ with ‘power elite’ to stress institutional power (The Power Elite, 1956), and presented Marx critically in The Marxists (1962). C. W. Mills, The Power Elite (1956); The Marxists (1962)

    Evidence: AI draft

    Karl Marx › 1818–1883

  • Gaetano Mosca

    influenced by

    Mills discussed Mosca’s organised ruling minority in The Power Elite (1956) but derived the elite from command posts in corporations, the military and the state. C. W. Mills, The Power Elite (1956); G. Mosca, Elementi di scienza politica (1896); G. Parry, Political Elites (1969)

    Evidence: AI draft

    Gaetano Mosca › 1858–1941

  • John Dewey

    influenced by

    Mills wrote his dissertation on pragmatism (1942, printed 1964 as Sociology and Pragmatism), reading Dewey’s theory of inquiry sociologically as tied to the institutions of American higher learning. C. W. Mills, A Sociological Account of Pragmatism (diss., Wisconsin, 1942), printed as Sociology and Pragmatism: The Higher Learning in America (1964)

    Evidence: AI draft

    John Dewey › 1859–1952

  • George Herbert Mead

    influenced by

    Mills drew on Mead’s social behaviourism to treat motives as socially learned vocabularies that actors use in situations (‘Situated Actions and Vocabularies of Motive’, 1940). C. W. Mills, “Situated Actions and Vocabularies of Motive”, American Sociological Review 5 (1940); H. Gerth and C. W. Mills, Character and Social Structure (1953)

    Evidence: AI draft

    George Herbert Mead › 1863–1931

  • Max Weber

    influenced by

    With Hans Gerth, Mills edited and translated From Max Weber (1946) and took up Weber’s analysis of bureaucracy and status in White Collar (1951). H. H. Gerth and C. W. Mills (eds. and trans.), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (1946); C. W. Mills, White Collar (1951)

    Evidence: AI draft

    Max Weber › 1864–1920

Influenced 1

  • Arlie Russell Hochschild

    influenced ✓

    Hochschild started from Mills’s ‘personality market’ in White Collar (1951), where salespeople sell their personality, and studied how such emotional labour is managed (The Managed Heart, 1983). A. R. Hochschild, The Managed Heart (1983); C. W. Mills, White Collar: The American Middle Classes (1951)

    Evidence: also in Wikidata · Wikidata

    Arlie Russell Hochschild › b. 1940

Criticism

Criticizes 1

  • Talcott Parsons

    criticised

    In The Sociological Imagination (1959) Mills attacked Parsons’s ‘grand theory’, translating passages of The Social System into a few plain sentences and faulting its neglect of power. C. W. Mills, The Sociological Imagination (1959), ch. 2

    Evidence: AI draft

    Talcott Parsons › 1902–1979

Works

  • 1959The Sociological Imagination

    Sociology should connect “personal troubles” with “public issues” – against Parsons’ abstract “grand theory” and against data-gathering without ideas.

Position

Mills wanted sociology to serve democratic self-understanding. In The Sociological Imagination (1959) he defined its promise as the ability to connect “the personal troubles of milieu” with “the public issues of social structure”: one person’s unemployment is a personal trouble, but when millions are out of work, the cause lies in the economy, not in individual character. The same book attacked two dominant styles of American sociology – the “grand theory” of Talcott Parsons, several pages of which Mills translated into a few plain sentences, and the “abstracted empiricism” of survey research, which piled up data without asking important questions. His earlier studies sketched the new social structure of the United States. White Collar (1951) portrayed the salaried middle class of offices and sales floors, who must sell their personalities along with their labour. The Power Elite (1956) argued that the interlocking leaders of big business, the military and the federal executive made the decisions that shaped the nation, largely beyond democratic control. Drawing on Weber, Marx and the pragmatists, Mills became a model for critical, public sociology and an inspiration for the New Left.

Life & context

Charles Wright Mills was born in 1916 in Waco, Texas, into a Catholic middle-class family. He studied at Texas A&M and the University of Texas and took his doctorate at the University of Wisconsin in 1942 with a dissertation on the sociology of pragmatism. With his teacher Hans Gerth he edited the influential collection From Max Weber (1946). From 1946 he taught at Columbia University in New York. A motorcycle-riding outsider, he attacked both the academic establishment and the complacency of Cold War America, and travelled to Cuba to write Listen, Yankee (1960) in defence of the revolution. His “Letter to the New Left” (1960) helped popularise the movement’s name. He died of a heart attack in 1962, aged 45.

Further main works

  • From Max Weber (ed. with Hans Gerth, 1946)
  • White Collar (1951)
  • The Power Elite (1956)
  • Listen, Yankee (1960)

Sources: Wikipedia · Wikidata

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