Agora思想的公共广场

C. 赖特·米尔斯

1916–1962

初步了解有意简化——人物介绍讲得更多

你的私人困扰——失业、婚姻破裂——往往是公共议题，而看到这种联系正是社会学的核心。

定位

社会学与社会理论 · 北美 · 社会与历史, 政治与法

美国社会学的叛逆者：社会学的想象力把个人的困扰与公共的议题联系起来，而一个无须负责的“权力精英”统治着战后的美国。

核心思想

  • 社会学的想象力
  • 个人困扰与公共议题
  • 权力精英
  • 对宏大理论的批判

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影响

受影响于 5

  • 卡尔·马克思

    受其影响

    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)

    依据: AI 草稿

    卡尔·马克思 › 1818–1883

  • 加埃塔诺·莫斯卡

    受其影响

    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)

    依据: AI 草稿

    加埃塔诺·莫斯卡 › 1858–1941

  • 约翰·杜威

    受其影响

    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)

    依据: AI 草稿

    约翰·杜威 › 1859–1952

  • 乔治·赫伯特·米德

    受其影响

    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)

    依据: AI 草稿

    乔治·赫伯特·米德 › 1863–1931

  • 马克斯·韦伯

    受其影响

    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)

    依据: AI 草稿

    马克斯·韦伯 › 1864–1920

影响了 1

  • 阿莉·罗素·霍克希尔德

    影响了 ✓

    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)

    依据: 亦见于 Wikidata · Wikidata

    阿莉·罗素·霍克希尔德 › 1940年生

批评

批评了 1

  • 塔尔科特·帕森斯

    批评了

    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

    依据: AI 草稿

    塔尔科特·帕森斯 › 1902–1979

作品

  • 1959社会学的想象力

    社会学应当把“个人困扰”与“公共议题”联系起来——反对帕森斯抽象的“宏大理论”，也反对没有思想的数据收集。

立场

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.

生平与背景

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.

其他主要作品

  • From Max Weber (ed. with Hans Gerth, 1946)
  • White Collar (1951)
  • The Power Elite (1956)
  • The Sociological Imagination (1959)
  • Listen, Yankee (1960)

来源: Wikipedia · Wikidata

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