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COPYRIGHT 2001 Texas Monthly, Inc.
A collection of the letters of influential sociologist C. Wright Mills shows that his radical ideas were grounded in his Texas upbringing.
TOO MANY SOCIAL SCIENTISTS write incomprehensible articles on inconsequential topics for journals that no one reads except their own colleagues. (The lead article in the March 2000 issue of the American Journal of Sociology is titled "The Instability of Androgynous Names: The Symbolic Maintenance of Gender Boundaries.") But there have been notable exceptions--from Thorstein Veblen and John Dewey to John Kenneth Galbraith--who have sought a wider audience and embraced a broader purpose in their work. C. Wright Mills was one of these. Born in Waco in 1916, educated at Dallas' Technical High School and at Texas A&M and the University of Texas, he taught sociology in the fifties at Columbia University. Perhaps no sociologist in the past half century has had so much influence over how Americans think--or aroused as much ire from his colleagues.
Mills wrote in a time of popular apathy but great intellectual ferment. Along with David Riesman, Dwight Macdonald, and William F. Buckley, Jr., Mills understood that America had turned a corner in its history. It had inherited global responsibility and had become a country of big government and big business, many of whose citizens no longer worked on their own farms or for small businesses, but in large glass office buildings. While Mills's academic colleagues often dwelt on the effects or symptoms of change, Mills, whose motto was to "take it big," wanted to know what it all meant. Half a century later, his answers continue to resonate.
As Mills's motto suggests, his intellectual approach clearly bore the traces of his Texas upbringing, but because he was often characterized as a provincial by his critics, he was loath to discuss his Texas roots publicly during his lifetime. But now, with the publication of C. Wright Mills: Letters and Autobiographical Writings, edited by his daughters Kathryn and Pamela Mills, we can learn in Mills's own words how profoundly his up-bringing in Texas contributed to his life and work.
Mills, who died of a heart attack in 1962 at age 45, wrote two books that are still widely read: White Collar and the American Middle Class, which came out in 1951, and, better known, The Power Elite, which was published in 1956. A third, The Sociological Imagination, is treasured by academics who, like Mills, don't fit their profession's stifling mold. He also wrote two books on foreign policy, The Causes of World War Three and Listen, Yankee, that, to the benefit of Mills's reputation, are no longer available in bookstores, except perhaps in Havana.
The Power Elite turned the high-school-civics-class view of American political power on its head. Mills argued that American politics was ruled not by citizens controlling their government by the power of the vote but by an "intricate set of overlapping cliques" that occupied the "command posts" of the country's great economic, military, and political institutions. He called them the "power elite." "In so far as national events are decided, the power elite are those who decide them," Mills wrote. His theory...
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