1916-1962
Chapter 1 The Sociology of C.
Wright Mills in
Macrosociology: Four Modern Theorists,
Essays:
Short
Answers:
On Oligarchy (Power Elite)
Links:
In His Own Words:
On the importance of theory
"To come to an orderly understanding of men and societies requires a set of viewpoints that are simple enough to make understanding possible, yet comprehensive enough to permit us to include in our views the range and depth of the human variety. The struggle for such viewpoints if the first and continuing struggle of social science" (1959, p. 133).
On "human nature"
"It is true, as psychoanalysts continually point out, that people do often have 'the increasing sense of being moved by obscure forces within themselves which they are unable to define.' But it is not true, as Ernest Jones asserted, that 'man's chief enemy and danger is his own unruly nature and the dark forces pent up within himself.' On the contrary: 'Man's chief danger' today lies in the unruly forces of contemporary society itself, with its alienating methods of production, its enveloping techniques of political domination, its international anarchy--in a word, its pervasive transformations of the very 'nature' of man and the conditions and aims of his life" (1959, p. 13).
"Historical transformations carry meanings not only for individual ways of life, but for the very character--the limits and possibilities of the human being. As the history-making unit, the dynamic nation-state is also the unit within which the variety of men and women are selected and formed, liberated and repressed--it is the man-making unit. That is one reason why struggles between nations and between blocs of nations are also struggles over the types of human beings that will eventually prevail in the Middle East, in India, in China, in the United State; that is why culture and politics are now so intimately related; and that is why there is such need and such demand for the sociological imagination" (1959, p. 158).
"For we cannot adequately understand 'man' as an isolated biological creature, as a bundle of reflexes or a set of instincts, as an 'intelligible field' or a system in and of itself. Whatever else he may be, man is a social and an historical actor who must be understood, if at all, in close and intricate interplay with social and historical structures" (1959, p. 158).
"Within the broad limits of the physiology of the sense organs, our very perception of the physical world, the colors we discriminate, the smells we become aware of, the noises we hear, are socially patterned and socially circumscribed. The motivations of men, and even the varying extents to which various types of men are typically aware of them, are to be understood in terms of the vocabularies of motive that prevail in a society and of social changes and confusions among such vocabularies" (1959, p. 162).
On social life
"Nowadays men often feel that their private lives are a series of traps. They sense that within their everyday worlds, they cannot overcome their troubles, and in this feeling, they are often quite correct: What ordinary men are directly aware of and what they try to do are bounded by the private orbits in which they live; their visions and their powers are limited to the close-up scenes of job, family, neighborhood; in other milieux, they move vicariously and remain spectators. And the more aware they become, however vaguely, of ambitions and of threats which transcend their immediate locales, the more trapped they seem to feel" (1959, p. 3).
"What they need, and what they feel they need, is a quality of mind that will help them to use information and to develop reason in order to achieve lucid summations of what is going on in the world and of what may be happening within themselves. It is this quality, I am going to contend, that journalists and scholars, artists and publics, scientists and editors are coming to expect of what may be called the sociological imagination" (1959, p.3).
On the social sciences
"As each social science advances, its interaction with the others has been intensified. . .They may of course specialize in one institutional order, but in so far as they grasp what is essential to it, they will also come to understand its place within the total social structure, and hence its relations with other institutional domains. For in considerable part, it is becoming clear, its every reality consists of these relations" (1959, p. 139).
"To state and to solve any one of the significant problems of our period requires a selection of materials, conceptions, and methods from more than any one of these several disciplines. A social scientist need not 'master the field' in order to be familiar enough with its materials and perspectives to use them in clarifying the problems that concern him. It is in terms of such topical 'problems,' rather than in accordance with academic boundaries, that specialization ought to occur" (1959, p. 142).
"Every social science--or better, every well-considered social study--requires an historical scope of conception and a full use of historical materials" (1959, p. 145).
"All sociology worthy of the name is 'historical sociology.' It is, in Paul Sweezy's excellent phrase, an attempt to write 'the present as history.'" (1959, p. 146).
On the Sociological Imagination
"The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society. That is its task and its promise. To recognize this task and this promise is the mark of the classic social analyst. It is characteristic of Herbert Spencer--turgid, polysyllabic, comprehensive; of E. A. Ross--graceful, muckraking, upright; of Auguste Comte and Emile Durkheim; of the intricate and subtle Karl Mannheim. It is the quality of all the is intellectually excellent in Karl Marx; it is the clue to Thorstein Veblen's brilliant and ironic insight . . . no less than of the profundity and clarity of Max Weber" (1959, p. 6).
"Whatever the specific problems of the
classic social analysts, however limited or however broad the features
of social reality they have examined, those who have been imaginatively
aware of the promise of their work have consistently asked three sorts
of questions:
(1) What is the structure of this particular
society as a whole? What are its essential components, and how are
they related to one another? How does it differ from other varieties
of social order? Within it, what is the meaning of any particular
feature for its continuance and for its change?
(2) Where does this society stand
in human history? What are the mechanics by which it is changing?
What is its place within and its meaning for the development of humanity
as a whole? How does any particular feature we are examining affect,
and how is it affected by, the historical period in which it moves?
And this period--what are its essential features? How does it differ
from other periods? What are its characteristic ways of history making?
(3) What varieties of men and women
now prevail in this society and in this period? And what varieties
are coming to prevail? In what ways are they selected and formed,
liberated and repressed, made sensitive and blunted? What kinds of
'human nature' are revealed in the conduct and character we observe in
this society in this period? And what is the meaning for 'human nature'
of each and every feature of the society we are examining" (1959,
pp. 6-7).
"To study these problems, to realize the human variety, requires that our work be continuously and closely related to the level of historical reality--and to the meanings of this reality for individual men and women. Our aim is to define this reality and to discern these meanings . . . It requires that we seek a fully comparative understanding of the social structures that have appeared and do now exist in world history. It requires that smaller-scale milieux be selected and studied in terms of larger-scale historical structures. It requires that we avoid the arbitrary specialization of academic departments, that we specialize our work variously according to topic, and above all according to problem, and that in doing so we draw upon the perspectives and ideas, the materials and the methods of any and all suitable studies of man as an historical actor" (1959, p. 134).
On personal troubles and public issues
"Consider marriage. Inside a marriage a man and a woman may experience personal troubles, but when the divorce rate during the first four years of marriage is 250 out of every 1,000 attempts, this is an indication of a structural issue having to do with the institutions of marriage and the family and other institutions that bear upon them" (1959, p. 9).
"In so far as an economy is so arranged that slumps occur, the problem of unemployment becomes incapable of personal solution. In so far as war is inherent in the nation-state system and in the uneven industrialization of the world, the ordinary individual in his restricted milieu will be powerless--with or without psychiatric aid--to solve the troubles this system or lack of system imposes upon him. In so far as the family as an institution turns women into darling little slaves and men into their chief providers and unweaned dependents, the problem of a satisfactory marriage remains incapable of purely private solution. In so far as the overdeveloped megalopolis and the overdeveloped automobile are built-in features of the overdeveloped society, the issues of urban living will not be solved by personal ingenuity and private wealth" (1959, p. 10).
On social change
"What we experience in various and specific milieux, I have noted, is often caused by structural changes. Accordingly, to understand the changes of many personal milieux we are required to look beyond them. and the number and variety of such structural changes increase as the institutions within which we live become more embracing and more intricately connected with one another. To be aware of the idea of social structure and to use it with sensibility is to be capable of tracing such linkages among a great variety of milieux. To be able to do that is to possess the sociological imagination" (1959, pp.10-11).
"We can examine trends in an effort to answer the question 'where are we going?'--and that is what social scientists are often trying to do. In doing so, we are trying to study history rather than to retreat into it, to pay attention to contemporary trends without being 'merely journalistic,' to gauge the future of these trends without being merely prophetic. All this is hard to do. We must remember that we are dealing with historical materials; that they do change very rapidly; that there are countertrends. And that we have always to balance the immediacy of the knife-edge present with the generality needed to bring out the meaning of specific trends for the period as a whole. But above all, the social scientist is trying to see the several major trends together--structurally, rather than as happening in a scatter of milieux, adding up to nothing new, in fact not adding up at all. This is the aim that lends to the study of trends its relevance to the understanding of a period, and which demands full and adroit use of the materials of history" (1959, pp. 153-154).
On classic social theory
"I believe that what may be called classic social analysis is a definable and usable set of traditions; that its essential feature is the concern with historical social structures; and that its problems are of direct relevance to urgent public issues and insistent human troubles. I also believe that there are now great obstacles in the way of this tradition's continuing--both within the social sciences and in their academic and political settings--but that nevertheless the qualities of mind that constitute it are becoming a common denominator of our general cultural life and that, however vaguely and in however a confusing variety of disguises, they are coming to be felt as a need" (1959, p. 21).
"It is out of the classic work, moreover,
that most of the ideas being used on the sub-historical and on the trans-historical
levels of work have in fact arisen. What really fruitful idea, what
conception of man and society and of their relations, has resulted from
abstracted empiricism or grand theory? So far as ideas are concerned,
both of these schools are parasites living off the classic social science
tradition" (1959, p. 125).
"Classic social science, in brief, neither
'builds up' from microscopic study nor 'deduces down' from conceptual elaboration.
Its practitioners try to build and to deduce at the same time, in the same
process of study, and to do so by means of adequate formulation and re-formulation
of problems and their adequate solutions" (1959, p. 128).
"The classic focus, in short, is on substantive problems. The character of these problems limits and suggests the methods and the conceptions that are used and how they are used. Controversy over different views of 'methodology' and 'theory' is properly carried on in close and continuous relation with substantive problems" (1959, p. 128).
"No problem can be adequately formulated unless the values involved and the apparent threat to them are stated. These values and their imperilment constitute the terms of the problem itself. The values that have been the thread of classic social analysis, I believe, are freedom and reason; the forces that imperil them today seem at times to be co-extensive with the major trends of contemporary society, if not to constitute the characterizing features of the contemporary period. The leading problems of the social studies today have this in common: They concern conditions and tendencies that seem to imperil these two values and the consequences of that imperilment for the nature of man and the making of history" (1959, pp. 129-130).
On legitimation
"Now, what Parsons and other grand theorists call 'value-orientations' and 'normative structure' has mainly to do with master symbols of legitimation. This is, indeed, a useful and important subject. The relations of such symbols to the structure of institutions are among the most important problems of social science. Such symbols, however, do not form some autonomous realm within a society; their social relevance lies in their use to justify or to oppose the arrangement of power and the positions within this arrangement of the powerful. Their psychological relevance lies in the fact that they become the basis for adherence to the structure of power or for opposing it" (1959, p. 37).
"'Governments' do not necessarily, as Emerson would have it, 'have their origin in the moral identity of men.' To believe that government does is to confuse its legitimations with its causes. Just as often, or even more often, such moral identities as men of some society may have rest on the fact that institutional rulers successfully monopolize, and even impose, their master symbols" (1959, p. 37).
"We cannot assume today that men must in the last resort be governed by their own consent. Among the means of power that now prevail is the power to manage and to manipulate the consent of men. That we do not know the limits of such power--and that we hope it does have limits--does not remove the fact that such power today is successfully employed without the sanction of the reason or the conscience of the obedient" (1959, pp.40-41).
"Intellectual 'conviction' and moral 'belief' are not necessary, in either the rulers or the ruled, for a structure of power to persist and even flourish. So far as the role of ideologies is concerned, the frequent absence of engaging legitimation and the prevalence of mass apathy are surely two of the central facts about the Western societies today" (1959, p. 41).
On the role of social science
"Social research is advanced by ideas; it is only disciplined by fact" (1959, p. 71).
"Studies are also used--by social scientists
and by other people--in ideological ways. In fact the ideological
relevance of social science is inherent in its very existence as social
fact. Every society holds images of its own nature--in particular,
images and slogans that justify its system of power and the ways of the
powerful. The images and ideas produced by social scientists may
or may not be consistent with these prevailing images, but they always
carry implications for them. In so far as these implications become
known, they usually come to be argued over--and used:
By justifying
the arrangement of power and the ascendancy of the powerful, images and
ideas transform power into authority.
By criticizing
or debunking prevailing arrangements and rulers, they strip them of authority.
By distracting
attention from issues of power and authority they distract attention from
the structural realities of the society itself" (1959, p. 80).
"Values are involved in the selection of the problems we study; values are also involved in certain of the key conceptions we use in our formulation of these problems, and values affect the course of their solution. So far as conceptions are concerned, the aim ought to be to use as many 'value-neutral' terms as possible and to become aware of and to make explicit the value implications that remain. So far as problems are concerned, the aim ought to be, again, to be clear about the values in terms of which they are selected, and then to avoid as best one can evaluative bias in their solution, no matter where that solution takes one and no matter what its moral or political implications may be" (1959, p. 78).
"In a book the writer is often trying to
persuade others of the result of his thinking; in a classroom the teacher
ought to be trying to show others how one man thinks--and at the same time
reveal what a fine feeling he gets when he does it well. The teacher
ought then, it seems to me, to make very explicit the assumptions, the
facts, the methods, the judgments. He ought not to hold back anything,
but ought to take it very slowly and at all times repeatedly make clear
the full range of moral alternatives before he gives his own choice"
(1959, p. 79).
"That democracy in the United States is
so largely formal does not mean that we can dodge the conclusion that if
reason is to play any free part in a democratic making of history, one
of its chief carriers must surely be the social sciences" (1959,
p. 191).
"The educational and political role of social science in a democracy is to help cultivate and sustain publics and individuals that are able to develop, to live with, and to act upon adequate definitions of personal and social realities" (1959, p. 192).
On the power elite
"Whatever else it is [the United States], surely this is evident: it is a society in which functionally rational bureaucracies are increasingly used in human affairs and in history-making decisions. Not all periods are alike in the degree to which historical changes within them are independent of the willful control, go on behind all men's backs. Ours seems to be a period in which key decisions or their lack by bureaucratically instituted elites are increasingly sources of historical change. Moreover, it is a period and a society in which the enlargement and the centralization of the means of control, of power, now include quite widely the use of social science for whatever ends those in control of these means may assign to it" (1959, pp. 115-116).
"From the individual's standpoint, much that happens seems the result of manipulation, of management, of blind drift; authority is often not explicit; those with power often feel no need to make it explicit and justify it. That is one reason why ordinary men, when they are in trouble or when they sense that they are up against issues, cannot get clear targets for thought and action; they cannot determine what it is that imperils the values they vaguely discern as theirs" (1959, pp. 169-170).
"Men are free to make history, but some men are much freer than others. Such freedom requires access to the means of decisions and of power by which history may now be made. It is not always so made; in the following, I am speaking only of the contemporary period in which the means of history-making power have become so enlarged and so centralized. It is with reference to this period that I am contending that if men do not make history, they tend increasingly to become the utensils of history-makers and also the mere objects of history-making" (1959, p. 181).
"But consider now, the major clue to our condition: Is it not, in a word, the enormous enlargement and the decisive centralization of all the means of power and decision, which is to say--all the means of history-making? In modern industrial society, the facilities of economic production are developed and centralized--as peasants and artisans are replaced by private corporations and government industries. In the modern nation-state, the means of violence and of political administration undergo similar development--as kings control nobles, and self-equipped knights are replaced by standing armies and now by fearful military machines" (1959, pp. 182-183).
On rationalization of the social sciences
"Nowadays social research is often of direct service to army generals and social workers, corporation managers and prison wardens. Such bureaucratic use has been increasing; no doubt it will continue to increase" (1959, p. 80).
"The morale projected by the 'human relations' experts is the morale of men who are alienated but who have conformed to managed or conventional expectations of 'morale.' Assuming that the existing framework of industry is unalterable and that the aims of the managers are the aims of everyone, the experts of 'human relations' do not examine the authoritarian structure of modern industry and the role of the worker in it. They define the problem of morale in very limited terms, and by their techniques seek to reveal to their managerial clients how they can improve employee morale within the existing framework of power. Their endeavor is manipulation. They would allow the employee to 'blow off steam' without changing the structure within which he is to live out his working life. . . .In a word, the human relations experts have extended the general tendency for modern society to be rationalized in an intelligent way and in the service of a managerial elite" (1959, pp. 94-95).
"Their [social scientists] positions change--from the academic to the bureaucratic; their publics change--from movements of reformers to circles of decision-makers; and their problems change--from those of their own choice to those of their new clients. The scholars themselves tend to become less intellectually insurgent and more administratively practical. Generally accepting the status quo, they tend to formulate problems out of the troubles and issues that administrators believe they face. They study, as we have seen, workers who are restless and without morale, and managers who 'do not understand' the art of managing human relations. They also diligently serve the commercial and corporate ends of the communications and advertising industries" (1959, p. 96).
"I want to make it clear in order to reveal
the meaning of the bureaucratic ethos. Its use has mainly been in
and for nondemocratic areas of society--a military establishment, a corporation,
an advertising agency, an administrative division of government.
It is in and for such bureaucratic organizations that many social scientists
have been invited to work, and the problems with which they there concern
themselves are the kinds of problems that concern the more efficient members
of such administrative machines" (1959, pp. 114-115).
"Theory serves, in a variety of ways,
as ideological justification of authority. Research for bureaucratic
ends serves to make authority more effective and more efficient by providing
information of use to authoritative planners" (1959, p. 117).
On rationalization
"The forces that shape these milieux do not originate within them, nor are they controllable by those sunk in them. Moreover, these milieux are themselves increasingly rationalized. Families as well as factories, leisure as well as work, neighborhoods as well as states--they to become parts of a functionally rational totality--or they are subject to uncontrolled and irrational forces" (1959, p. 169).
"Given these effects of the ascendant trend of rationalization, the individual 'does the best he can.' He gears his aspirations and his work to the situation he is in, and from which he can find no way out. In due course, he does not seek a way out: he adapts. That part of his life which is left over from work, he uses to play, to consume, 'to have fun.' Yet this sphere of consumption is also being rationalized. Alienated from production, from work, he is also alienated from consumption, from genuine leisure. This adaptation of the individual and its effects upon his milieux and self results not only in the loss of his chance, and in due course, of his capacity and will to reason; it also affects his chances and his capacity to act as a free man. Indeed, neither the value of freedom nor of reason, it would seem, are known to him" (1959, p. 170).
"The rational organization is thus an alienating organization: the guiding principles of conduct and reflection, and in due course of emotion as well, are not seated in the individual conscience of the Reformation man, or in the independent reason of the Cartesian man. the guiding principles, in fact, are alien to and in contradiction with all that has been historically understood as individuality. It is not too much to say that in the extreme development the chance to reason of most men is destroyed, as rationality increases and its locus, its control, is moved from the individual to the big-scale organization. There is then rationality without reason. Such rationality is not commensurate with freedom but the destroyer of it" (1959, p. 170).
"It will no longer do merely to assume, as a metaphysic of human nature, that down deep in man-as-man there is an urge for freedom and a will to reason. Now we must ask: What in man's nature, what in the human condition today, what in each of the varieties of social structure makes for the ascendancy of the cheerful robot? And what stands against it?" (1959, p. 171).
On the "irrationality factor"
"Science, it turns out, is not a technological Second Coming. That its techniques and its rationality are given a central place in a society does not mean that men live reasonably and without myth, fraud, and superstition. Universal education may lead to technological idiocy and nationalist provinciality--rather than to the informed and independent intelligence. The mass distribution of historic culture may not lift the level of cultural sensibility, but rather, merely banalize it--and compete mightily with the chance for creative innovation. A high level of bureaucratic rationality and of technology does not mean a high level of either individual or social intelligence. From the first you cannot infer the second" (1959, 168).
For social, technological, or bureaucratic rationality is not merely a grand summation of the individual will and capacity to reason. The very chance to acquire that will and that capacity seems in fact often to be decreased by it" (1959, pp. 168-169).
"Rationally organized social arrangements are not necessarily a means of increased freedom--for the individual or for the society. In fact, often they are a means of tyranny and manipulation, a means of expropriating the very chance to reason, the very capacity to act as a free man" (1959, p. 169).
"The increasing rationalization of society,
the contradiction between such rationality and reason, the collapse of
the assumed coincidence of reason and freedom--these developments lie back
of the rise into view of the man who is 'with' rationality but without
reason, who is increasingly self-rationalized and also increasingly uneasy.
It is in terms of this type of man that the contemporary problem of freedom
is best stated" (1959, p. 169).
"In our time, must we not face the possibility
that the human mind as a social fact might be deteriorating in quality
and cultural level, and yet not many would notice it because of the overwhelming
accumulation of technological gadgets? Is not that one meaning of
rationality without reason? Of human alienation? Of the absence
of any free role for reason in human affairs? The accumulation of
gadgets hides these meanings: Those who use these devices do not
understand them; those who invent them do not understand much else.
That is why we may not, without great ambiguity, use technological abundance
as the index of human quality and cultural progress" (1959, p. 175).
Bibliorgraphy:
Mills, C. W. (2000). C.
Wright Mills: Letters and Autobiographical Writings. (K. Mills, & P. Mills,
Eds.) Berkeley: University of California Press.
Mills, C. W. (1960). Listen
Yankee: The Revolution in Cuba. New York: Ballantine Books.
Mills, C. W. (1958). The
Causes of World War Three. London: Secker & Warburg.
Mills, C. W. (1956/1970).
The Power Elite. New York: Oxford University Press.
Mills, C. W. (1959/1976).
The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press.
©Frank
Elwell
Send comments to felwell at
rsu.edu