New Political Science,
Volume 30, Number 3, September 2008
COMMENTARY
C. Wright Mills and American Democracy
Joseph G. Peschek
Hamline University
Do the writings of C. Wright Mills, largely published in the 1950s, have anything to
offer to the discussion about the condition and possibilities of egalitarian
democratic politics during a period of conservative and corporate domination in
the United States? In the last decade interest in the work of Mills, who died in 1962
at age 45, has revived. In 2000 a collection of his letters and unpublished writings
was published in a volume edited by his daughters Kathryn Mills and Pamela
Mills, offering a fresh and vivid portrait of Mills’s character, politics, and
intellectual development.1 The New Men of Power (1948), White Collar (1951),
The Power Elite (1956) and The Sociological Imagination (1959) were republished in
new editions with essays by prominent scholars Nelson Lichtenstein, Russell
Jacoby, Alan Wolfe, and Todd Gitlin, respectively. New Left activist Tom Hayden’s
MA thesis on Mills has been published in book form, with contemporary reflections
by sociologists and activists Dick Flacks, Stanley Aronowitz, and Charles Lemert, as
well as by Hayden himself.2 Even the New York Times Book Review published a
respectful article on the importance and relevance of The Power Elite.3
Mills was best known for his studies of the American power elite and the new
middle classes, and as a champion of a “sociological imagination” that linked
individual experience to historical process. But underlying all of Mills’s work, in my
view, is a normative vision of radical, egalitarian democracy. As his friend Ralph
Miliband put it, Mills’s “political point of reference . . . was the need for democratic
participation at all levels and at all points of decision making, industrial as well as
political, on the job as well as in the polling-booth.”4 While Mills was increasingly
interested in Marxism, and his last book was about The Marxists,5 his democratic
views were rooted in an American radical tradition and influenced by figures such as
Thorstein Veblen, John Dewey, and George Herbert Mead.6 As political theorist
1
Kathryn Mills with Pamela Mills (eds.), C. Wright Mills: Letters and Autobiographical
Writings (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
2
Tom Hayden, Radical Nomad: C. Wright Mills and His Times (Boulder, CO: Paradigm
Publishers, 2006).
3
John H. Summers, “The Deciders,” New York Times Book Review, May 14, 2006.
Summers notes that in 1968, six years after his death, Mills was identified by the CIA as one
of the most influential New Left intellectuals in the world.
4
Ralph Miliband, “Mills and Politics,” in Irving Louis Horowitz (ed.), The New
Sociology (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1964), p. 82.
5
C. Wright Mills, The Marxists (New York: Dell Publishing, 1962).
6
Rick Tilman, C. Wright Mills: A Native Radical and His American Intellectual Roots
(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1984).
ISSN 0739-3148 print/ISSN 1469-9931 on-line/08/030393-11 q 2008 Caucus for a New Political Science
DOI: 10.1080/07393140802305700
394 Joseph G. Peschek
James Miller wrote, “Rereading him, it is striking how consistently he hammers away
at a handful of motifs and themes, almost all of them linked to a sense of America’s
lost democratic promise. This political vision is absolutely central for any
appreciation of Mills’s real importance.”7
C. Wright Mills was a controversial figure among American intellectuals when
he died in 1962. Intense personal feelings about Mills affected evaluations of his
work. Mainstream sociologists were capable of snide innuendo and disparagement, as illustrated in a review of The Sociological Imagination published in
Encounter by the Chicago sociologist Edward Shils:
Imagine a burly cowpuncher in the long, slow ride from the Panhandle of Texas
to Columbia University, carrying in his saddle-bag some books which he reads
with absorption while his horse trots. Imagine that among the books are some
novels of Kafka, Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution, and the essays of Max
Weber. Imagine the style and imagery of the cowboy student and his studies.
Imagine also that en route he passes through Madison, Wisconsin, that seat of a
decaying populism, and that on arriving at his destination in New York, he
encounters Madison Avenue, that street full of reeking phantasies of the
manipulation of the human will and of what is painful to America’s well-wishers
and enjoyable to its detractors. Imagine the first Madison disclosing to the learned
cowpuncher his subsequent political mode, the second an object of his hatred.
The end result of such an imaginary grand tour would be a work like
The Sociological Imagination.8
In a 1961 survey of American sociology Seymour Martin Lipset and Neil Smelser
wrote of Mills in a similar vein:
In any article discussing major trends in American sociology designed for
publication in England it is clearly necessary to discuss C. Wright Mills for he seems
to have become an intellectual hero to a youthful section of the British political
community. It must be reported, however, that he has little importance for
contemporary American sociology, although his books are bestsellers outside the
field and are widely hailed in certain political circles . . . . But if Mr. Mills cuts himself
off from the sociological fraternity he retains important outlets of expression from a
more popular and commercial media and thus manages to influence the outside
world’s image of sociology.9
Edward Shils returned to the attack in 1963, a year after Mills’s death, maintaining
that Mills had become
a demagogic simplifier . . . he had a singularly incurious mind . . . [he wrote]
vigorous and cloudy rhetoric. Now he is dead and his rhetoric is a field of broken
7
James Miller, “Democracy and the Intellectual: C. Wright Mills Reconsidered,”
Salmagundi nos. 70 – 71 (Spring – Summer 1986), p. 89.
8
Edward A. Shils, “Imaginary Sociology,” Encounter (June 1960), pp. 77– 80. For Mills’s
reaction to Shils’s review, see Irving Louis Horowitz, C. Wright Mills: An American Utopian
(New York: The Free Press, 1983), pp. 101– 103. On Mills’s relationship with other
academics, see Dennis Wrong, “C. Wright Mills Recalled,” Society 38:6 (2001), pp. 61 – 64.
9
Seymour Martin Lipset and Neil Smelser, “Change and Controversy in Recent
American Sociology,” The British Journal of Sociology 12:1 (1961), pp. 50 – 51. Quoted in John
Eldridge, C. Wright Mills (London: Ellis Horwood Limited and Tavistock Publications
Limited, 1983), p. 110.
C. Wright Mills and American Democracy 395
stones, his analysis empty, his strenuous pathos limp. He was a victim of his own
vanity and of a shrivelled Marxism which will not die and which goes on requiring
the sacrifice of the living.10
In 1964 Newsweek carried an article on this “Legend of the Left,” and found Mills’s
“attitude toward the democratic process ambivalent” and his portrait of American
society
grossly distorted, lacking in proof . . . . In his adulation of Castro’s Cuba, Mills proved
embarrassingly naive, and in his rejection of America, unnecessarily harsh. Yet he
wrote what many left-wing intellectuals, particularly in Western Europe, wanted to
believe. As a result, Mills, who craved public attention, won a worldwide reputation.11
Others found merit in the Mills legacy. The 1962 Port Huron statement of
Students for a Democratic Society, which urged the creation of “participatory
democracy,” was profoundly shaped by the ideas of C. Wright Mills.12 In the 1980s
Mills was appraised in terms of radical democratic theory by James Miller, for
whom Mills was “perhaps the most influential American left-wing intellectual of
this century”13 and by Cornel West, who has assessed Mills’s “attempt to keep
alive the Deweyan project of an Emersonian culture of radical democracy . . . ”14
Mills was identified as a prominent representative of the vanishing breed of
“public intellectuals” in Russell Jacoby’s The Last Intellectuals. Discussing Mills
and his Columbia University colleagues Richard Hofstadter and Lionel Trilling,
Jacoby states, “Their differences, however, should not obscure what they shared:
they saw themselves not so much as professors but as intellectuals addressing a
public on public issues; and they all sought and found a larger audience.”15
Mills influence extended outside the United States. In his first major book,
The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962), the German philosopher
and social theorist Jürgen Habermas commented very favorably on Mills’s key
distinction between “publics” and “masses” and stated that it supported his
analysis of the deterioration of the public sphere in contemporary societies.16
10
Quoted in Tilman, C. Wright Mills, op. cit., p. 11.
“Legend of the Left,” Newsweek, May 11, 1964, pp. 91 –92.
12
James Miller, “Democracy is In the Streets”: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), pp. 79 – 91; Howard Brick, Transcending Capitalism: Visions
of a New Society in Modern American Thought (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007),
pp. 202, 204– 205, 207.
13
Miller, “Democracy and the Intellectual,” op. cit., p. 83.
14
Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), p. 128.
15
Russell Jacoby, The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe (New York:
Basic Books, 1987), p. 78. On Mills and Hofstadter, see Richard Gillam, “Richard Hofstadter,
C. Wright Mills, and ‘the Critical Ideal,’” American Scholar 47:1 (1977– 1978), pp. 69 – 85. For
more recent assessments of Mills, see John B. Judis, “Grist for Mills,” Texas Monthly 29:3
(2001), pp. 80 – 90; Stanley Aronowitz, “A Mills Revival?” Logos: A Journal of Modern Society
and Culture 2:3 (2003), available online at , http://www.logosjournal.com/issue2.3.pdf .;
Michael Burawoy, “Open Letter to C. Wright Mills,” Antipode 40:3 (2008), pp. 365– 375.
16
Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, translated Thomas
Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), p. 249. In his “Introduction” to One-Dimensional
Man, Marcuse wrote, “I should like to emphasize the vital importance of the work of
C. Wright Mills.” Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964),
p. xvii.
11
396 Joseph G. Peschek
In Britain Mills formed personal ties with a number of leaders of the emerging
post-1956 New Left, especially Ralph Miliband, and contributed a muchdiscussed “Letter to the New Left” to New Left Review in its first year of publication
in 1960.17
Contemporary academic political theory has appropriated the work of thinkers
like John Dewey, Hannah Arendt, and Reinhold Niebuhr. In my view C. Wright
Mills is an equally admirable spur to reflection on US democracy. In this essay I will
describe the normative foundations of Mills’s democratic ideals, link Mills’s
analysis of the American power structure to his perception of the diminishment of
democratic politics in the postwar period, discuss his critique of US militarism and
Cold War policies, and assess Mills’s views on how participatory democracy in
America might be revived.
Democratic Values
Mills held a classical view of public activity as essential to human wellbeing.
He maintained that democracy, free of domination and manipulation, was
necessary for the realization of human freedom. As Miliband recalled, “For Mills,
the point of reference was the vision of a society where men might achieve control
of their fate by the use of knowledge and reason, and where men’s social and
institutional setting would encourage self-cultivation and craftsmanship.”18 To the
extent that contemporary society encouraged privatism and indifference among
its citizens, a whole dimension of human experience was rendered unavailable.
As Mills wrote, “If we accept the Greek’s definition of the idiot as an altogether
private man, then we must conclude that many American citizens are now
idiots.”19 Depoliticization, for Mills, resulted in passivity and alienation:
we are now in a situation in which many who are disengaged from prevailing
allegiances have not acquired new ones, and so are distracted from and inattentive to
political concerns of any kind. They are strangers to politics. They are not radical, not
liberal, not conservative, not reactionary; they are inactionary; they are out of it.20
Mills’s concept of democracy rested on an ideal-typical distinction between
“publics” and “masses” that pervades his work. Public opinion, in the democratic
sense of the 18th century, should be based on “face-to-face groups” in which
“anyone is allowed to speak at will, and everyone interested does.” Under these
conditions, the “possibilities of answering back, of forming autonomous organs
of public opinion, of realizing opinion in action, are automatically established
by the institutional possibilities of democratic society.” An active, deliberative
public presupposed “a conception of authority by discussion, based formally on
the theory that truth and justice will somehow come out of society as a great
17
C. Wright Mills, “Letter to the New Left,” New Left Review I:5 (September – October
1960), pp. 18 – 23. On Mills and Miliband, see Michael Newman, Ralph Miliband and the
Politics of the New Left (London: Merlin Press, 2002), pp. 64 – 68, 80, and 347.
18
Miliband, op. cit., p. 82.
19
C. Wright Mills, Power, Politics, and People, edited by Irving Louis Horowitz (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1963), p. 12.
20
C. Wright Mills, White Collar: The American Middle Classes (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1951), p. 328.
C. Wright Mills and American Democracy 397
apparatus of free discussion.” In this democratic society, “Parliament, as an
institution, crowns all the primary publics; it is the archetype for each of the
scattered little circles of face-to-face citizens discussing their public business.”21
Mills was an intense student of philosophy before he became a sociologist and
his democratic ideals were shaped by the American pragmatic tradition of Peirce,
Dewey, James, and Mead, the subject of Mills’s 1942 dissertation.22 From the
pragmatists Mills derived an emphasis on the social nature of the self, dialogue
and communication, and the power of critical intelligence to guide human affairs.
In a 1944 article on “The Social Role of the Intellectual” Mills wrote:
Knowledge that is not communicated has a way of turning the mind sour, of being
obscured, and finally of being forgotten . . . . For only through the social
confirmation of others . . . do we earn the right of feeling secure in our knowledge.23
In contrast to a democratic formation of the general will, public opinion in
“mass society” is generated without free dialogue and deliberation and stands in a
subordinate relationship to elite decision makers. Under the modern media,
“competition goes on between the crowd of manipulators . . . and the people
receiving their communications . . . ‘Answering back’ by the people is systematically unavailable.” Such conditions presuppose a view of the public as “merely
the collectivity of individuals each rather passively exposed to the mass media and
rather helplessly opened up to the suggestions and manipulations that flow from
these media.”24 In a mass society the real determinants of personal experience are
removed from general awareness and the democratic articulation of public issues is
thereby limited. Mills thought that America had become a “mass society,” not
because of an irrational “revolt of the masses” posited by conservative thinkers, but
through the historical development of a new system of power and politics.
Power and Politics in America
Mills came to maturity amidst the upsurge of American liberalism represented
politically by Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman and intellectually by
pragmatism. Yet Mills was sharply critical of mid-century liberalism, from a
radically democratic point of view. According to Miliband, Mills thought that
liberalism “had gone flabby and conservative. It had become a rhetoric of apology,
a way of masking reality, a means of clouding issues, an obstacle to understanding
and significant action.”25
Steven Lukes has argued that a commitment to liberal values does not
necessarily entail a commitment to the individualist and capitalist forms of social
organization with which they have been linked historically. “Taking equality and
21
Mills, Powers, Politics, and People, op. cit., p. 579. See also C. Wright Mills, The Causes of
World War Three (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1958), p. 32.
22
C. Wright Mills, Sociology and Pragmatism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966).
Horowitz, C. Wright Mills: An American Utopian, op. cit., pp. 117 – 145. On Mills’s relation to
Dewey, see Rick Tilman, “Reinhold Niebuhr and C. Wright Mills as Convergent Critics of
John Dewey and American Liberalism,” Transactions of the Charles S. Pierce Society 37:4
(2001), pp. 585– 608.
23
Mills, Power, Politics, and People, op. cit., p. 300.
24
Ibid., pp. 581– 582.
25
Miliband, op. cit., p. 87.
398 Joseph G. Peschek
liberty seriously implies seeking to ascertain the conditions under which they can
be realized, maintained, and increased,” writes Lukes.26 Mills did not reject
liberal, humanist values. Rather he thought that contemporary liberalism had
become disembodied, failing to specify the social, political, and institutional
conditions that would make possible the realization of liberal, democratic ideals.
In an often quoted passage he stated:
Liberalism, as a set of ideals, is still viable, and even compelling to Western man. That
is one reason why it has become a common denominator of American political
rhetoric; but there is another reason. The ideals of liberalism have been divorced from
any realities of modern social structure that might serve as the means of their
realization. Everybody can easily agree on general ends; it is more difficult to agree on
means and the relevance of various means to the ends articulated. The detachment
of liberalism from the facts of a going society make it an excellent mask for those who
do not, cannot, or will not do what would have to be done to realize its ideals.27
Mills contended that the prevalent understanding of power in America on the
part of liberal intellectuals masked more than it revealed. He found the concept of
pluralism and countervailing power among political scientists to be wanting:
Instead of justifying the power of an elite by portraying it favorably, one denies that
any set of men, any class, any organization has any really consequential power.
American liberalism is thus readily made to sustain the conservative mood.28
Liberalism was no longer oppositional. Rather than spurring democratic
activism, the dominant interpretation of liberalism served as the ideology for the
interweaving of state and economy in a new form of organized capitalism. Where
others saw only progressive reform, Mills also saw incorporation, depoliticization,
and deradicalization, as “administration replaces electoral policies; the maneuvering of cliques replaces the open clash of parties.”29
Mills’s analysis of the US power structure was deeply at odds with selfcongratulatory interpretations of American democracy. His critique of liberalism
differed from that of conservatives because it was rooted in egalitarian democratic
values and because it made clear the close relationship of the post-New Deal liberal
state to the sophisticated wing of the corporate business community. In The New
Men of Power Mills differentiated “sophisticated conservatives” from “practical
conservatives,” a distinction he also employed in White Collar.30 In The Power Elite
he described these two tendencies within the business community:
In the higher circles of business and its associations, there has long been a tension,
for example, between the “old guard”’ of practical conservatives and the business
liberals’ or sophisticated conservatives. What the old guard represents is the
outlook, if not always the intelligent interests, of the more narrow economic
concerns. What the business liberals represent is the outlook and the interests of the
new propertied class as a whole. They are “sophisticated” because they are more
26
Steven Lukes, Individualism (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), pp. 156– 157.
Mills, Power, Politics, and People, op. cit., p. 189.
28
C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), p. 336.
29
Mills, The Causes of World War Three, op. cit., p. 29.
30
C. Wright Mills, The New Men of Power: America’s Labor Leaders (New York: Harcourt,
Brace, 1948), pp. 23 – 24; Mills, White Collar, op. cit., pp. 361– 362.
27
C. Wright Mills and American Democracy 399
flexible in adjusting to such political facts of life as the New Deal and big labor,
because they have taken over and used the dominant liberal rhetoric for their own
purposes, and because they have, in general, attempted to get on top of, or even
slightly ahead of, the trend of these developments, rather than to fight it as practical
conservatives are wont to do.31
Along with the military leadership and the higher reaches of the federal
state, the corporate elite formed part of the triumvirate of power that was
hegemonic in US politics. The labor movement, which Mills thought to be the only
barrier to slump and war in the late 1940s, had largely entered into a strategic
alliance with the corporate liberals, who in contrast to the business conservatives,
preached cooperation and accommodation. Mills saw this relationship as a “blind
alley” and a threat to the ability of labor to formulate an independent political and
economic program.32 Oppositional space was being conceded.
For Mills the power structure functioned in such a way as to shrink the
democratic public sphere, as public discourse was manipulated by elites and
colonized by the market. The complexity of civil society and the quality of public
discussion were being reduced. The relegation of citizens to spectatorship, and
the obscure nature of power’s operation, led to a “moral insensibility” in which “the
individual becomes the spectator of everything but the human witness of nothing.”33
In the years after it was published Mills’s analysis of the US power structure was
subject to a wide-ranging debate across the political spectrum, including on the
left.34 Among its positive offspring was an empirically and theoretically rich body
of power structure research that has specified more clearly the relationship of the
power elite to the corporate and financial community and the processes through
which ruling class political consensus is reached in the United States. G. William
Domhoff, the foremost scholar of power structure research, has argued:
Today, Mills looks even better than he did 50 years ago in his characterization of the
benefactors of American capitalism as a corporate rich led by the chief executives of
large corporations and financial institutions, who by now can clearly be seen as the
driving force within the power elite. His analysis also remains right on target as far as
the nature of the political directorate, who circulate between corporations, corporate
law firms, and government positions in the same way they did 50 years ago (and well
before that, of course).35
31
Mills, The Power Elite, op. cit., p. 122. For discussion of Mills’s analysis of the business
community, see G. William Domhoff, The Power Elite and the State: How Policy is Made in
America (Hawthorne, New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1990), pp. 35 – 36.
32
C. Wright Mills, The New Men of Power: America’s Labor Leaders (New York: Harcourt,
Brace, 1948), p. 233. On Mills and the labor movement, see Nelson Lichtenstein, “The New
Men of Power,” Dissent 48:4 (2001), pp. 121– 130.
33
Mills, The Causes of World War Three, op. cit., p. 78.
34
Clyde W. Barrow, “Plain Marxists, Sophisticated Marxists, and C. Wright Mills’
The Power Elite,” Science and Society 71:4 (2004), pp. 400– 430. The major contemporary
critiques of The Power Elite are included in G. William Domhoff and Hoyt B. Ballard (eds.)
C. Wright Mills and the Power Elite (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968).
35
G. William Domhoff, “Mills’s The Power Elite 50 Years Later,” Contemporary Sociology
35:6 (2006), pp. 547– 548. Domhoff argues that Mills’s concept of “mass society” made his
analysis of non-elite layers less accurate and unable to foresee the emergence of new social
movements in the U.S. See also Domhoff, “C. Wright Mills, Power Structure Research, and
the Failures of Mainstream Political Science,” New Political Science 29:1 (2007), pp. 97 – 114.
400 Joseph G. Peschek
Liberals and progressives often underplay the implications of this analysis in
their accounts of contemporary American politics, clouding the sources of growing
inequality and perhaps understating the obstacles to reform.36 At this writing the
presidential candidacy of Barack Obama has excited much of the left, for very
understandable reasons. But at the least Mills would encourage us to take into
account Obama’s campaign contributors, key advisers, and actual policy statements,
along with his populist and reformist appeals, in order to have a realistic view of
what kind of changes an Obama presidency would and would not bring.
Militarism and the Cold War
Mills addressed global and international issues with growing intensity in the late
1950s. This of course was signaled by his “pamphlets” The Causes of World War
Three (1958) and Listen, Yankee (1960), which challenged the Cold War with the
Soviet Union and argued for solidarity with the Cuban Revolution.37 Mills’s book
on Cuba followed a visit to the island in 1960, where he met with Fidel Castro and
Che Guevara. Listen, Yankee! sold over 400,000 copies and played an important
role in the opposition to US intervention in Cuba. After its publication Mills
received an anonymous threat of assassination on his next visit to Cuba.38 An FBI
memo of November 29, 1960 noted that
Mills indicated he would not be surprised if this were true since he does not doubt
that the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other similar United States
organizations do not approve of his activities. Mills has made several inquiries in
regard to purchasing a gun for self-protection.39
International Relations scholar Justin Rosenberg has argued that Mills, among his
other contributions, provides the basis for an alternative to the realist school of international relations, based on “grounding in substantive problems, the use of an historical and comparative depth of field, the perception of social totalities, and the
commitment to the ideals of freedom and reason.”40 Mills included the military elite
as part of the tripartite power structure in the United States, and thought that the
36
A case in point is the 2004 report “American Democracy in an Age of Rising
Inequality” by the Task Force on Inequality and American Democracy of the American
Political Science Association. Available online at , http://www.apsanet.org/section_256.
cfm. . For a critical discussion, see Frances Fox Piven, “Response to ‘American Democracy
in an Age of Rising Inequality,’” PS: Political Science and Politics 39:1 (2006), pp. 43 – 46, and
G. William Domhoff, “Inequality and American Democracy: What We Know and What We
Need to Learn,” American Journal of Sociology 112:5 (2007), pp. 1589– 1591.
37
I find more value in these books than does John Judis, who writes that “to the benefit
of Mills’s reputation, [they] are no longer available in bookstores, except perhaps in
Havana.” Judis, op. cit., p. 82.
38
On Mills’s interest in the Cuban revolution and the impact of Listen Yankee!, see Van
Gosse, Where the Boys Are: Cuba, Cold War America and the Making of a New Left (London and
New York: Verso, 1993), pp. 176– 183.
39
Ricardo Alarcon, “Waiting for C. Wright Mills,” The Nation, March 20, 2007. Available
online only at , http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070409/alarcon_eng. .
40
Justin Rosenberg, “The International Imagination: IR Theory and ‘Classic Social
Analysis,’” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 23:1 (1994), p. 94. See also Fred
Halliday, “Theory and Ethics in International Relations: The Contradictions of C. Wright
Mills,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 23:2 (1994), pp. 377– 385.
C. Wright Mills and American Democracy 401
ruling circles in both the Soviet Union and America were possessed by a “military
metaphysic.” While I accept criticism that Mills over-emphasized the autonomous
power of the military, his claim was based on the correct view that the post-war power
elite was shaped by America’s changing, hegemonic international position, and that a
culture and politics of militarism helped to support that position. As Carl Boggs
explains, “The Pentagon stands at the center of a vast web of military, industrial, political, and global structures tied to complex bureaucracies, weapons systems, base
facilities, communications networks, job and contract structures and a labyrinthine
network of armed forces branches.”41 Mills also thought that military spending had
become established as a countervailing force to capitalist stagnation.42 A change in US
foreign policy required radical changes in the American political economy. But the
lack of democratic debate over America’s global position, and the distortions induced
by the news media, created “plain ignorance about what most of the world is up to.”43
Mills was also critical of anti-communist socialists and “NATO intellectuals”
whose support for the West perpetuated the cold war:
Some of the best of them allow themselves to be trapped by the politics of antiStalinism, which has been a main passageway from the political thirties to the
intellectual default of the apolitical fifties . . . They use the liberal rhetoric to cover
the conservative default.44
This position led to rifts with some of his friends on the democratic left, such as
Dissent editor Irving Howe.45 After 9/11 a number of liberal intellectuals fell
into the trap identified by Mills, foolishly supporting the “war on terrorism” as an
extension of the Cold War against communism and endorsing the war on Iraq as
a form of humanitarian intervention and democracy promotion.
In Search of a Democratic Imagination
C. Wright Mills must have been one of the first writers to discuss the emergence of
a “post-modern” epoch. Far from regarding the post-modern world as a delightful
era of the endless subversion of codes, Mills was concerned that the Enlightenment
belief in the unified progress of reason and freedom, along with the ideologies of
liberalism and socialism, “have virtually collapsed as adequate explanations of the
world and ourselves.”46 This did not mean that Mills was fatalistic about American
41
Carl Boggs, Imperial Delusions: American Militarism and Endless War (Lanham, MD:
Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), p. 26.
42
Mills, The Causes of World War Three, op. cit., pp. 56 – 57.
43
C. Wright Mills, Listen, Yankee: The Revolution in Cuba (New York: Ballantine Books,
1960), pp. 178, 187.
44
Mills, The Causes of World War Three, op. cit., p. 126.
45
On Howe’s relationship with Mills, see Irving Howe, A Margin of Hope: An Intellectual
Autobiography (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1982), pp. 243– 246.
46
C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press,
1959), p. 166. For context, see Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity (London and
New York: Verso, 1998), p. 12 – 13. In his “Open Letter to C. Wright Mills,” Michael Burawoy
states that Mills’s “first scholastic fallacy” is that “knowledge is liberating. Today, following
Michel Foucault, we are more likely to follow the bleak hypothesis that sociological
knowledge is disabling, incapacitating, a form of control . . . But let us not descend into
postmodern pessimism.” Burawoy, op. cit., p. 369.
402 Joseph G. Peschek
democracy. He urged the re-creation of genuine publics and urged Americans to
“take democracy seriously and literally.” What resources does his thought provide
for this project?
Mills placed great importance on intellectual responsibility and was scornful
of several trends among intellectuals in the 1950s. He denounced the “cult of
alienation” as “a form of collapse into self-indulgence. It is a personal excuse for
lack of political will. It is a fashionable way of being overwhelmed.”47 As for the
“tragic-view-of-life” perspective, Mills was equally caustic:
It is a way of saying to oneself: “We’re all in this together” . . . But “we” are not all
in this together—so far as such decisions as are made and can be made are
concerned. “We” are not all in this together—so far as bearing the consequences of
these decisions is concerned. To deny either statement is to deny the facts of
power, in particular the fact that different men hold very different portions of such
power as is now available. Only if all men everywhere were actors of equal power
in an absolute democracy could we seriously hold the “tragic view” of
responsibility.48
Mills held out the possibility of a more creative response on the part of
intellectuals:
The independent artist and intellectual are among the few remaining personalities
equipped to resist and to fight the stereotyping and consequent death of genuinely
living things. Fresh perception now involves the capacity continually to unmask
and to smash the stereotypes of vision and intellect with which modern
communications swamp us.49
Mills made a well-known distinction between private troubles and public
issues, and argued that the former may come to be perceived as the latter under
certain conditions.50 Individual experience could be related to social structure by
critical intellectuals, practicing the sociological imagination. From a radical
democratic point of view, this allows many seemingly non-political matters to be
raised to the level of public discourse. Feminists have long argued that the
personal is political. Mills, who wrote a laudatory review of Simone de Beauvoir’s
The Second Sex, provided an approach that helps to redefine the boundaries of
public and private and expand the concept of politics.51
Mills once said that of the three great values of the French Revolution he was
sympathetic to liberty and equality, but not to fraternity. Nonetheless he was
concerned with the loss of communities and the privatism, indifference, and
47
Mills, White Collar, op. cit., pp. 159– 160.
Quoted in West, op. cit., p. 129.
49
Mills, Power, Politics, and People, op. cit., p. 299.
50
For an application of this distinction to Mills himself, see John D. Brewer, “The Public
and Private in C. Wright Mills’s Life and Work,” Sociology 39:4 (2005), pp. 661– 677.
51
“Women: The Darling Little Slaves,” Power, Politics and People, pp. 339– 346. Burawoy
incorrectly states that Mills “missed out on Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex,” op. cit.,
p. 372. Les Temp Modernes published selections from The Power Elite and Mills and de
Beauvoir were acquainted. “Bright eyed, bearded, he said to me gaily: ‘We have the
same enemies,’ reeling off the names of certain American critics who didn’t have much use
for me.” Simone de Beauvoir, Force of Circumstance (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1965),
p. 589.
48
C. Wright Mills and American Democracy 403
spectatorship of the mid-20th century American character. He argued for a new
public sphere that would prefigure in its own practices the quality of democracy it
hoped to generalize:
Power won by election, revolution, or deals at the top will not be enough to
accomplish this. In the day-by-day process of accumulating strength as well as in
times of social upset, the power of democratic initiation must be allowed and
fostered in the rank and file.52
Contemporary democratic discourse is full of well-meaning nostrums about
rediscovering the values of community, deliberation, and civil society. Mills
challenged his fellow Americans to think more clearly and critically about the real
forces undermining democracy and what must be done to challenge them. For
Mills a modern state required several conditions to be democratic: a public sphere
in which real issues are debated; nationally responsible parties with clear
positions; an engaged intelligentsia of genuine independence; a media of open
and genuine communication; civic associations linking families and smaller
communities and publics on the one hand with the state, the military, and the
corporation on the other.53 Mills provokes us to “address the central issues of
power and resource allocation that must be at the heart of public deliberation in
a democracy.”54 Citizens who are committed to a more just, equitable, and
participatory America would do well to consider the legacy of C. Wright Mills.
52
Mills, The New Men of Power, op. cit., p. 252.
Mills, The Causes of World War Three, op. cit., pp. 118 – 119.
54
Robert W. McChesney, Corporate Media and the Threat to Democracy (New York: Seven
Stories Press, 1997), p. 6. Thanks to Bill Domhoff and Bill Grover for helpful comments.
53