Guy Oakes - The Anthem Companion to C. Wright Mills

Anthem Companions to Sociology offer authoritative and comprehensive assessments of major figures in the development of sociology from the last two centuries. Covering the major advancements in sociological thought, these companions offer critical evaluations of key figures in the American and European sociological tradition, and will provide students and scholars with an in-depth assessment of the makers of sociology and chart their relevance to modern society.

Bryan S. Turner City University of New York, United States of America, and Australian Catholic University, Australia

The Anthem Companion to C. Wright Mills

Edited by Guy Oakes

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

This edition first published in UK and USA 2016

by ANTHEM PRESS

7576 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK

or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

2016 Guy Oakes editorial matter and selection; individual chapters individual contributors

The moral right of the authors has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Names: Oakes, Guy, editor.

Title: The Anthem companion to C. Wright Mills / edited by Guy Oakes.

Description: London; New York, NY : Anthem Press, 2016. |

Series: Anthem companions to sociology |

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016002573 | ISBN 9780857281807 (hardback : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Mills, C. Wright (Charles Wright), 19161962. |

Sociologists United States. | Sociology United States History.

Classification: LCC HM479.M55 A58 2016 | DDC 301.092dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016002573

ISBN-13: 978 0 85728 180 7 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 0 85728 180 1 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

CONTENTS

Guy Oakes

Whatever is the lot of humankind

I want to taste within my deepest self.

I want to seize the highest and the lowest,

To load its woe and bliss upon my breast,

And thus expand my single self titanically

And in the end go down with all the rest.

J. W. Goethe, Faust, Part I, lines 17651775

C. Wright Mills was born in Waco, Texas, on August 28, 1916. In the 1940s the governor of Texas observed that the frontiersmen who settled the wilderness that became Texas carried an ax, a rifle and a Bible (Powers 2015, 29). When Mills became an Ivy League professor and a New York intellectual, he was not averse to embellishing his Wild West provenance, solidifying his image of the intellectual who wrote by riding and shooting. Playing the part of the outlander, he kept his distance from the pretensions of the Claremont Avenue set and the cultural refinements of Morningside Heights in the neighborhood of Columbia University, where he taught in the undergraduate college. Mills seems to have believed that he forged in the smithy of his soul if not the uncreated conscience of his race, then at least his own identity creating himself ex nihilo. In fact, he received an excellent education at the University of Texas, especially in philosophy with George Gentry and David Miller. Both had doctorates from the University of Chicago, where they had studied with George Herbert Mead. Mills studied economics with Clarence Ayres, another Chicago doctorate in philosophy who taught institutional economics. Compared to contemporary graduate education in Anglophone sociology where training in philosophy and economics ranges from primitive to nonexistent outside the subdisciplines of economic sociology and what is loosely called methodology Millss education was remarkably comprehensive and thorough. Yet he devoted much of his career to puncturing the mythologies, illusions and self-deceptions of his contemporaries.

Autobiographical fictionalizations aside, Mills was a protean and endlessly restless thinker. In a breathless career of some twenty years, he wrote on issues of remarkable breadth: from the sociology of knowledge and the philosophy of the social sciences to the theory of social stratification and the reconfiguration of the US middle classes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the concentration of political and economic power in his time, the collapse of liberalism in the United States and the relentless bureaucratization and militarization of US society, the commercial debasement of the media and the translation of power as culture, the politics of the Cold War and prospects for democratization and economic progress in developing states. This is not an exhaustive list. Beginning in the early 1950s, he succeeded in his ambition of writing social science for the public, publishing articles in newspapers and magazines as well as writing books that would now be regarded as anomalies: sociological bestsellers that were also taken seriously by academics. Moreover, he attempted, with mixed results, to write social science as imaginative literature sociological poetry, as he called it, finding perhaps deeper truths and more telling insights in novels than in sociological surveys and casting doubt on the dichotomy of fictional and nonfictional prose. Thus he drew on an uncommon range of writers: not only the usual suspects for a sociologist of the Left Karl Marx, Max Weber, Karl Mannheim, the American pragmatists and the thinkers of the Frankfurt School but also Honor de Balzac, John Dos Passos and James Agee. The conception of the nonfictional novel later realized in Truman Capotes