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MILLS, C(harles) Wright (1916-1962)

Short biography of C Wright Mills published in the Dictionary of Modern American Philosophers (Bristol, UK: Thoemmes Press, 2004), written by Bernard Phillips.

C. Wright Mills was born on 28 August 1916 in Waco, Texas. His father was a white-collar insurance broker and his mother was a housewife, and they were of Irish-English ancestry. The family moved from place to place in Texas, living in Waco, Wichita Falls, Fort Worth, Sherman, Dallas, Austin and San Antonio. When Mills was forty-one he described himself as "a born troublemaker" and "as good as any damned body anywhere." As a child he lived a relatively isolated life. His father was away on trips much of the time, his parents had very few friends, and he grew up with no intimate and continuous relationships. That isolation foreshadowed his own social experiences in grammar school, high school and college. He grew up in houses with no books or music, describing himself as self-made as it is possible to be.

After graduating from Dallas Technical High School in 1934, anticipating a career as an engineer, Mills entered Texas Agricultural & Mechanical College, a large military school which his father thought would make a man of him. As a freshman, his first published piece was a letter to the Batallion, a student newspaper, where he protested against the mindless disciplinary oppression which freshmen were forced to undergo at the hands of upperclassmen. Later he relished the anger he saw on senior officers' faces as they read it. Responding to a rejoinder accusing him of a lack of "guts," he penned these closing words in a second letter in the Battalion::

Just who are the men with guts? They are the men who have the ability and the brains to see this institution's faults, who are brittle enough not to adapt themselves to its erroneous order--and plastic enough to change if they are already adapted; the men who have the imagination and the intelligence to formulate their own codes; the men who have the courage and the stamina to live their own lives in spite of social pressure and isolation. These my friends, are the men with "guts" (Mills, 2000: 34).

After a year at Texas A & M Mills transferred in 1935 to the University of Texas at Austin with its strong departments in philosophy and sociology, faculty holding doctorates from the University of Chicago and a president supportive of Roosevelt's New Deal. Mills did extremely well in philosophy, sociology, cultural anthropology, social psychology and economics. While still an undergraduate he became George Gentry's teaching assistant in sociology, proving to be most capable. In October, 1937, he married Dorothy Smith (Freya), a bright and personable young woman who had strong ties to the Young Men's and Women's Christian Association, an agency oriented to social change like the education of Negro sharecroppers. However, tensions developed when Freya asserted herself. In philosophy Mills was introduced to Peirce, Dewey, James and Mead. He also became interested in sociological theory (including the ideas of Marx), urban sociology, social psychology, economics (especially Thorstein Veblen) and empirical research. In 1939 he received a bachelor's degree in sociology and a master's degree in philosophy (Phi Beta Kappa).

Mills, highly recommended by his instructors, moved with Freya to Madison, Wisconsin, in 1939, entering the doctoral program in sociology with a research fellowship at the University of Wisconsin. The Sociology Department included Howard Becker, E. A. Ross and John Gillin, all of whom were no strangers to philosophy. By that time he had already published articles in the two leading sociological journals, and he was seen by some fellow students as an overly ambitious individual with a desire to become a legend in sociology. He developed a close relationship with Hans Gerth, who brought to the faculty ideas from European classical sociology, including the work of Max Weber and Karl Marx. Collaboration with Gerth later resulted in two joint books: From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (1946), and Character and Social Structure (1953). Mills' early article in the American Sociological Review, "Situated Actions and Vocabularies of Motive" (1940), foreshadowed the situational emphasis within the new field of ethnomethodology that emerged decades later. His article in the American Journal of Sociology, "The Professional Ideology of Social Pathologists" (1943), took sociologists to task--including John Gillin, the Chair--for writing textbooks on social problems which avoided fundamental classical ideas like the negative impact of social stratification.

Mills completed his course work in 1941 and was appointed associate professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, with his high blood pressure giving him a deferment from military service. His PhD dissertation, Sociology and Pragmatism, was completed in 1942, when he was awarded the doctorate from Wisconsin, but it was not published until 1964. His focus there was on applying the sociology of knowledge to the development of the philosophy of pragmatism, especially the work of Charles Peirce, William James and John Dewey. He used the themes he developed there in much of his later writing. In 1943 Mills and Freya had a daughter, Pamela, although their relationship continued to deteriorate. For Mills, the University of Maryland provided both an opportunity to become involved in what was going on in Washington, DC., as well as a way-station on the road to Columbia and New York. It was there that he began writing for progressive magazines like the New Republic and continued to define himself as an innovative intellectual and sociologist, concerned with the fundamental issues of the era. He saw reformism and liberalism, illustrated by the New Deal, as no longer a valid answer to American and world problems.

In 1945 Mills took a position as research associate at Columbia's Bureau of Applied Social Research (BASR), and in that same year he separated from Freya and Pamela, divorcing in 1947. The next year he was appointed assistant professor of sociology at Columbia College. This author had been a pre-medical student at Columbia, but courses with Mills in 1951 and 1952 yielded a conversion to sociology. Mills was an extremely impressive figure as an instructor, with his towering bulk, deep voice and total commitment to sociology as a tool to understand the world and confront its problems. A story he told students about an encounter with Dwight Eisenhower, then President of Columbia University, replays his experience with his very first publication in the Battalion. One day Eisenhower walked into Mills' class unannounced and took a seat in the back row. Mills immediately changed his planned topic to a discussion of how to achieve a violent overthrow of the US. government, with the class functioning as a cell directing operations. As Mills continued in as realistic a manner as he could muster, Eisenhower became more and more uncomfortable, began to turn red and finally stood up and walked out never to be heard from again. Mills was much amused by his feat, yet one might easily claim that this antagonistic way of relating to others cost him many opportunities to achieve the kind of influence he sought throughout his life.

Although Mills attempted to combine his deep political interests with empirical work at the BASR with its projects in mass communications and public opinion, these orientations did not mesh for the director, Paul F. Lazarsfeld. Mills once again began to occupy the role of marginal man, both at Columbia and in relation to his political friends in New York who saw his sociological interests negatively. Ruth Harper, who assisted him with his research chores, became his second wife in 1947, and a year later he withdrew from work at the BASR. But his empirical work served him well, giving credibility to subsequent books. Mills continued to focus on the different social classes and their political impact: New Men of Power (1948), White Collar (1951) and The Power Elite (1956). These publications were particularly radical at a time during the Cold War when the House Committee on Un-American Activities along with the FBI and the Attorney General were compiling lists of subversive individuals and organizations. Over 10,000 people lost their jobs in the 1940s and 1950s during this anti-communist crusade.

Mills was promoted to Associate Professor in 1950 and to Professor in 1956, with a second daughter, Kathryn, born in 1955. But Mills' ties with Columbia and professional sociology in general were loosening more and more, for his clash with Lazarsfeld typified his relationships with others, including professors in other departments like Lionel Trilling. For example, he taught only undergraduate students rather than graduate sociology students. Mills visited Europe in 1956, and he was a Fulbright lecturer at the University of Copenhagen between 1956 and 1957. Mills and Ruth separated in 1957 and divorced in 1959, the year that Mills married Yaroslava Surmach, and in 1960 their son Nikolas was born. The Causes of World War Three was published in 1958 and The Sociological Imagination in 1959. Mills came to see the Cuban revolution under Fidel Castro as a possible "third way" between Soviet communism and American capitalism. He visited Cuba in 1960, interviewing Castro, Che Guevara and others, and published Listen Yankee in 1960. A day or two before he was scheduled to debate A. A. Berle Jr. on national television, he had a massive heart attack. After a trip to Europe, Mills returned to his home in West Nyack, New York. It was there that he died of a heart attack on 20 March 1962 just prior to the publication of The Marxists, a broad-ranging analysis of many different species of Marxism.

Three years after Mills' death The New Sociology was published, a book of essays in his honor. His own essays were collected in 1963, his own doctoral dissertation finally found a publisher in 1964, his addresses were published in 1968, and his letters appeared in 2000. Three biographies of Mills were written (Scimecca, 1977, Horowitz, 1983; Tilman, 1984) as well as a book on his approach to the power elite (Domhoff and Ballard, 1968), and at least three books were dedicated to him (Stein and Vidich, 1965; Wallerstein and Starr, 1971; Phillips, 2001). In 1964 the Society for the Study of Social Problems began to give a yearly prize for the book that "best exemplifies outstanding social science research and an understanding of the individual and society in the tradition of the distinguished sociologist, C. Wright Mills." In a 1997 survey of members of the International Sociological Association which asked them to identify the ten books published in the 20th century which they considered to be the most influential for sociologists, they ranked The Sociological Imagination second, preceded only by Max Weber's Economy and Society. In 2001 we have a book explicitly building on Mills' approach to the scientific method in his The Sociological Imagination (Phillips). And in 2002 we have the first edited volume of research based on that same approach (Phillips, Kincaid and Scheff, eds.), the result of the first annual conference of "The Sociological Imagination Group," formed in 2000.

Although some viewed him as a pessimist (Chasin, 1990), in fact he appears to have been a utopian (Horowitz, 1983), somehow managing to carry forward Enlightenment ideals and a conviction as to the promise of sociology during a time of pessimism, cynicism and fear. As a lifelong practicing pragmatist, Mills would have appreciated the fact that his work lives on in an era in which it is perhaps more urgent than ever before both to understand the world and to change it.

Examining Mills' life and work from the perspective of the 21st century, sociologists generally have emphasized Mills' analysis of social classes, elites and social stratification and their impact on society and the individual, as illustrated by the phenomenon of alienation. We see this focus of Mills in one of his earliest articles, "The Professional Ideology of Social Pathologists" (1943), where he critically analyzes textbooks on social problems:

Collecting and dealing in a fragmentary way with scattered problems and facts of milieux, these books are not focused on larger stratifications or upon structured wholes. . . .They do not typically consider whether or not certain groups or individuals caught in economically underprivileged situations can possibly obtain the current goals without drastic shifts in the basic institutions which channel and promote them (166, 179).

The European tradition of sociological analysis, especially the work of Marx and Weber on social classes, alienation and social stratification, was largely being ignored by those textbooks--and by sociologists in general. Later, in Mills' trilogy on social stratification--The New Men of Power, White Collar and The Power Elite--Mills attempted to make up for this deficiency, succeeding in achieving scholarly credibility as a leading sociologist with fundamental insights into America's social classes. This was a focus that meshed closely with his egalitarian ideals as well as his interests in power and social change. All three books were concerned with the passivity or alienation of the masses as well as power within the US as a whole and not just specific organizations or social classes.

The 500 "new men of power" he studied joined with the business and political elite to stabilize the economy and maintain existing patterns of social stratification. White Collar centered on the newly emerging middle class, a diverse group including middle managers, salaried professionals and technicians, sales people and office workers. Like David Riesman in The Lonely Crowd and William H. Whyte in The Organization Man, Mills was much concerned with the isolation and alienation of the white-collar individual, who he felt was adrift in a society that failed to question its fundamental structures. Mills' The Power Elite came to grips with the impact of the continuing technological revolution throughout the world, following through on pragmatism's focus on science's impact on human affairs. Mills argued neither for a conspiracy among elites nor for the evils of capitalism, but rather drew a complex picture of top, middle and lower levels of power working together, building on Max Weber's analysis of class, status and power. However, Mills' The Causes of World War Three and Listen Yankee lacked such a balanced argument supported by data, with his voice becoming shrill and partisan.

For all of Mills' achievements in analyzing social stratification in the US, it was his The Sociological Imagination which proved to be his most influential book. How is this to be explained? It was in that book that Mills returned to his pragmatic and sociological roots --by contrast with his emphasis on urgent political causes--perhaps providing the elements required for fulfilling what he called "the promise of sociology." Mills castigated both "grand theory," as illustrated by Talcott Parsons, and "abstracted empiricism," as exemplified by the research at the BASR. Instead, the researcher should learn to shuttle up and down language's levels of abstraction, informing abstract theory with historical and empirical specificity. Taking pragmatic action to confront "personal troubles" as well as "public issues" remained important for the social scientist, yet such action must be informed by an understanding of the complexities involved.

Mills succeeded in that book in charting a general course for sociologists to follow the scientific ideal of opening up to all knowledge relevant to the complexities of a given problem, by contrast with the failure of specialized sociologists to communicate with one another. He had returned to his earlier analysis of the methodological approach of sociologists within textbooks on social problems:

The level of abstraction which characterizes these texts is so low that often they seem to be empirically confused for lack of abstraction to knit them together. They display bodies of meagerly connected facts, ranging from rape in rural districts to public housing, and intellectually sanction this low level of abstraction (1943: 166).

The Sociological Imagination carried that analysis further not only by emphasizing the importance of shuttling far up and down language's "ladder" of abstraction but also by specifying the kinds of phenomena that abstract concepts should take into account. In that early paper Mills had mentioned "social stratification" and "total social structures," but now he became more explicit:

The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society. . .they are the questions inevitably raised by any mind possessing the sociological imagination. For that imagination is the capacity to shift from one perspective to another--from the political to the psychological; from examination of a single family to comparative assessment of the national budgets of the world; from the theological school to the military establishment; from considerations of an oil industry to studies of contemporary poetry. It is the capacity to range from the most impersonal and remote transformations to the most intimate features of the human self--and to see the relations between the two. Back of its use there is always the urge to know the social and historical meaning of the individual in the society and in the period in which he has his quality and his being (1959: 6-7).

Presently there are 43 distinct Sections of the American Sociological Association with little communication across those boundaries. Mills' vision pointed toward a scientific method which would employ systematically concepts centering on social structure (such as social stratification) as well as concepts focusing on the individual (such as alienation) as well as concepts oriented to historical change (such as anomie). As a result of such a broad orientation to the research process, the individual sociologist would be able to range widely over the complex problems of modern society. The sociologist would avoid both "grand theory" with no empirical or historical basis and "abstracted empiricism" with no broad theoretical relevance.

Such breadth, which follows the ideals of the scientific method for openness to all relevant phenomena as well as for the rapid cumulative development of understanding, was of little practical use for Mills unless it addressed the most fundamental problems of modern society. The importance of the sociologist's commitment to such efforts is suggested by Mills' use of "imagination" in his title. That points squarely to the individual's emotions, just as Nietzsche did much the same in the title of his The Gay Science (1887/1974). Mills saw such commitment as essential to a scientific approach to sociology, just as Charles Peirce viewed "the irritation of doubt" as fundamental to the scientific method (1877/1955: 10-11). In his appendix, "On Intellectual Craftsmanship," Mills suggested the basis for developing such commitment: ". . .the most admirable thinkers within the scholarly community you have chosen to join do not split their work from their lives." There he foreshadowed Alvin Gouldner's call for a "reflexive sociology" in his The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology (1970).

Mills' approach to language appears to have been the key to integrating his diverse elements of philosophy and sociology into a concrete program that could build on his ideas, despite his own relative alienation from academia:

One great lesson that we can learn from its systematic absence in the work of the grand theorists is that every self-conscious thinker must at all times be aware of--and hence be able to control--the levels of abstraction on which he is working. The capacity to shuttle between levels of abstraction, with ease and with clarity, is a signal mark of the imaginative and systematic thinker (1959: 34).

By continuing to move up language's ladder of abstraction we come to epistemology, illustrated by the scientific method which Mills centered on in The Sociological Imagination. It was there that he sketched directions for following scientific ideals that included a deep commitment to one's problem, the definition of a problem using abstract concepts so as to invoke links to fundamental problems in society, the use of such concepts to open up to a wide range of phenomena, including the investigator's own personal experiences within that wide range, and coming far down language's ladder of abstraction so as to test hypotheses empirically.

By moving even further up language's ladder of abstraction we come to metaphysics, illustrated by Mills' pragmatic stance throughout his life. We might recall here John Dewey's argument in his Reconstruction in Philosophy (1920/1948):

Democracy has many meanings, but if it has a moral meaning, it is found in resolving that the supreme test of all political institutions and industrial arrangements shall be the contribution they make to the all-around growth of every member of society (186).

Throughout Mills' many confrontations with the power of stratification in American society over the life of the individual--whether within the labor movement, in the situation of the middle class, in the elite strata of society, within the discipline or sociology or in his own personal life--there was a search for some path to achieve "the all-around growth of every member of society." Perhaps Mills has given us the elements needed to move in this direction, and perhaps his approach to language will enable us to initiate that journey. At least that is the stance taken up in some recent publications (Phillips, 2001; Phillips, Kincaid and Scheff, 2002), granting some postmodernist objections (Denzin, 1990, 2002, 2003). From this perspective, Mills was a Moses who took social scientists to the promised land yet was unable to enter it himself. And if we are to assess his achievements with the aid of Peirce's maxim, "Do not block the way of inquiry" (1896/1955: 54), we can see the continuation of his own efforts within the twenty-first century in these attempts to build on his work. We can also see that continuation in his influence on the development of the New Left and what came to be called "critical sociology," in the assessment of his peers within the International Sociological Association, in the publication of Mills' unpublished writings along with his addresses and letters, in the biographies and other publications on Mills' work, and in the numerous and continuing citations of that work by social scientists and others as well. For Mills succeeded in giving voice to Enlightenment optimism--perhaps still buried deeply within all of us moderns--and in resonating even in our present era clouded by pessimism, fear, ignorance and cynicism.

Bibliography

From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (with Hans H. Gerth, New York, 1946).

The New Men of Power: America's Labor Leaders (New York, 1948).

The Puerto Rican Journey: New York's Newest Migrants (with C. Senior and R. Goldsen, New York, 1950).

White Collar: The American Middle Classes (New York, 1951).

Character and Social Structure: The Psychology of Social Institutions (with Hans H.

Gerth, New York, 1953).

The Power Elite (New York, 1956).

The Causes of World War Three (New York, 1958).

The Sociological Imagination (New York, 1959)

Listen, Yankee: The Revolution in Cuba (New York, 1960).

Images of Man: The Classic Tradition in Sociological Thinking (ed. with an introduction, New York, 1960)

The Marxists (New York, 1962).

Power, Politics and People: The Collected Essays of C. Wright Mills (ed. with an introduction by Irving L. Horowitz, New York, 1963).

Sociology and Pragmatism: The Higher Learning in America (New York, 1964).

On Social Men and Social Movements: The Collected Addresses of C. Wright Mills (ed.

with an introduction by Irving Louis Horowitz, published in Spanish only as De hombres sociales y movimientos sociales, Mexico City, 1968).

Letters and Autobiographical Writings (ed. by Kathryn Mills with Pamela Mills, Berkeley, 2000).

Other Relevant Works

"Situated Actions and Vocabularies of Motive," American Sociological Review, 5 (1940), 904-913.

"The Professional Ideology of Social Pathologists," American Journal of Sociology 49 (1943), 165-180.

Further Reading

Bottomore, T. B. Critics of Society: Radical Thought in North America (New York, 1969).

Bottomore, T. B. Sociology as Social Criticism (New York, 1974).

Chasin, Barbara H. "C. Wright Mills, Pessimistic Radical," Sociological Inquiry 60 (1990), 337-351.

Denzin, Norman K. "On the Sociological Imagination Revisited," The Sociological Quarterly 31 (1990): 1-22.

Denzin, Norman K. "Review of Bernard Phillips' Beyond Sociology's Tower of Babel: Reconstructing the Scientific Method," Contemporary Sociology 31 (2002): 790-792.

See also "Comment" by Bernard Phillips and "Reply" by Norman Denzin, Contemporary Sociology 32 (2003): 266.

Dewey, John. Reconstruction in Philosophy (Boston, 1920/1948).

Domhoff, G. William, and Hoyt C. Ballard. C. Wright Mills and the Power Elite (Boston, 1968).

Gouldner, Alvin W. The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology (New York, 1970).

Horowitz, Irving L. (ed.). The New Sociology: Essays in Social Science and Social

Theory in Honor of C. Wright Mills (New York, 1964).

Horowitz, Irving L. C. Wright Mills: An American Utopian (New York, 1983).

Horowitz, Irving L. "Postscript to Utopia: History and the Fourth Epoch," in C. Wright

Mills: An American Utopian (New York, 1983), pp. 305-331.

Long, Priscilla (ed.). The New Left: A Collection of Essays (Boston, 1969).

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science (trans. by Walter Kaufmann, New York 1887/1974).

Peirce, Charles S. "The Fixation of Belief," in Peirce, Philosophical Writings of Peirce (New York, 1877/1955, 5-22).

Peirce, Charles S. "The Scientific Attitude and Fallibilism," in Peirce, Philosophical Writings of Peirce (New York, 1896/1955, 42-59).

Phillips, Bernard. Beyond Sociology's Tower of Babel: Reconstructing the ScientificMethod (New York, 2001).

Phillips, Bernard, Harold Kincaid and Thomas J. Scheff (eds.). Toward A SociologicalImagination: Bridging Specialized Fields (Lanham, Maryland,, 2002).

Scimecca, Joseph A. The Sociological Theory of C. Wright Mills (Port Washington, NewYork, 1977).

Stein, Maurice, and Arthur Vidich (eds.). Sociology on Trial (Englewood Cliffs, NewJersey, 1965).

Tilman, Rick. C. Wright Mills: A Native Radical and His Intellectual Roots (University Park, Pennsylvania, 1984).

Wallerstein, Immanuel, and Paul Starr (eds.). The University Crisis Reader, Vols. 1 and 2 (New York, 1971).