Mills, C. Wright (1916-1962)

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MILLS, C. WRIGHT (1916-1962)

Charles Wright Mills grew up in Dallas in a thoroughly bourgeois family. His father was an insurance agency manager—one of the petty office workers that Mills would later identify as the new proletariat in his book White Collar (1951). After graduating from the University of Texas at Austin and flirting with a career as a car salesman, Mills went, in 1939, to graduate school at the University of Wisconsin. There he met his mentor and later collaborator, Hans Gerth, who introduced Mills to the work of classic European sociologists, in particular Max Weber. In addition to Weber, Gerth, as a German émigré and former member of the Frankfurt School, exposed Mills to the latest European neo-Marxist sociological thought. After his first teaching job at the University of Maryland, Mills moved to Columbia University in 1946, where he stayed until his death.

His most important books, in addition to White Collar, are The Power Elite (1956) and Sociological Imagination (1959). The basic theme of Mills's work is how power permeates every aspect of American society and how it is the duty of the critical sociologist to expose how power has compromised individual freedom. Many of his critics and supporters have emphasized the European elements in Mills's work. While it is certainly true that Gerth's influence had a decisive impact on Mills, fundamentally his thought is built on an American foundation, especially the work of Thorstein Veblen, and the American Pragmatists: Charles Peirce, William James, and John Dewey.

The core of Mills's sociological outlook is his concept of a mass society and its relationship to authority. In his book The Power Elite, he identified the American power elite as an alliance of political, military, and industrial leaders. Mills did not suggest that this elite acted in a conspiratorial manner. He argued that the members of the elite, because they were raised in similar social circumstances and went to the same privileged schools, were predisposed to think alike. Hence, their exercising of power was inevitably linked, if not explicitly coordinated.

What makes Mills's critique so radical, and powerful, is that he describes the power elite's relationship to the powerless majority by identifying the role of the mass media in maintaining the power structure. The sociologist asserted that the majority of the nation's citizens had been reduced to a politically inactive and uninformed mass, creating a mass society. According to Mills, in the past, America was directed by numerous groups of politically literate and active citizens. He referred to this decentralized society as a community of publics. The arrival of mass communications changed this liberal political culture. Mills admitted that the United State was never an ideal community of publics, nor had the mass society of the mid-twentieth century completely eliminated all vestiges of an informed and active public. Yet, in his view, by the 1950s the balance had shifted decisively toward the mass society.

To illustrate this shift, Mills described four distinguishing characteristics of a mass society. The first was the ratio of opinion givers to receivers. In a mass society, the number of opinion givers was limited while mass communication dramatically increased the number of opinion receivers. Thus, the sociological meaning of mass communication was the ability of authority to centralize and control information distribution. An additional attribute of the mass society was that the ability of the opinion receivers, or the masses, to reply was limited. Mills believed that the technology of mass communications had imposed uniformity upon opinion givers by concentrating them in mass media corporations while simultaneously rendering the opinion receivers mute.

The third characteristic of the mass society was that authority also controlled the institutions (e.g., legislative bodies, corporate boards, and the courts) that translated opinion into policy. Mills further argued that the inability of the mass society to respond to opinion and to influence public policy psychologically affected the individual. This social-psychological trait was highlighted in what he saw as the fourth distinguishing trait of a mass society—the "penetration" of the masses and their total lack of autonomy. By "penetration," Mills meant the ability of the elite to control virtually every aspect of the lives of the mass of the people by monopolizing the institutions of society.

Mills used Fascist and Communist societies as extreme examples of penetration. However, he also claimed that the power elite of the United States had penetrated American society and that the elite did not have to rely on crude and violent authoritarian measures. The elite's control of the mass media, combined with the vast scale of modern communications, allowed authority to psychologically manipulate the minds of the masses. In The Power Elite, Mills explained that the media of the 1950s—primarily television and radio—created a kind of "psychological illiteracy" where the "man of the masses" became dependent on the media for an understanding of the world. He argued that what was so insidious about this penetration of the minds of the masses was that most Americans developed their "identity and aspirations" from the media, as well as their conceptions of the outside world. Thus, Mills implied that contemporary American political culture was inherently, albeit by relatively subtle means, totalitarian.

There is an ironic nostalgia running throughout Mills's radical critique of modern society. His writings suggest that modern technological developments have enabled the elite to expand their power. Yet Mills did not idealize the past. Like Weber, Mills recognized that the preindustrial world was inefficient and ultimately unsustainable. Although he accepted the inevitably of the development of the modern world of mass industry and culture, Mills hoped that a critical intellectual tradition could point out the dangers that came with this historical progression. With an optimism that contrasted strongly with his pessimistic historical outlook, Mills believed that critical intellectuals like him could speak for the powerless masses.

One could argue that Mills was too optimistic about the ability of the critical intellectual to influence public policy and too pessimistic about the prospects of future technological development. His concept of a mass society was based on the technology of the 1950s. More than fifty years later, it appears that the technology of mass communication may be equalizing the ratio of opinion givers to opinion receivers through innovations such as the Internet. Nevertheless, despite the fact that the technological parameters of mass communication have changed dramatically since Mills's death, his warnings about the tendency of the elite to concentrate their power institutionally is still very relevant in the era of the multinational corporation.