C. Wright Mills

Mills supplied the American half of the argument Marcuse was making from the European side. He supplied it first. The Power Elite in 1956 described a military, corporate and political command locked into one another. Ordinary democratic politics could not reach it. The Sociological Imagination in 1959 attacked his own discipline for producing technique without object.

The document that matters here is the "Letter to the New Left". New Left Review ran it in 1960. In it he rejects what he called the labour metaphysic: the old Marxist faith that the industrial working class drives history. He calls it a Victorian expectation the evidence no longer supports. In its place he points to the young intelligentsia. The sign, he says, is the student movements then on the march in Poland, Hungary and Japan.

Tom Hayden wrote his master's thesis on Mills, and the influence runs straight into the Port Huron Statement, which puts the engine of change in students housed in universities. Mills died of a heart attack in March 1962, three months before Port Huron. He was forty-five.