1916–1962
C. Wright Mills was an American sociologist who asked why so few people could shape the lives of everyone else. His books examined union leaders, people who worked for salaries and those at the top of American institutions. By 1960, he was asking whether young thinkers could help build a new left. This account follows his ideas and their use by student organizer Tom Hayden through 1962.[1][2][3][4][5]
Early life and intellectual formation
1916–1962
Mills was born in Waco, Texas, in 1916. He studied American philosophy and how institutions worked. In a 1944 grant application, he credited George V. Gentry with his early interest in philosophy and Clarence Ayres with teaching him Veblen and economics. At Wisconsin, Selig Perlman taught him about labor and economic institutions. Hans Gerth brought him into closer contact with German social thought, especially the tradition of Max Weber.[6]
Mills studied how social life shaped ideas. He did not treat thinking as something people did apart from the world around them. He also wanted readers outside universities to understand his work. In the same application, he explained that he had written for magazines to learn how to reach a wider public.[6]
Ideas and political aims
1916–1962
Labor as a base for political action
In The New Men of Power (1948), Mills looked to unions as a base for a new American left. Workers had organizations, while writers and researchers could help explain the wider causes of hardship. He wanted the two groups to work together. A new slump might produce anger, but hardship could also make people withdraw. A movement had to explain what people had in common and give them a reason to act.[1]
Mills therefore assigned union leaders a choice. They could seek a place within the existing order or help build a political force of their own. He also looked beyond factory workers to potential allies among salaried employees. This alliance would need leaders and a way to bring people together. Mills did not expect hardship to create a movement by itself.[1]
Personal hardship and public decisions
Mills asked readers to connect their lives with forces they could not control alone. In The Sociological Imagination (1959), he used job loss to make the point. If one person lost a job, the cause might lie in that person's life. If millions were out of work, the explanation had to include how the economy and its institutions worked. Treating each case as a personal failure would miss the public problem.[7]
He gave social scientists a public role in this work. They should explain what the powerful did and how those acts affected other people's lives. They should also help people learn to question, reason and keep learning for themselves. Mills knew that scholars did not control the main sources of power in politics and the economy.[7]
Who could bring about change?
In his 1960 “Letter to the New Left,” Mills challenged the assumption that industrial workers must always lead social change. He called this fixed expectation a “labour metaphysic.” He did not propose abandoning workers. Where labor could act, he said, the left should work with it. The task was to investigate what particular groups could do under particular conditions.[4]
Students and young writers drew his attention because they were already acting. He pointed to protests in several countries, including the American South. Their settings and aims differed. Mills wanted to study those differences. He urged left intellectuals to learn from these movements and work with them on strategies that could give their protests a clearer political direction.[4]
Career and activities
1916–1962
Mills received his doctorate from Wisconsin in 1942. He taught at Maryland, then moved to research work at Columbia in 1945. Columbia appointed him to its teaching faculty in 1946. His collaboration with Gerth produced From Max Weber that year. Mills died on March 20, 1962.[6]
Mills drew on others in his labor research. In the acknowledgments to The New Men of Power, he thanked labor intellectual J. B. S. Hardman for helping shape the study. He credited Helen Schneider's work on the poll and Leo Lowenthal 's reading of the draft. Their research and criticism helped him develop the book.[1]
Major works
1916–1962
The New Men of Power (1948) examined union leaders and their choices. White Collar (1951) turned to people who worked for salaries and to divisions within the middle classes. Mills argued that they did not yet form a common political force. Their interests and loyalties drew them toward other groups.[1][2]
The Power Elite (1956) examined power at the top of business, government and the armed forces. Mills argued that union leaders often reacted to choices made elsewhere. They had less power to set the course themselves. He was now more doubtful about their role than he had been in 1948.[1][3]
The Sociological Imagination (1959) linked people's lives with the larger forces of society and history. The “Letter to the New Left” (1960) asked who could challenge those forces. Readers could use these questions and arguments. The fact that the works appeared in print does not tell us what a movement did with them.[7][4]
Influence and criticism
1916–1962
Tom Hayden both used Mills and objected to him. In “A Letter to the New (Young) Left,” Hayden found Mills's account of power compelling. But he thought Mills left too little hope or guidance for action. Hayden urged students to form groups that could keep their work going.[5]
Hayden then used Mills's approach to study power on campus. In “Decomposition of Democracy: Excerpts from a speech,” he asked how authority worked at the University of Michigan. He considered its managers, outside research funds and the faculty's part in major choices. Mills's work helped him frame questions that students could study where they lived.[8]
These essays show how one organizer used Mills’s work. Hayden treated it as a way to investigate power while continuing to argue about how to challenge it. His criticism remained part of that use.[5][8]