The Politics of Truth: Selected Writings of C. Wright Mills, published in 2008, is the first collection of Mills’ writings in English since 1963. In a single volume, it brings together 23 of Mills’ writings from 1944 to 1960 that show his growth as an intellectual and shed much light on the thinking behind his major works.
Although Mills lived around half a century ago and died in 1962 at the age of 45, his work is still fresh and relevant today. Then as now, the U.S. continues to dominate world affairs, engages in war, this time, the potentially never ending “global war on terror.” And the apparent threats to our fragile democracy are no less challenging today: the concentration of control of the mainstream media and influence on politics by big businesses.
“The intellectual ought to be the moral conscience of his society, at least with reference to the value of truth, for in the defining instance that is his politics. And he ought also to be a man absorbed in the attempt to know what is real and what is unreal,” wrote Mills in 1954 in On Knowledge and Power, part of the collection.
John H. Summers, a visiting scholar at the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College, selected the writings for the new collection in The Politics of Truth and wrote the introduction to it. Throughout the collection Summers provides annotations that give insight into the context for many of the Mills’ writings.
Responses to the Critics of ‘The Power Elite’
According to Summers, Mills wrote to his friend Bill Miller in 1957: “’Criticisms’ of The Power Elite hit me very hard indeed … I damn near lost my nerve for writing. It is hard to carry a load as big as Luther’s when damn near all the world tells you it’s only a bag of peanuts.”
In that same year, Mills replied to his critics in an essay which is part of the collection in The Politics of Truth. The essay is important, not only for the relevance of The Power Elite today, but also because it illuminates some essential points of Mills’ thinking and position in his major works.
According to Mills, big business is increasingly in the position to dominate political democracy. He explains that this is related to the key meaning of the power elite for democracy: “one of the major themes of the book is that many key decisions are made outside the parliamentary mechanism which thus drops to a secondary position, to the middle levels of power. On this level, there is very often a semi-organized stalemate.”
He wrote, “You’ve always got to balance the precision of knife-edge description with the generality needed to bring out their meaning for your time. But above all, you’ve got to see the several major trends together―structurally, rather than as a mere scatter of happenings adding up to nothing new, in fact not adding up at all.”
He criticizes literary and journalist people of his time as “pseudo-scientific know-nothings” who distribute images of social structure without commenting on them, sustaining the images that guide and obscure the myths of our social reality.
In response to half a dozen reviewers who criticized Mills for acting like a “judge” and questioning his role as a sociologist, Mills fired back saying that as a sociologist who studies the large structures of society, he cannot turn his back on the problem of “moral judgment.” Mills explained that a sociologist and a man of intellect should not just focus on “petty details … making himself irrelevant to the political conflicts and forces of his time.”
Mills wrote, “Anyone today who spends his life studying society and publishing the results is acting politically. The question is whether you face that and make up your own mind or whether you conceal it from yourself and drift morally.”
According to Mills, most social scientists of his time conformed to the “prevailing tone of liberal American politics and the accompanying fear of any passionate commitment.” He wrote that this is what those who complain about “value judgment” really want, not “scientific objectivity.”
“The most important problem for political reflection in our time has to do with the problem of responsibility… No one is outside society; the question is where you stand within it,” wrote Mills.
Relevance of Mills Today
John H. Summers’ introduction to The Politics of Truth is insightful in explaining the life and significance of Mills. But it is very brief. There are other contemporary thinkers who have addressed the question of Mills relevance for today.
Conservative scholar Andrew J. Bacevich, author of The Limits of Power, The End of American Exceptionalism, wrote in 2008: “the sociologist C. Wright Mills took a stab at describing this ‘power elite.’ His depiction of an interlocking corporate, political, and military directorate remains valid today, although one might amend it to acknowledge the role played by insider journalists and policy intellectuals who serve as propagandists, gatekeepers, and packagers of the latest conventional wisdom.”
Bacevich is Professor of International Relations and History at Boston University. He wrote, “According to Mills, the power elite and those trafficking in ideas useful to its core membership share a ‘cast of mind that defines international reality as basically military.’ This was true when Mills wrote those words in the 1950s, and it is even truer today.”
G. William Domhoff, author of Who Rules America?, wrote in a 2006 article, “Mills’s The Power Elite 50 Years Later” in Contemporary Sociology that The Power Elite “became a classic because it was the first full-scale study of the structure of distribution of power in the United States by a sociologist using the full panoply of modern-day sociological theory and methods.”
Domhoff provides a list of things that he says Mills got wrong. Domhoff wrote, “Once we move below the power elite… there are more serious problems with his analysis… Mills first of all underestimated the power of Congress and too quickly dismissed the political parties as indistinguishable on power issues.”
David Brown, author of Richard Hofstadter: An Intellectual Biography, finds shortcomings too in Mills’ work. In a review of Radical Ambition: C. Wright Mills, the Left, and American Social Thought, appearing in Columbia (2009), he says: “When searching fruitlessly for democratic structures of oppositional power, [Mills] inexplicably overlooked the civil rights movement, perhaps the single most successful popular source of oppositional power in the American Century.”
Norman Birnbaum, professor emeritus at the Georgetown University Law Center, who personally knew Mills half century ago, wrote on March 11, 2009 in the Nation, “Mills left a great deal out. Ethnicity and race in the United States (and elsewhere) did not particularly interest him. Despite his affinity for the early twentieth-century sociologist Max Weber, a very profound student of religion, Mills was himself religiously unmusical. He was concerned with the social setting of personal development, but his portraits of human existence were frequently one dimensional.”
Nevertheless, Domhoff wrote: “Today, Mills looks even better than he did 50 years ago in his characterization of the benefactors of American capitalism as a corporate rich led by the chief executives of large corporations and financial institutions, who by now can be clearly seen as the driving force within the power elite.”
Mills: The Self-Cultivating Man
It is too simplistic to say that Mills was a far left intellectual. Various essays in The Politics of Truth show that Mills was critical of both the Right and the Left in American politics. He was also critical of methodological dogmas of his peers in the social sciences. He was an independent thinker and critic, not fully committed to any group.
In The Conservative Mood, Mills argued that “the middle classes have been predominant―in class and in status and in power… there can be no genuinely conservative ideology in the United States… All major sections of strata have taken on, in various degrees and ways, the coloration of a middle-class liberal ethos.”
Mills also attacked the Left, the side that he tended to lean towards.
In the essay on The Power Elite: Comments and Criticism, Mills explained that “classical liberal image of modern American society” is the “intellectual target of my attack,” which he regarded as a myth that distorts the truth about America.
In Culture and Politics: The Fourth Epoch, Mills wrote in 1959 that The Modern Age is being succeeded by a post-modern period which may be called “The Fourth Epoch… [where] our basic definitions of society and of self are being over-taken by new realities.”
According to Mills, both liberalism and socialism came out of the Enlightenment, and they have had two major values: “freedom and reason are supposed to coincide: increased rationality is held to be the prime condition of increased freedom.”
Mills said that in The Fourth Epoch, “increased rationality may not be assumed to make for increased freedom… Great and rational organizations―in brief, bureaucracies―have indeed increased, but the substantive reason of the individual at large has not… they are a means of tyranny and manipulation, a means of expropriating the very chance to reason, the very capacity to act as a free man.”
In Decline of the Left, Mills wrote, “Like religion, education in the U.S.A. competes with, and in due course, takes its place alongside, the other mass means of distraction, entertainment, and communication. These fabulous media do not often truly communicate; they do not connect public issues with private troubles; they do not often make clear the human meaning of impersonal and often atrocious events and historic decisions. They trivialize issues, and they convert public into mere ‘media markets.’ The image of self-cultivating man as a goal of the human being has everywhere declined.”
There are ample indications that Mills was not a Communist, and even did not subscribe to a full Marxist agenda, despite his emphasis on the importance of class and the economy. As Max Weber before him, he believed that Marx was useful but had been proved to be incomplete and unrealistic.
“The major developments of our time can be adequately understood in terms of neither the liberal nor the Marxian interpretation of politics and culture,” wrote Mills.
In Decline of the Left, he wrote, “The formal freedom of the West rests upon cultural traditions of great force; it is very real―this freedom; and it has been, and is immensely valuable… Certainly in America today there is much more celebration and defense of civil liberties than insurgent and effective use of them.”
Summers wrote, “By representing no one party, he could speak credibly to many different parties. His greatest achievement was his independence.”
Mills: Critic of Contemporary Methods of the Social Sciences
Mills was also very critical of the dominant methods in the social sciences, which he thought “insur[es] that no one learns too much about man and society.” In two essays, “Thorstein Veblen” and “IBM Plus Reality Plus Humanism=Sociology”, he outlines the major issues with the “Higher Statisticians” and the “Grand Theorists.”
Mills explains that theorists must do their work with a sense of reality and research technicians must work with larger meaning as well as mathematical ingenuity: “Both are going to have to drop their trivialization of subject matter and their pretentions about method,” he wrote.
In the essay on The Power Elite: Comments and Criticism, Mills wrote: “we’ve refused to give up the larger problems because of any initial dogma about method. Above all, we’ve refused to become silly about transferring the models of physical and mathematical proof into the social studies.”
Mills had a strong dislike for the ascendency of quantitative methods and grand theory (Talcott Parsons, for example) in the sociology discipline of the 1950s, neither of which had much use for historical context or address the great issues of the day.
Instead, Mills identified with a tradition that goes back to ancient times. In Are We Loosing Our Sense of Belonging, Mills wrote that he, like others who ask serious questions and try to answer them, belong to the “minority which has carried the big discourse of the rational mind,” which has been going on “since western society began some two thousand years ago in the small communities of Athens and Jerusalem.”
According to Summers, Mills died in his sleep on March 20, 1962, and etched in his tombstone was an aphorism: “I have tried to be objective. I do not claim to be detached.”
The Epoch in Which We Live
Mills’ intense independent research on the big issues, radical departure from the conventions of his peers, anarchism, strong moral sense of responsibility as an intellectual, unrelenting criticisms of U.S. foreign policies, and his prophetic warnings about threats to freedom and democracy are a lasting legacy that continues to inspire a new generation of social thinkers.
Considering the depth and breadth of research and rational descriptions of the big issues, Mills’ theory should not be dismissed as some conspiracy theory. It is complex and intricate, well grounded in facts, structurally and historically. Even some mainstream conservative scholars, who may find issues with Mills’ tendencies toward the Left, agree with much of Mills’ descriptions of the big issues.
Bryan S. Turner, who wrote the preface to From Max Weber, Essays in Sociology, suggests that the eminent sociologist Max Weber was a powerful influence on the young C. Wright Mills and much of Mills’ concept of “the power elite” is an application of Weber’s distinction between class, status, and power. But Mills’ is not merely a derivative of Max Weber who died in 1920 and did not witness the rise of the U.S. to preeminence in world affairs.
Now with the shifting of world powers and the declining U.S., Mills’ deep analysis of the character and structure of American society may yet provide valuable insight on the special role of the U.S. for the coming epoch.
Summers outlines what is not included in the collection in The Politics of Truth: four technical essays on sociology of knowledge by Mills and a series of autobiographical letters. The letters and many photographs of Mills, his family, and friends are available in C. Wright Mills: Letters and Autobiographical Writings, edited by Mills’ daughters Kathryn and Pamela Mills.
The collection in The Politics of Truth cannot be a substitute for his influential works such as The Power Elite, White Collar, and The Sociological Imagination. The collection sheds much light on the man who wrote these classics. It stands as a valuable reference and supplement to the life work of a brilliant and daring American intellectual who died too young.
Whether you agree or disagree with Mills, the work and the man can provide valuable lessons on what is truly important to us and challenge us to determine for ourselves where each of us should stand in our present epoch.
References
C. Wright Mills. 2008. The Politics of Truth: Selected Writings of C. Wright Mills. Oxford University Press, Inc. ISBN 978-0-19-534304-5
C. Wright Mills. 2000. The Power Elite. Oxford University Press, Inc. ISBN-13 978-0-19-513354-7
Andrew J. Bacevich. 2008. The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism. Metropolitan Books. ISBN-13: 978-0-8050-8815-1
Edited by H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (with new preface by Bryan S. Turner). 2009. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-48269-1
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