Critic and Crusader

I

Even if the rest of this sentence reads like an oxymoron, C. Wright Mills was the most inspiring sociologist of the second half of the 20th century, his achievement all the more remarkable for the fact that he died at 45 and produced his major work in a span of little more than a decade. For the political generation trying to find bearings in the early ‘60s, Mills was a guiding knight of radicalism. Yet he was a bundle of paradoxes, and this was part of his appeal, whether his readers were consciously attuned to the paradoxes or not. He was a radical disabused of radical traditions, a sociologist disgruntled with the course of sociology, an intellectual frequently skeptical of intellectuals, a defender of popular action as well as a craftsman, a despairing optimist, a vigorous pessimist and, all in all, one of the few contemporaries whose intelligence, verve, passion, scope--and contradictions--seemed alive to most of the main moral and political traps of his time. A philosophically trained and best-selling sociologist who decided to write pamphlets, a Populist who scrambled to find what was salvageable within the Marxist tradition, a loner committed to politics, a man of substance acutely cognizant of style, he was not only a guide but an exemplar, prefiguring in his paradoxes some of the tensions of a student movement that was reared on privilege, amid exhausted ideologies, yet hellbent on finding, or forging, the leverage with which to transform America root and branch.

In his two final years, Mills the writer became a public figure, his tracts against the Cold War and U.S. Latin American policy more widely read than any other radical’s, his “Listen, Yankee,” featured on the cover of Harper’s magazine, his “Letter to the New Left” published in both England (New Left Review) and America (Studies on the Left) and distributed, in mimeographed form, by Students for a Democratic Society.

In December 1960, cramming for a television network debate on Latin America policy with a leading establishmentarian, Mills suffered a heart attack, and when he died 15 months, later he was instantly acclaimed by his admirers as a martyr. SDS’s Port Huron Statement carries echoes of Mills’ prose, and Tom Hayden, its principal author, wrote his master’s thesis on Mills, whom he labeled “Radical Nomad,” a heroic if quixotic figure who, like the New Left itself, tried to bull through the ideological logjam. After his death, one son of the New Left founders was named for Mills, along with at least one cat, my own, so called because he was almost red.

Mills’ writing was charged--seared--by a keen awareness of human initiative and disappointment, a passionate feeling for the human adventure and a commitment to dignity. In many ways the style was the man. In a vigorous, instantly recognizable prose, he hammered home again and again the notion that people lived lives that were not only bounded by social circumstance but deeply shaped by social forces not of their own making and that this irreducible fact had two consequences: It lent most human life a tragic aspect with a social root and created the potential--if only people saw a way forward--of improving life in a big way by concerted action.

*

In “The Sociological Imagination” and other works, Mills insisted that a sociologist’s proper subject was the intersection of biography and history. His own biography and history met in a distinctly American paradox: He was the lone artisan who belonged by refusing to belong. “I have been intellectually, politically, morally alone,” he would write in an essay that went unpublished in his lifetime. “I have never known what others call ‘fraternity’ with any group, however small, neither academic nor political. With a few individuals, yes, I have known it, but with groups however small, no. . . . And the plain truth, so far as I know, is that I do not cry for it.” “Intellectually and culturally I am as ‘self-made’ as it is possible to be,” he declared. His “direction” was that “of the independent craftsman”--”craftsman” was one of his favorite words. “I am a Wobbly, personally, down deep and for good. . . . I take Wobbly to mean one thing: the opposite of bureaucrat.” In the midst of his activist pamphleteering, he could still write: “I am a politician without a party” or, to put it another way, a party of one.

His forceful prose, his instinct for significant controversy, his Texas hell-for-leather aura, his reputation for intellectual fearlessness and his passion for craftsmanship seemed all of a piece. A free intellectual tempted by action, he was an outsider who counterposed himself not only to liberal academics who devoted themselves to explaining why radical change was either foreclosed or undesirable but also to the court intellectuals, the fawning men of power and quantification who clustered around the Kennedy administration and later helped anoint it Camelot. The Camelot insiders might speak of a New Frontier while living in glamour and reveling in power; Mills, the loner, the anti-bureaucrat, was staking out a New Frontier of his own.

It was not incidental to his appeal that his prose was hard-driving, properly labeled muscular. Mills worked hard for two decades to perfect his style. It was frequently vivid and moving, often pointedly colloquial, though at times clumsy from an excess of deliberation. He was partial to collisions between nouns of action and nouns of failure--”showdown” and “thrust” versus “drift” and “default.” He reveled in polemical categories like “crackpot realism” and “the military metaphysic.” This style was, in the best sense of the word, masculine, though hardly macho--a macho writer would not be haunted by the prospect of mass violence or write that the “central goal of Western humanism [was] . . . the audacious control by reason of man’s fate.”

Mills’ efforts at audacious control of his own fate were (to put it mildly) vexed, not least by his premature death. One work he left unfinished was the meditative intellectual memoir quoted above, taking the form of a series of open letters addressed, fittingly enough, to a figure who did not exist: an imagined Russian intellectual opposite number Mills called “Tovarich” (for comrade), a man with whom he could see making a separate peace amid the frozen wastes of the Cold War. The audience to whom Mills wrote some of his most self-revealing words, to whom he wished to explain himself, with whom he could imagine making a separate peace was a useful fiction who, he thought, faced troubles comparable to his own. The “Tovarich” essays are among the highlights of the long overdue “C. Wright Mills: Letters and Autobiographical Writings,” edited by his daughters, Kathryn Mills with Pamela Mills, a book of many revelations and felicities that sees the light of day 38 years after Mills’ death. This volume assembles many interesting elements of Mills’ intellectual and political profile, gathering many letters to and from fellow writers and restlessly unacademic academics, from friends and relations. It is not a critical study, nor does it satisfy (to adapt Joyce Carol Oates’ term) pathographic impulses. But it is indispensable to a picture of intellectuals and politics in our time, tracing out the contours of a robust life of the mind, an odyssey that seems as quaint today as anything in Homer.

II

“I have never had occasion to take very seriously much of American sociology as such,” Mills had the audacity to write in an application for a Guggenheim grant in 1944. He told the foundation that he wrote for journals of opinion and “little magazines” because they took on the right topics “and even more because I wished to rid myself of a crippling academic prose and to develop an intelligible way of communicating modern social science to nonspecialized publics.” (He got the grant.) At 28, the loner already wished to explain himself; the freelance politico wished to have on his side a reasoning public without letting it exact a suffocating conformity as the price of its support. Mills knew the difference between popularity, which he welcomed as a way to promote his ideas, and the desire to live a free life, which was irreducible; for (he wrote in a letter at 40) “way down deep and systematically I’m a goddamned anarchist.”

Not any old goddamned anarchist, however. Certainly not an intellectual slob. He respected rigor, aspired to the high calling of craft, was usually unafraid of serious criticism and liked to respond to it, liked the rough and tumble of straightforward dispute. Craft, not methodology--the distinction was crucial. Methodology was rigor mortis, dead rigor, rigor fossilized into statistical arcana so fetishized as to have eclipsed the real stakes of research. Craft was work done with respect for materials, clarity about objectives and a sense of the high drama and stakes of intellectual life. Craft partook of rigor, but rigor could not guarantee craft. A mastery of craft required not only technical knowledge and logic but a general curiosity, a Renaissance range of skills, a grasp of history and culture. It was the craft of sociological imagination, not a hyper-refinement of methodology, after all, that produced the other great sociological survival of the 1950s, David Riesman’s “The Lonely Crowd,” a masterpiece on American national character.

“The Sociological Imagination,” Mills’ most enduring book, ends with an appendix called “On Intellectual Craftsmanship,” which ends, in turn, with these words (which, as it happens, I typed on an index card and posted next to my typewriter in college, hoping to live up to the spirit): “Before you are through with any piece of work, no matter how indirectly on occasion, orient it to the central and continuing task of understanding the structure and the drift, the shaping and the meanings, of your own period, the terrible and magnificent world of human society in the second half of the twentieth century.” Some mission for pale sociology!

Like “The Lonely Crowd,” Mills’ major books--”The New Men of Power” (1948), “White Collar” (1951), “The Power Elite” (1956)--were driven by large topics, not method or theory, yet they were also driven by a spirit of adventure. (Mills was so far from the main temper of sociology as to prefer the term “social studies” to “social sciences.”) That a sociologist should work painstakingly throughout a career to fill in a big picture should not seem as remarkable as it does today. In “The Sociological Imagination,” Mills grandly excoriated the two dominant tendencies of mainstream sociology, the bloated puffery of Grand Theory and the microscopic marginality of Abstracted Empiricism, in terms that remain as important and vivid (and sometimes hilarious) today as they did 40 years ago. All the more so, perhaps, because sociology has slipped still deeper into the troughs Mills described. He would be amused at the way in which many postmodernists, Marxists and feminists have joined the former grandees of theory on what he called their “useless heights,” claiming high seriousness for their pirouettes and performances, their monastic and masturbatory exercises, their Populist cheerleading, political wishfulness and self-important grandiosity. He would not have thought capital-T Theory a serious blow against irresponsible power. I think he would have recognized the pretensions of Theory as a class-bound ideology--that of a “new class,” if you will--to be criticized just as he had exposed the supervisory ideology of the abstracted empiricists in their research teams doing the intellectual busywork of corporate and government bureaucracies. I think he would also have recognized, in the jargon-larded bravado of academic Theory, a sort of Leninist assumption--a dangerous one--about the irreplaceably high mission of academics, as if, once they got their Theory straight, they would proclaim it to a waiting world and consider their work done.

Of course Mills had a high sense of mission himself--not only his own mission but that of intellectuals in general and social scientists in particular. He was committed to intellectual work guided by fidelity to what Max Weber had called a “calling,” a vocation in the original sense of being summoned by a voice. Not that Mills (who with Hans Gerth edited the first significant compilation of Weber’s essays in English) agreed with Weber’s conclusion that “science as a vocation” and “politics as a vocation,” to name his two great essays on the subject, should be ruthlessly severed. Not at all. Mills thought the questions ought to come from values, but the answers should not be rigged. A crucial difference! If the results of research made you grumpy, too bad. But he also thought that good social science became good politics when it moved into the open and generated public discussion. He came to this activist idea of intellectual life partly by temperament--he was not one to take matters lying down--but also by deduction and by elimination. For if intellectuals were not going to break the intellectual logjam, who would?

This was not, for Mills, a merely rhetorical question. It was a question that, in the Deweyan pragmatic spirit that had been the subject of his doctoral dissertation, required an answer unfolding in real life through reflection upon experience. Mills concluded that if one were looking for a fusion of reason and power--at least potential power--there was nowhere else to look but to intellectuals. He had sorted through the available history-makers in his books of the late 1940s and 1950s--labor in “The New Men of Power,” the middle classes in “White Collar,” the chiefs of top institutions themselves in “The Power Elite.” Labor was not up to the challenge of structural reform, white collar employees were confused and rear guard and the power elite was irresponsible. Mills concluded (partly by elimination) that intellectuals and only intellectuals had a fighting chance to deploy reason. Because they could embody reason in addressing social problems when no one else could do so, it was incumbent upon them to try, in addressing a problem, to have “a view of the strategic points of intervention--of the ‘levers’ by which the structure may be maintained or changed; and an assessment of those who are in a position to intervene but are not doing so.”

As he would write in “The Marxists,” a political philosophy had to encompass not only an analysis of society and a set of theories of how it works but “an ethic, an articulation of ideals.” It followed that intellectuals should be explicit about their values and rigorous in considering contrary positions. It also followed that research work should be supplemented by blunt writing that was meant to inform and mobilize what he called, following John Dewey, “publics.” In Mills’ words, “The education and the political role of social science in a democracy is to help cultivate and sustain publics and individuals that are able to develop, to live with, and to act upon adequate definitions of personal and social realities.”

To a degree that would inspire cynicism today, Mills was unambivalent about reason--or its attainability, even as a glimmering goal that could never be reached but could be approximated ever more closely, asymptotically. To the contrary. He wrote about the Enlightenment without a sneer. With pre-postmodern rigor, he argued that the problem with the condition of the Enlightenment at mid-century was not that we had too much Enlightenment but that we had too little, and the tragedy was that the universal genuflection to technical rationality--in the form of scientific research, business calculation and state planning--was the perfect disguise for this great default. The democratic self-governance of rational men and women was damaged partly by the bureaucratization of the economy and the state. (This was a restatement of Weber’s great discovery: that increased rationality of institutions made for less freedom, or least no more freedom, of individuals.) And democratic prospects were damaged, too--in ways that Mills was trying to work out when he died--because the West was coping poorly with the entry of the “underdeveloped” countries onto the world stage and because neither liberalism (which had, in the main, degenerated into techniques of “liberal practicality”) nor Marxism (which had, in the main, degenerated into a blind doctrine that rationalized tyranny) could address their urgent needs. “Our major orientations--liberalism and socialism--have virtually collapsed as adequate explanations of the world and of ourselves,” he wrote. This was dead on.

III

Forty years is a long time in the social sciences (or better, social studies). Not only does society change, so do scholarly procedures. The cycle of generations all by itself would guarantee some change, for young scholars must carve out new niches in order to distinguish themselves from their predecessors and the material from which they must carve is the old discipline itself. So do styles and vocabulary transmute; so do the governing paradigms turn over. When Mills wrote, and through the 1960s, administrative research was a growth industry, Mills accordingly singled it out for attention--and scorn--in “The Sociological Imagination.” In the thick of the Cold War, Abstracted Empiricism was useful not only to corporations but to government agencies. But the money ran out, as did the confidence in government-sponsored planning and what Mills called “liberal practicality.” Accordingly, today’s Abstracted Empiricism is not as prestigious as in Mills’ days. Likewise, the Grand Theory that would fill him with mirth today would less likely be Talcott Parsons’ than Michel Foucault’s, in which power, having been virtually nothing in the structural-functionalism of the 1950s, turns out to be everything.

This makes it all the more remarkable that, at the turn of the millennium, most of “The Sociological Imagination” remains as valid, and necessary, as ever. Forty years ago, Mills identified the main directions of sociology in terms largely apropos today: “a set of bureaucratic techniques which inhibit social inquiry by methodological pretensions, which congest such work by obscurantist conceptions, or which trivialize it by concern with minor problems unconnected with publicly relevant issues.” It remains true, as he noted in defending the high purpose of sociology, that literature, art and criticism largely fail to bring intellectual clarity to social life. The sense of political limbo is once again palpable. In the West, as Mills wrote, “the frequent absence of engaging legitimation and the prevalence of mass apathy are surely two of the central political facts.” “Prosperity,” however unequally distributed (and it is vastly more unequal today than in 1959), once again is touted as the all-purpose solution to social problems. Unfortunately, these declarations of Mills’ have proved largely prophetic.

Still, four decades are four decades--longer than Mills’ adult lifetime--and not surprisingly, tangible social changes require that his outlook be updated. First, Mills was concerned about hidden authority, authority that was tacit, veiled and therefore not at issue in public life. In the muddle of Eisenhower’s America, the clustering of powerful corporations did not meet with cogent criticism. (Recall that “The Sociological Imagination” was published more than a year before Eisenhower warned against the power of the “military-industrial complex.”) The left was defunct, the right more preoccupied with the dangers of communism than the usurpation of power by private institutions. Moreover, the population was largely content with the reigning combination of affluence and Cold War. When government power intervened to build interstate highways, to finance suburbs or subsidize research universities, few objected. Today, authorities of all sorts are more likely to be suspected, mocked and scorned than invisible. The Cold War is no longer available as a rationale for government power. As a result of the cultural upheavals of the 1960s and the uninterrupted fascination with personal liberation through commodities, what has become normal is disrespect for almost all institutions and traditions--the branches of government, business, labor, the media, the professions. Such political faith as there is honors the mythology of the market, an institution that is more a mystique than a firm structure, since it presupposes government preferences and subsidies. The dominant ideology, in a sense, is anti-institutional--what Robert Bellah and his colleagues, in “Habits of the Heart,” called “expressive individualism.” Since the Vietnam War, Watergate and the election of Ronald Reagan, the faith in liberal practicality that Mills sought to overcome has been considerably tarnished, since government action has been largely delegitimized except when police action and incarceration are at issue or pork barrels remain to be disgorged.

Today, too, it cannot be said, with Mills, that “much private uneasiness goes unformulated.” To the contrary. In the United States, complacency about most social arrangements curiously coexists with widespread anxiety about them--or rather, anxieties in the plural, as the varieties of dissatisfaction and estrangement do not coalesce along a single axis of conflict. To the extent that “malaise and indifference . . . form the social and personal climate of contemporary American society,” as Mills wrote, they coexist with many dispersed antagonisms, a vast proliferation of groups and labels which Americans believe they can blame for their troubles. For conservatives, it is the liberal media, or secular humanism, or government bureaucracy, or moral relativism, or a breakdown of patriotism, or uppity minorities. For liberals, it is the conservative media, or resurgent capital, or racism, or market ideology sponsored by right-wing foundations. For feminists, it is patriarchy; for patriarchs, feminism. When “The Sociological Imagination” was published, public demonstrations were jarringly uncommon; today, they are normal, even banal. Political sentiments on every side have been professionalized. The insurgencies of the 1960s, having succeeded in taking up Mills’ call to convert private troubles to public issues, have often been plasticized into “astroturf” and “grass-tops” pseudo-movements.

Hopeful about a revival of democratic engagement, Mills did not fully appreciate just how much enthusiasm Americans could bring to acquiring and using consumer goods. He underestimated the degree to which, starting in the late 1960s, majorities in democratic society would find satisfactions, even provisional identities or clusters of identities, in the acquisition of commodities. His America was still sheltered from hedonism by the Puritan overhang of the work ethic. Still, he did prefigure one of the striking ideas of perhaps his most formidable antagonist, Daniel Bell--namely, the centrality, in corporate capitalism, of the tension between getting (via the Protestant ethic) and spending (via the hedonistic ethic). He would have been struck by the fact that most Americans not only have money to spend, or are willing to borrow it, but that they have channeled the spirit of fun into technological wizardry.

Which brings me to another transformation postdating 1959, namely, the growing presence of the media--not only what used to be called the mass media, with single corporate senders beaming their signals to tens of millions of receivers but the whole dynamic, synergistic welter of television, radio, magazines, toys, advertising, the Internet, the Walkman--linking up multinational conglomerates with demographic niches, saturating daily experience in manifold ways, soaking up attention. This transformation, still underway, requires a new application of the sociological imagination, as Mills well knew. (A projected volume on “the cultural apparatus” was one casualty of his untimely death.) Amid the immensity of popular culture, he would have been aghast, but not surprised, to see how the language of private life has penetrated into the conflicts of public value, so that the clash of national political cultures during the Clinton administration was steeped in the language of confession, “co-dependency” and “feeling your pain.” In this sense, it remains true, in Mills’ words, that “many great public issues as well as many private troubles are described in terms of ‘the psychiatric.’ ” If today “the psychiatric” is less likely to be discussed in psychoanalytic terms than in the language of self-help 12-step programs, confessions and the like--as on TV talk shows--this is nonetheless not what Mills meant by the conversion of private troubles to public issues; it is more the other way round.

*

Mills did not sufficiently apply his sociological imagination to the vexing central problem of race. Mills himself hated racism, but although he lived through the early years of the civil rights movement, he wrote surprisingly little about the dynamics of race in American life. The students of the civil rights movement attracted him as one of many groupings of young intellectuals rising into history around the globe, but the way in which racial identification shaped and distorted people’s life chances did not loom large in his thinking. Today, race has become so salient in American social structure and discourse as, at times, to drown out other contending forces. Since Mills’ death, other non-class dimensions of identity have also reared up in importance--as scales that sort out opportunities and prisms that refract reality, bending the rays of light that Americans (and others) use to see the world. Sex and sexuality, religion and region are still other forces that the sociological imagination today must reckon with, and centrally. Such advances as sociology has made since the 1950s, in fact, emerge precisely here: in analyses of the dynamics of sex and gender, of race and ethnicity, some of them inspired by Mills’ own call to understand private troubles as public issues.

Finally, it is a curious fact about contemporary culture that sociological language has, in many ways, become a normal element in commonplace talk as well as political speech, though often in degraded form. In one dreary irony of a spongy culture, the sociological gloss on ephemeral events is, by now, a routine component of popular journalism. This is, in part, a tribute to the success of sociology in entering the academic curriculum. Journalists and editors have taken the courses and learned to talk the talk; they are no longer confident that, without expertise, they can follow the main contours of social change. But the result is that, in popular talk and in the media, as in the academy and the behind-the-scenes work of advertising agencies and political consultants, sociological imagination has been trivialized by a debased success. Not a commercial movie or toy or TV series succeeds today without commentary springing up to “explain” its success with reference to the “strains,” “insecurities” and “frustrations” of the contemporary era. Corporations hire consultants to anticipate, or shape, demand with the benefit of a once-over-lightly reading of social trends. Myself, frequently called upon to offer such divinations in sociological lingo, I have watched the media appetite for plausible-sounding, expert-delivered tidbits stretch out to become a staple of conventional entertainment coverage. What does it mean that two movies of type X are suddenly hits or that a new toy, or fashion, or term or candidate, is hot? In the media, a pass at sociological understanding has become an acceptable, indeed almost obligatory, element in the trend story, stamping the report as something more reputable than the guesswork of fans. The same has happened in the field of cultural studies, in which popular ephemera were elevated to objects worthy of the most ponderous scrutiny. Pop sociology is sociological imagination lite, a fast food version of nutriment, a sprinkling of holy water on the commercial trend of the moment and a trivialization of insight.

Mills not only invoked the sociological imagination, he practiced it brilliantly. Careful critics like David Riesman, who thought Mills’ picture of white-collar workers too monolithically gloomy, still acknowledged the insight of his portraits and the soundness of his research. For all that his life was cut short, more of his work endures than that of any other critic of his time. His was an indispensable, brilliant voice in sociology and social criticism--and in the difficult, necessary effort to link the two. He was a restless, engaged, engaging moralist who asked the big questions. His work remains bracing, often enough thrilling, even when one disagrees. One reads and rereads him with a feeling of being challenged beyond one’s received wisdom, called to one’s best thinking. For an intellectual of our time, no higher praise is possible.