Mills, Charles Wright

MILLS, CHARLES WRIGHT (1916–1962). Radical sociologist and social critic, C. Wright Mills was one of the most important left-wing intellectuals of his generation. Born in Waco, Texas in 1916, Mills studied at the University of Texas at Austin and earned his PhD at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1942. At Wisconsin, Mills worked closely with left-wing German émigré sociologist Hans Gerth; together they published an early and important English translation of essays by Max Weber, From Max Weber (1946). Mills landed a position teaching sociology at Columbia College in 1946. Though Mills quickly became alienated from Columbia sociologists, whom he memorably critiqued along with the profession at large in The Sociological Imagination (1959), he forged important connections with several left-wing “New York intellectuals” such as Dwight MacDonald.

Mills’s most influential works expressed a disillusioned radicalism that offered a powerful critique of American society while despairing of changing it and emerged from a period of left-wing retrenchment. White Collar (1951) analyzed the “new middle class” of office workers whom Mills described as trapped by bureaucratic institutions into lives devoid of creativity, individuality, and public engagement. The Power Elite (1956) identified an interlocking ruling class of corporate, political, and military leaders who made major decisions with little democratic input. At a time when liberals celebrated the United States as a pluralistic democracy, The Power Elite was one of very few books in its era to identify the emergence of the military-industrial complex and its damaging effects on American democracy.

An unaffiliated intellectual broadly associated with the anti-Stalinist left, Mills’s political engagement spanned the period from the decline of the Old Left of the 1930s and 1940s to the rise of the New Left in the late 1950s. For a short but significant period after World War II, Mills committed himself to the progressive wing of the surging US labor movement represented by the United Automobile Workers (UAW). This engagement led to the publication of Mills’s first book, The New Men of Power (1948), though by the time it appeared Mills had already discerned the incorporation of labor leaders into the postwar political order as “junior partners.”

Beginning in the mid-1950s, Mills became one of the first to identify the emergence of a “New Left.” Indeed, Mills popularized the term with his publication of “Letter to the New Left” in the British New Left Review in 1960 (subsequently reprinted in the United States in Studies on the Left) that identified the growth of a “young intelligentsia” of peace activists and non-Communist Third World revolutionaries. In his final book, Listen, Yankee (1960) Mills defended the Cuban Revolution from its critics. Despite his untimely death of a heart attack, Mills’s work had a significant influence on the American and global left during the long 1960s.

Geary, Daniel. Radical Ambition: C. Wright Mills, the Left, and American Social Thought. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009.

Mills, Kate and Mills, Pamela, eds. C. Wright Mills: Letters and Autobiographical Writings. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.

Trevino, Javier. C. Wright Mills and the Cuban Revolution: An Exercise in Sociological Imagination. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017.

C. Wright Mills Official Website. http://www.cwrightmills.org

A Guide to the Charles Wright Mills Papers, 1929-1975, 1997, 2000. Briscoe Center for American History. University of Texas at Austin. https://legacy.lib.utexas.edu/taro/utcah/01094/cah-01094.html