Michael J. Thompson Stephen Eric Bronner Wadood Hamad - Logos

Stanley Aronowitz
Logos 2.3 – Summer 2003
I
C. Wright Mills is exemplary of a vanishing breed in American life: the public
political intellectual who, despite his grating message, often received a hearing
in mainstream media. For almost fifteen years, beginning with the publication
of The New Men of Power in 1948 and ending with his untimely death, at age
forty six, in 1962, Mills was among America’s best known social scientists and
social critics. During the late 1940s and 1950s he published three books that
constitute a theory and description of the post-World War II American social
structure. His Sociological Imagination remains widely read in college
classrooms, both for its attempt to provide a socially-committed introduction
to the discipline, and its fierce critique of the prevailing tendencies in American
sociology, what Mills calls “Grand Theory” and “Abstracted Empiricism.” The
grand theorist’s scope is much too wide to yield practical and theoretical
insight. And Mills criticizes the legions of Abstracted Empiricists who, in the
service of incrementally accumulated verifiable scientific knowledge, confine
themselves to producing small-scale investigations. Together with his
collaborator and mentor, Hans Gerth, he edited one of the earliest and best
collections in English translation of Max Weber’s essays. And Character and
Social Structure (1954), written with Gerth, an unjustly neglected work, may
be considered Mills’s premier work of social theory. This book elaborates what
I claim was the “scaffolding” upon which he hung his major works of middle
range theory, especially the triology. In fact, it is difficult to fully comprehend
the harsh critiques of Sociological Imagination, and Mills’s method, without the
elaborated theoretical framework of Character.
While not exactly a household name, he was widely known among the
politically active population and wide circles of academic and independent
intellectuals. Unlike many public intellectuals he was neither a servant nor a
supplicant of power but, in the sense of the 17th century English radical, was a
“ranter”; in American terms, he was a Paul Revere whose job it was to sound
the alarm. Indeed, some of his writings recall the pamphlets of the decades of
the American revolution where the address of numerous and often anonymous
writers was to the “publick” of small farmers and artisans, as much as to those
holding political and economic power. Much of his later writing may be