Michael J. Thompson Stephen Eric Bronner Wadood Hamad - Logos

Stanley Aronowitz
Naming the power élite as the only “independent variable” in American
society, Mills was obliged to revise his earlier estimation of the labor
movement. Barely eight years after designating the labor leaders “new men of
power” who had to choose whether to lead the entire society in the name of
working people and other subordinate groups he designated them a
“dependent variable” in the political economy. Accordingly, he lost hope that,
in any possible practical eventuality, working people and their unions would
enter the historical stage as autonomous actors, at least until a powerful new
left of intellectuals and other oppressed groups emerged to push them.
Mills’s identification of power with the triumvirate of corporation, military
and national state, was offered in the same period that political theorists and
sociologists were proclaiming the concept of pluralism as a more accurate
description. Robert Dahl’s Who Governs, a study of the city of New Haven’s
power structure, construed power in the metaphor of a parallelogram of forces,
none of which dominated political decision-making. Business, labor, consumer
groups such as parent associations, taxpayers and other organized groups
constituted power relationships through the mechanisms of compromise and
consensus. Although not denying that big business and the political directorate
exhibited oligarchic tendencies, Dahl vehemently refuted the concepts
associated with both Marxism and élite theory that there were clearly
articulated ruling groups that were the only genuine independent force. Dahl’s
study became not only a model for the understanding of local power, but of
national power as well. As persuasive as Mills’s argument may have been for
progressives and other political skeptics, his views were subject to the severe
criticism of many of his fellow academics as well as reviewers. For some he had
failed to appreciate the resilience of American democracy, was importing ideas
inherited from the non-applicable European context to American
circumstances and, in any case, had offered yet another exercise in debunking.
II
HE DID HIS GRADUATE WORK AT Wisconsin under the mentorship of, among
others, Hans Gerth, whose powerful mind was never matched by a body of
equally compelling written work. In some respects, Mills gave an English
language voice to Gerth’s ideas (although the collaboration has lately been
Logos 2.3 – Summer 2003