The killing fields of inequality
by Göran Therborn
Eurozine
There are three main ways of distinguishing between difference and inequality. First, a difference may be horizontal, without anything or anybody being higher or lower, better or worse, whereas an inequality is always vertical, or involves ranking. Secondly, differences are matters of taste and/or of categorisation only. An inequality, on the other hand, is not just a categorisation; it is something that violates a moral norm of equality among human beings. (To argue this is not to presuppose any norm of complete equality, but to point to a difference that is too big and/or has an undeserved direction, i.e. the wrong people getting the best rewards.) Thirdly, for a difference to become an inequality it must also be abolishable. The greater physical prowess of the average 20-year-old in comparison with the average 60-year-old is not an inequality. But the different social life-chances of women as compared to men, or of black working-class boys in comparison with white bankers boys, have come to be seen as inequalities. In one sentence: inequalities are avoidable, morally unjustified, hierarchical differences.
There are (at least) three fundamentally different kinds of inequality, and all of them are destructive of human lives and of human societies.
There is inequality of health and death, which we may call vital inequality. True, we are all mortal and physically vulnerable, and in some sense our life-tree is decided by some inscrutable lottery. However, hard evidence is piling up that health and longevity are distributed with clearly visible social patterns. Children in poor countries and poor classes die more often before the age of one, and between the age of one and five, than children in rich countries and rich classes. Low-status people in Britain die more often before retirement age than high-status people, and if they survive have shorter lives in retirement. A retired British male bank or insurance employee, for instance, can look forward to seven to eight more years of retirement life than a retired employee of Whitbread or Tesco (Financial Times, 20/21.10.07). Vital inequality, which we can measure relatively easily through life expectancy and survival rates, is literally destroying millions of human lives in the world every year.
Existential inequality hits you as a person. It restricts the freedom of action of certain categories of persons, for instance of women in public spaces and spheres, as in Victorian and Edwardian Britain, and as in some countries still today. Existential inequality means denial of (equal) recognition and respect, and is a potent generator of humiliations, for black people, (Amer-)Indians, women in patriarchal societies, poor immigrants, low castes and stigmatised ethnic groups. It is important to note here that existential inequality does not only take the form of blatant discrimination; it also operates effectively through more subtle status hierarchies.
Thirdly, there is material or resource inequality, meaning that human actors have very different resources to draw upon. We can distinguish two aspects here. The first is inequality of access – to education, career tracks and social contacts, to what is called "social capital". In conventional mainstream discussions this aspect is often referred to as "inequality of opportunity". The second is inequality of rewards, often referred to as inequality of outcome. This is the most frequently used measure of inequality – the distribution of income, sometimes also of wealth.
These three kinds of inequality interact with and influence each other. But it is useful to distinguish between them because, as well as having different types of effects on people, the different kinds of inequality have different trajectories in different periods – which means that they are governed by different causal mechanisms.
Inequality can be produced in four basic ways. First there is distantiation – some people are running ahead and/or others falling behind. Secondly there is the mechanism of exclusion – through which a barrier is erected making it impossible, or at least more difficult, for certain categories of people to access a good life. Thirdly, the institutions of hierarchy mean that societies and organisations are constituted as ladders, with some people perched on top and others below. Finally, there is exploitation, in which the riches of the rich derive from the toil and the subjection of the poor and the disadvantaged.
The historical importance of these mechanisms in generating the configuration of the modern world is hotly disputed. Are current inequalities primarily a product of North Atlantic nations forging ahead, through scientific and industrial innovations? Or are they rather an effect of exclusion, for example the British empire's hindering of Indian industry from developing? Did the "modern world system" after 1500 spawn a world hierarchy of a core, a semi-periphery, and periphery? Or was the rise of the West mainly driven by armed exploitation, by the plunder of American metals, by plantation slavery, and by forced and underpaid commodity production in the South? The debate remains unfinished, both because of the ambiguity of the evidence – there is empirical support for all four mechanisms, but it is difficult to weigh them in relation to each other – and because of the high moral historical stakes involved.
In this article, however, we shall look into the ways in which current inequalities are being produced.
To Read the Rest of the Essay
Showing posts with label Sociology. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sociology. Show all posts
Sunday, January 23, 2011
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
Claude Fischler: Americans need to stop multitasking while eating alone
Americans need to stop multitasking while eating alone, argues French sociologist Claude Fischler
Grist
...
Fischler and his colleagues surveyed 7,000 people from the United States and five European nations (France, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, and England) about their attitudes toward food and health. They found a spectrum of attitudes, with the U.S. occupying one extreme end and France, the other.
Here in the good ol' U.S. of A, our national identity as disparate, atomized individuals is reflected in how we see our food: nothing more than a sum of individual nutrients that can be customized to fit the health needs and tastes of the individual. Americans value choice in their diets above almost all else. They want to build a diet especially for their bodies and what they choose to put in their bodies is always their choice. The American obsession with choice stood out markedly from the other five countries surveyed, and is the case in other studies as well.
On the other hand, the French made clear that "not all eating is eating." Eating "requires a certain configuration of time, space, and people" to constitute a meal. For example, a Frenchwoman, Fischler recounted, would tell researchers that she hadn't eaten all day but then state plainly that she bought and consumed a pastry from a baker's stand. The French also honed in on food's quality and culinary identity: How does it taste? Where does it come from? How fresh is it?
It's not just what you're eating, it's who you're eating. Er, with! Who you're eating with.
Along these same lines, the English-speaking countries in the study (U.S. and Britain) distinguished themselves from the continental European nations (France, Switzerland, Germany, and Italy) by describing health as the main purpose of eating. For the others, health is a secondary benefit; social pleasures and the joy of life dominate continental Europeans' discussions about eating. As one Italian put it, "to eat good fish and drink good wine" with friends is the true meaning of eating well. That sounds convivial, even commensal. It also sounds worlds away from the anxiety revealed by middle-aged American women weighing the protein and carbohydrates necessary to eat well.
It's not surprising that attitudes toward eating differ among countries and cultures. But what are the consequences of those differences?
To Read the Rest of the Article
Grist
...
Fischler and his colleagues surveyed 7,000 people from the United States and five European nations (France, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, and England) about their attitudes toward food and health. They found a spectrum of attitudes, with the U.S. occupying one extreme end and France, the other.
Here in the good ol' U.S. of A, our national identity as disparate, atomized individuals is reflected in how we see our food: nothing more than a sum of individual nutrients that can be customized to fit the health needs and tastes of the individual. Americans value choice in their diets above almost all else. They want to build a diet especially for their bodies and what they choose to put in their bodies is always their choice. The American obsession with choice stood out markedly from the other five countries surveyed, and is the case in other studies as well.
On the other hand, the French made clear that "not all eating is eating." Eating "requires a certain configuration of time, space, and people" to constitute a meal. For example, a Frenchwoman, Fischler recounted, would tell researchers that she hadn't eaten all day but then state plainly that she bought and consumed a pastry from a baker's stand. The French also honed in on food's quality and culinary identity: How does it taste? Where does it come from? How fresh is it?
It's not just what you're eating, it's who you're eating. Er, with! Who you're eating with.
Along these same lines, the English-speaking countries in the study (U.S. and Britain) distinguished themselves from the continental European nations (France, Switzerland, Germany, and Italy) by describing health as the main purpose of eating. For the others, health is a secondary benefit; social pleasures and the joy of life dominate continental Europeans' discussions about eating. As one Italian put it, "to eat good fish and drink good wine" with friends is the true meaning of eating well. That sounds convivial, even commensal. It also sounds worlds away from the anxiety revealed by middle-aged American women weighing the protein and carbohydrates necessary to eat well.
It's not surprising that attitudes toward eating differ among countries and cultures. But what are the consequences of those differences?
To Read the Rest of the Article
Sunday, March 07, 2010
Etay Zwick: Predatory Habits -- How Wall Street Transformed Work in America
Predatory Habits: How Wall Street Transformed Work in America
By Etay Zwick
The Point
More than a century ago, Thorstein Veblen—American economist, sociologist and social critic—warned that the United States had developed a bizarre and debilitating network of social habits and economic institutions. Ascendant financial practices benefited a limited group at the expense of the greater society; yet paradoxically Americans deemed these practices necessary, even commendable. Far from lambasting the financiers plundering the nation’s resources, we lauded them as the finest members of society. Their instincts, wisdom and savoir faire were idealized, their avarice and chicanery promoted under the banners of patriotism and virtue.
Veblen, an inveterate reader of ethnographies, noticed a historical pattern that could illuminate America’s peculiar relationship with its economic institutions. Societies everywhere fall between two extremes. First, there are societies in which every person works, and no one is demeaned by his or her toil. In these societies, individuals pride themselves on their workmanship, and they exhibit a natural concern for the welfare of their entire community. As examples of such “productive” societies, Veblen mentions Native Americans, the Ainus of Japan, the Todas of the Nilgiri hills and the bushmen of Australia. Second, there are “barbarian” societies, in which a single dominant class (usually of warriors) seizes the wealth and produce of others through force or fraud—think ancient Vikings, Japanese shoguns and Polynesian tribesmen. Farmers labor for their livelihood and warriors expropriate the fruits of that labor. Exploitative elites take no part in the actual production of wealth; they live off the toil of others. Yet far from being judged criminal or indolent, they are revered by the rest of the community. In barbarian societies, nothing is as manly, as venerated, as envied, as the lives of warriors. Their every trait—their predatory practices, their dress, their sport, their gait, their speech—is held in high esteem by all.
Our world falls into the latter form. There remains a class that pillages, seizes and exploits in broad daylight—and with our envious approval. Who are the barbarian warriors today? According to Veblen, the modern barbarians live on Wall Street. They are the financiers summarily praised for their versatility, intelligence and courage in the face of an increasingly mysterious economy. Today a growing number of Americans feel at risk of economic despair; in a world of unsatisfying professional options and constant financial insecurity, the image of Wall Street life offers a sort of relief. It symbolizes the success possible in the modern world.
But in order to capitalize mortgage securities, expected future earnings and corporate debts, Wall Street elites must first capitalize on our personal insecurities. They make their exploits appear necessary, natural, even laudable. This is quite a feat, since in those moments when we suspend our faith in the financial sector and candidly examine its performance, we generally judge Wall Street’s behavior to be avaricious and destabilizing, immoral and imprudent. At the best of times, Wall Street provides white noise amidst entrepreneurs’ and workers’ attempts to actualize their ambitions and projects. We are still learning what happens at the worst of times.
The Myth of Finance
The myth of the financial sector goes something like this: only men and women equipped with the highest intelligence, the will to work death-defying hours and the most advanced technology can be entrusted with the sacred and mysterious task of ensuring the growth of the economy. Using complicated financial instruments, these elites (a) spread the risks involved in different ventures and (b) discipline firms to minimize costs—thus guaranteeing the best investments are extended sufficient credit. According to this myth, Wall Street is the economy’s private nutritionist, advising and assisting only the most motivated firms—and these fitter firms will provide jobs and pave the path to national prosperity. If the rest of us do not understand exactly why trading credit derivatives and commodity futures would achieve all this, this is because we are not as smart as the people working on Wall Street. Even Wall Street elites are happy to admit that they do not really know how the system works; such admissions only testify to the immensity of their noble task.
Many economists have tried to disabuse us of this myth. Twenty-five years before the recent financial crisis, Nobel Laureate James Tobin demonstrated that a very limited percent of the capital flow originating on Wall Street goes toward financing “real investments”—that is, investments in improving a firm’s production process. When large American corporations invest in new technology, they rely primarily on internal funds, not outside credit. The torrents of capital we see on Wall Street are devoted to a different purpose—speculation, gambling for capital gains. Finance’s second founding myth, that the stock market in particular is an “efficient” source for funding business ventures, simply doesn’t cohere with the history of American industrial development. When firms have needed to raise outside capital, they have generally issued debt—not stock. The stock market’s chief virtue has always been that it allows business elites to cash out of any enterprise by transferring ownership to other elites. Old owners then enjoy their new wealth, while new owners manage the same old corporation. The reality is that business elites promote the stock market far more than the stock market promotes economic growth.
Rather than foster growth, contemporary financial practices have primarily succeeded in exacerbating income inequality and creating singular forms of economic calamity. In the recent crisis, new instruments for expanding financial activity—justified at the time by reckless promises of universal homeownership—prompted a remarkable spiral of poverty, debt and downward mobility in America. The path from homeownership to homelessness, from apparent wealth and security to lack of basic shelter, is completely novel—as is the now steadily growing social group of “middle-class paupers.” (Ten percent of homeless people assisted by social service agencies last year lost their homes through bank foreclosures, according to the study “Foreclosure to Homelessness 2009.”) The homeless-through-foreclosure, having been persuaded by cheap credit to aspire to homeownership, were punished for unbefitting ambitions; any future pathway out of debt will be accompanied by new insecurities about the appropriateness of their life aspirations. Also novel in recent years is the extent to which economic “booms” no longer benefit average Americans. During the last economic “expansion” (between 2002 and 2007), fully two-thirds of all income gains flowed to the wealthiest one percent of the population. In 2007, the top 50 hedge and private equity managers averaged $588 million in annual compensation. On the other hand, the median income of ordinary Americans has dropped an average of $2,197 per year since 2000.
We habitually excuse Wall Street’s disproportionate earnings out of a sense that it helps American businesses thrive—but even corporations don’t quite benefit from Wall Street’s “services.” Consider the infamous merger between Daimler-Benz and Chrysler. In 1998, Goldman Sachs claimed that this merger would result in a $3 billion revenue gain. Stock prices responded extremely positively to the merger, which won the coveted Institutional Dealers’ Digest “Deal of the Year” Award. Only two years later, because of incongruities between the European and American parties, Chrysler lost $512 million in annual income, $1 billion in shareholder value in a single quarter, and was forced to lay off 26,000 workers. With the merger acknowledged as a failure, Chrysler was sold off from Daimler-Benz in 2007. Goldman Sachs, which had already made millions in windfall fees from the original merger, then walked away with millions more for advising the equity firm which now swooped in to pillage an ailing Chrysler. Bad advice seems to do little to tarnish Goldman’s golden reputation; after all, the firm can always point to its extraordinary profits as proof of talent and success. (Goldman Sachs ought to love the “bad publicity” it attracts nowadays; the headlines that reveal the billions made shorting housing and securities markets only solidify its status as Wall Street’s elite firm—capable of turning a profit even in times of economic crisis.)
The evidence suggests that Wall Street has assumed a negative relation to the economic interests of society at large. Many investment bankers are doubtless nice, hard-working people who give a lot of money to charity; nevertheless, they constitute a distinct class with interests diverging from society’s as a whole. This past year, unemployment skyrocketed from 6.2 to 10 percent. Meanwhile, Wall Street announced stock market gains of $4.6 trillion between March and October.
To Read the Rest of the Essay
By Etay Zwick
The Point
More than a century ago, Thorstein Veblen—American economist, sociologist and social critic—warned that the United States had developed a bizarre and debilitating network of social habits and economic institutions. Ascendant financial practices benefited a limited group at the expense of the greater society; yet paradoxically Americans deemed these practices necessary, even commendable. Far from lambasting the financiers plundering the nation’s resources, we lauded them as the finest members of society. Their instincts, wisdom and savoir faire were idealized, their avarice and chicanery promoted under the banners of patriotism and virtue.
Veblen, an inveterate reader of ethnographies, noticed a historical pattern that could illuminate America’s peculiar relationship with its economic institutions. Societies everywhere fall between two extremes. First, there are societies in which every person works, and no one is demeaned by his or her toil. In these societies, individuals pride themselves on their workmanship, and they exhibit a natural concern for the welfare of their entire community. As examples of such “productive” societies, Veblen mentions Native Americans, the Ainus of Japan, the Todas of the Nilgiri hills and the bushmen of Australia. Second, there are “barbarian” societies, in which a single dominant class (usually of warriors) seizes the wealth and produce of others through force or fraud—think ancient Vikings, Japanese shoguns and Polynesian tribesmen. Farmers labor for their livelihood and warriors expropriate the fruits of that labor. Exploitative elites take no part in the actual production of wealth; they live off the toil of others. Yet far from being judged criminal or indolent, they are revered by the rest of the community. In barbarian societies, nothing is as manly, as venerated, as envied, as the lives of warriors. Their every trait—their predatory practices, their dress, their sport, their gait, their speech—is held in high esteem by all.
Our world falls into the latter form. There remains a class that pillages, seizes and exploits in broad daylight—and with our envious approval. Who are the barbarian warriors today? According to Veblen, the modern barbarians live on Wall Street. They are the financiers summarily praised for their versatility, intelligence and courage in the face of an increasingly mysterious economy. Today a growing number of Americans feel at risk of economic despair; in a world of unsatisfying professional options and constant financial insecurity, the image of Wall Street life offers a sort of relief. It symbolizes the success possible in the modern world.
But in order to capitalize mortgage securities, expected future earnings and corporate debts, Wall Street elites must first capitalize on our personal insecurities. They make their exploits appear necessary, natural, even laudable. This is quite a feat, since in those moments when we suspend our faith in the financial sector and candidly examine its performance, we generally judge Wall Street’s behavior to be avaricious and destabilizing, immoral and imprudent. At the best of times, Wall Street provides white noise amidst entrepreneurs’ and workers’ attempts to actualize their ambitions and projects. We are still learning what happens at the worst of times.
The Myth of Finance
The myth of the financial sector goes something like this: only men and women equipped with the highest intelligence, the will to work death-defying hours and the most advanced technology can be entrusted with the sacred and mysterious task of ensuring the growth of the economy. Using complicated financial instruments, these elites (a) spread the risks involved in different ventures and (b) discipline firms to minimize costs—thus guaranteeing the best investments are extended sufficient credit. According to this myth, Wall Street is the economy’s private nutritionist, advising and assisting only the most motivated firms—and these fitter firms will provide jobs and pave the path to national prosperity. If the rest of us do not understand exactly why trading credit derivatives and commodity futures would achieve all this, this is because we are not as smart as the people working on Wall Street. Even Wall Street elites are happy to admit that they do not really know how the system works; such admissions only testify to the immensity of their noble task.
Many economists have tried to disabuse us of this myth. Twenty-five years before the recent financial crisis, Nobel Laureate James Tobin demonstrated that a very limited percent of the capital flow originating on Wall Street goes toward financing “real investments”—that is, investments in improving a firm’s production process. When large American corporations invest in new technology, they rely primarily on internal funds, not outside credit. The torrents of capital we see on Wall Street are devoted to a different purpose—speculation, gambling for capital gains. Finance’s second founding myth, that the stock market in particular is an “efficient” source for funding business ventures, simply doesn’t cohere with the history of American industrial development. When firms have needed to raise outside capital, they have generally issued debt—not stock. The stock market’s chief virtue has always been that it allows business elites to cash out of any enterprise by transferring ownership to other elites. Old owners then enjoy their new wealth, while new owners manage the same old corporation. The reality is that business elites promote the stock market far more than the stock market promotes economic growth.
Rather than foster growth, contemporary financial practices have primarily succeeded in exacerbating income inequality and creating singular forms of economic calamity. In the recent crisis, new instruments for expanding financial activity—justified at the time by reckless promises of universal homeownership—prompted a remarkable spiral of poverty, debt and downward mobility in America. The path from homeownership to homelessness, from apparent wealth and security to lack of basic shelter, is completely novel—as is the now steadily growing social group of “middle-class paupers.” (Ten percent of homeless people assisted by social service agencies last year lost their homes through bank foreclosures, according to the study “Foreclosure to Homelessness 2009.”) The homeless-through-foreclosure, having been persuaded by cheap credit to aspire to homeownership, were punished for unbefitting ambitions; any future pathway out of debt will be accompanied by new insecurities about the appropriateness of their life aspirations. Also novel in recent years is the extent to which economic “booms” no longer benefit average Americans. During the last economic “expansion” (between 2002 and 2007), fully two-thirds of all income gains flowed to the wealthiest one percent of the population. In 2007, the top 50 hedge and private equity managers averaged $588 million in annual compensation. On the other hand, the median income of ordinary Americans has dropped an average of $2,197 per year since 2000.
We habitually excuse Wall Street’s disproportionate earnings out of a sense that it helps American businesses thrive—but even corporations don’t quite benefit from Wall Street’s “services.” Consider the infamous merger between Daimler-Benz and Chrysler. In 1998, Goldman Sachs claimed that this merger would result in a $3 billion revenue gain. Stock prices responded extremely positively to the merger, which won the coveted Institutional Dealers’ Digest “Deal of the Year” Award. Only two years later, because of incongruities between the European and American parties, Chrysler lost $512 million in annual income, $1 billion in shareholder value in a single quarter, and was forced to lay off 26,000 workers. With the merger acknowledged as a failure, Chrysler was sold off from Daimler-Benz in 2007. Goldman Sachs, which had already made millions in windfall fees from the original merger, then walked away with millions more for advising the equity firm which now swooped in to pillage an ailing Chrysler. Bad advice seems to do little to tarnish Goldman’s golden reputation; after all, the firm can always point to its extraordinary profits as proof of talent and success. (Goldman Sachs ought to love the “bad publicity” it attracts nowadays; the headlines that reveal the billions made shorting housing and securities markets only solidify its status as Wall Street’s elite firm—capable of turning a profit even in times of economic crisis.)
The evidence suggests that Wall Street has assumed a negative relation to the economic interests of society at large. Many investment bankers are doubtless nice, hard-working people who give a lot of money to charity; nevertheless, they constitute a distinct class with interests diverging from society’s as a whole. This past year, unemployment skyrocketed from 6.2 to 10 percent. Meanwhile, Wall Street announced stock market gains of $4.6 trillion between March and October.
To Read the Rest of the Essay
Monday, February 15, 2010
Against the Grain: Daniel Geary -- C. Wright Mills Reconsidered
C. Wright Mills Reconsidered
Against the Grain (KPFA: Berkeley)
C. Wright Mills liked to think big. His analyses of power elites, white collar workplaces, the Cuban Revolution, and potential sources of radical social transformation were influential with thinkers, activists, and concerned citizens in many parts of the globe. Daniel Geary describes Mills's ideas and their impact on a number of social movements, especially the New Left.
To Listen to the Episode
Against the Grain (KPFA: Berkeley)
C. Wright Mills liked to think big. His analyses of power elites, white collar workplaces, the Cuban Revolution, and potential sources of radical social transformation were influential with thinkers, activists, and concerned citizens in many parts of the globe. Daniel Geary describes Mills's ideas and their impact on a number of social movements, especially the New Left.
To Listen to the Episode
Friday, January 01, 2010
C. Wright Mills: Power, Craftsmanship, and Private Troubles and Public Issues
C. Wright Mills: Power, Craftsmanship, and Private Troubles and Public Issues
by Mark K. Smith
The Encyclopedia of Informal Education
...
The research reported in White Collar had begun some five years before and focused on what he described as the new middle class – white collar people on salaries. The rise of white collar employment was highly significant, Mills argued, both in terms of upsetting the nineteenth-century expectation that society would be divided between entrepreneurs and workers; and by their mass way of life. This mass way of life had ‘transformed the tang and feel of the American experience’ (Mills 1951: ix). Certainly the book spoke to a particular moment and caught something of the mood. It, along with David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd (1950) and William H. Whyte’s The Organization Man (1956) shaped the debates around the coming of age of the new middle class (Horowitz 1983: 226).
Estranged from community and society in a context of distrust and manipulation; alienated from work and, on the personality market, from self; expropriated of individual rationality, and politically apathetic – these are the new little people, the unwilling vanguard of modern society. These are some of the circumstances for the acceptance of which their hopeful training has quite unprepared them. (Mills 1951: xviii-xix)
As can be seen from the above, three themes stand out – the rise of mass society and the power of corporate society; the extent to which many of the new jobs were alienating; and the relative lack of political consciousness in the USA.
Mass society. ‘The transformation of a community of publics into a mass society is’, C. Wright Mills wrote in an article first published in 1954, ‘one of the keys to the meaning of modern life’ (Mills 1963: 353). For him it was a structural trend that had led to many of the psychological and political problems that confronted Americans (op. cit.). While not being altogether a mass society, the balance had shifted in America with the rise of mass media and changes in economic organization. As John H. Summers (2006) characterized Mills’ position, ‘For the first time in history… the territories of the United States made up a self-conscious mass society. If the economy had once been a multitude of locally or regionally rooted, (more or less) equal units of production, it now answered to the needs of a few hundred corporations’.
Alienation. C. Wright Mills argued that one of the characteristic features of contemporary American social structure was ‘its systematic creation and maintenance of estrangement from society and selfhood (1951: 340). In building his argument around the conditions of modern work he drew upon Marx – and upon American writers such as Thoreau. He contrasts traditions of craftsmanship (which at work had become the preserve of miniscule groups of professionals, and in leisure had been trivialized into ‘hobbies’) with the routinized activity of modern work.
As tool becomes machine, man is estranged from the intellectual potentialities and aspects of work; and each individual is routinized in the name of increased and cheaper per unit productivity. The whole unit and the meaning of time is modified…. The introduction of office machinery and sales devices has been mechanizing the office and the salesroom, the two big locales of white-collar work…. None of the features of work as craftsmanship is prevalent in office and salesroom, and, in addition, some features of white-collar work, such as the personality market, go well beyond the alienating conditions of wage-work. (Mills 1951: 226-7)
C. Wright Mills’ analysis of the extent to which salaried work had come to mirror the alienating features of waged work broke new ground.
Lack of consciousness. In an argument that was later to be echoed by Kenneth Galbraith (1992) and others, C. Wright Mills suggested that people experiencing a history of increasing and uninterrupted contentment ‘are not likely to develop economic resentments that would turn their political institutions into means of ideological conflict, or turn their minds to political forms’ (Mills 1951: 340). For Mills indifference was the primary factor in the lack of political consciousness he found amongst the new middle class – and American society generally. US politics were ‘anchored in the economic sphere’ (Mills 951: 343). As such, activity was centred around gaining and securing limited economic, rather than political, ends. It had 'seldom involved more than immediate material profits and losses’ (op. cit.).
White Collar was a significant contribution to debates but was subject to some sharp critique (the arguments are summarized in Horowitz 1983: 244-54). Perhaps the most significant of these came from David Riesman (1952). Riesman questioned C. Wright Mills’ lack of attention to the ‘ethnic coloring of attitudes to white collar work’; his portrayal of the mass media (i.e. they were less exploitative than he suggests); and his judgement around the impoverishment and drabness of white-collar life. There is some merit in these criticisms – but they do not in the end harm in any substantive way the central lines of his analysis. There had been a profound change in American society with the emergence of a large, salaried, middle class, but the conditions under which it laboured were surprisingly similar to those experienced by wage earners.
The power elite
Within the ‘power trilogy’ there were changes in style and broad approach – and these can be seen with some force in The Power Elite. In this book C. Wright Mills both wrote directly and, at times, beautifully. Similarly Mills’ understanding of the nature of power relationships in US changed from the first to the third book in the trilogy. As John H. Summers (2006) has again put it, Mills ‘argued that the "sociological key" to American uneasiness could be found not in the mysteries of the unconscious or in the battle against Communism, but in the over-organization of society’.
The powers of ordinary men are circumscribed by the everyday worlds in which they live, yet in these rounds of job, family, and neighbourhood they often seem driven by forces they can neither understand nor govern. ‘Great changes’ are beyond their control, but affect their conduct and outlook none the less. The very framework of modern society confines them to projects not their own, but from every side, such changes now press upon the men and women of mass society, who accordingly feel that they are without purpose in an epoch in which they are without power (Mills 1956: 3)
Mills argued that a small group of men within the political, military and corporate spheres - the power elite - made ‘the decisions that reverberated into all areas of American life’ (Summers 2006). Within American society, ‘major national power now resides in the economic, the political and the military domains’ (Mills 1956: 6). Within each institution units had got bigger, became administrative and, ‘in the power of its decisions, ha[d] become centralized’ (op. cit.: 7). In the economic sphere he charted the rise of large corporations; in the political the move to more centralized executive establishments. In addition the military, in his words, had become ‘the largest and most expensive feature of government’ (ibid.).
In each of these institutional areas, the means of power at the disposal of decision makers have increased enormously; their central executive powers have been enhanced; within each of them modern administrative routines have been elaborated and tightened up.
As each of these domains becomes enlarged and centralized, the consequences of its activities become greater, and its traffic with the others increases. (Mills 1956: 7)
As might be expected from the book's title Mills looked to the discourses of elite theory that had been pioneered by Pareto (1935) and Michels (1949) (see Bottomore 1966 for an overview of elite theory). C. Wright Mills was dismissive of notions such as ruling class - which he described as a ‘badly loaded phrase’ (Mills 1956: 277). For him the theory underpinning the idea of a ‘ruling class’ did not give enough autonomy to the political order. In making sense of this we can see the influence in The Power Elite of Max Weber (not unexpectedly given the work that he and Hans Gerth had undertaken). The unity of the elite for Mills rested, ‘upon the corresponding developments and coincidence of interests among economic, political and military organizations (op. cit.: 292).
It also rests upon the similarity of origin and outlook, and the social and personal intermingling of the top circles from each of these dominant hierarchies. This conjunction of institutional and psychological forces, in turn, is revealed by the heavy personnel traffic within and between the big three institutional orders, as well as by the rise of go-betweens as in the high-level lobbying. (Mills 1956: 292)
The book’s controversial analysis both found a wider readership, and stimulated considerable and sometimes angry debate (Summers 2006). There were questions around the degree to which the analysis of power relationships held up (particularly with regard to the role of the judiciary and political parties) and to the concept of power employed. According to Parsons (1964: 199-225) power for Mills was a zero-sum concept (either you have it or you don’t) and failed to attend to way it is generated within social systems. However, as John H Summers (2006) has commented, the historical value of The Power Elite seems assured:
Personal troubles and public issues
C. Wright Mills argued that perhaps the most helpful distinction with which the sociological imagination works is that between personal troubles and public issues (Mills 1967: 395; Mills 1959: 8). For him troubles have to do with 'an individual's character and with those limited areas of social life of which he is directly and personally aware' (op. cit.). To describe those troubles and to resolve them, he argues, we must attend the individual's biography and the scope of their immediate milieux - what Mills describes as 'the social setting that is directly open to his personal experience and to some extent his willful activity' (Mills 1967: 395-6). A trouble is, thus, a private matter: 'values cherished by an individual are felt by him to be threatened' (ibid.: 396).
In contrast, issues have to do with 'matters that transcend these local environments of the individual and the limited range of his life' (Mills 1967: 396; Mills 1959: 8). He continues:
This crisis can be seen in the experience of unemployment:
For much of the time governments tend to cloak or to present such public issues as private troubles: it is the fault of individuals that they cannot find work, rather than an outcome of structural or political arrangements. Furthermore, given the orientation of social workers and educators, when working with individuals or groups, it is all to easy to end up working with people around the immediate issue or trouble. In C Wright Mills’ (1967: 534) words they can ‘slip past structure to focus on isolated situations’ and consider problems ‘as problems of individuals’. We can confuse personal troubles with public issues. Indeed, this critique by Mills of the professional ideology of what he described as social pathologists (social workers who focus on individual adjustment rather than structural change) remains of fundamental concern.
On intellectual work
In an appendix of 31 pages to The Sociological Imagination (1959), C. Wright Mills provides us with one of the defining twentieth century statements concerning the nature of intellectual life - and the sort of qualities that we need to carry into our activities as practitioners. He begins the Appendix by making a point that many of us have learnt the hard way - 'the most admirable thinkers within the scholarly community you have chosen to join do not split their work from their lives. They seem to take both too seriously to allow such disassociation, and they want to use each for the enrichment of the other' (ibid.: 195). This is a theme that appears time and again in Mills's work. It involves him in constantly looking to the relationship between the whole and the parts. By looking to the whole - and seeing the parts as elements of the whole - we are able to see the connections between things. To see how one element cannot exist in this way or that - without the presence of another. Mills wrote:
In these words we can see sentiments that are familiar to informal and community educators. We have had to focus on our selves, to develop a particular character or way of being as workers, and to make a commitment to our craft. We have had to use our life experience, to reflect on encounters and feelings, to build theories and commitments about how we may act and live our lives.
To Read the Entire Essay
by Mark K. Smith
The Encyclopedia of Informal Education
...
The research reported in White Collar had begun some five years before and focused on what he described as the new middle class – white collar people on salaries. The rise of white collar employment was highly significant, Mills argued, both in terms of upsetting the nineteenth-century expectation that society would be divided between entrepreneurs and workers; and by their mass way of life. This mass way of life had ‘transformed the tang and feel of the American experience’ (Mills 1951: ix). Certainly the book spoke to a particular moment and caught something of the mood. It, along with David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd (1950) and William H. Whyte’s The Organization Man (1956) shaped the debates around the coming of age of the new middle class (Horowitz 1983: 226).
Estranged from community and society in a context of distrust and manipulation; alienated from work and, on the personality market, from self; expropriated of individual rationality, and politically apathetic – these are the new little people, the unwilling vanguard of modern society. These are some of the circumstances for the acceptance of which their hopeful training has quite unprepared them. (Mills 1951: xviii-xix)
As can be seen from the above, three themes stand out – the rise of mass society and the power of corporate society; the extent to which many of the new jobs were alienating; and the relative lack of political consciousness in the USA.
Mass society. ‘The transformation of a community of publics into a mass society is’, C. Wright Mills wrote in an article first published in 1954, ‘one of the keys to the meaning of modern life’ (Mills 1963: 353). For him it was a structural trend that had led to many of the psychological and political problems that confronted Americans (op. cit.). While not being altogether a mass society, the balance had shifted in America with the rise of mass media and changes in economic organization. As John H. Summers (2006) characterized Mills’ position, ‘For the first time in history… the territories of the United States made up a self-conscious mass society. If the economy had once been a multitude of locally or regionally rooted, (more or less) equal units of production, it now answered to the needs of a few hundred corporations’.
Alienation. C. Wright Mills argued that one of the characteristic features of contemporary American social structure was ‘its systematic creation and maintenance of estrangement from society and selfhood (1951: 340). In building his argument around the conditions of modern work he drew upon Marx – and upon American writers such as Thoreau. He contrasts traditions of craftsmanship (which at work had become the preserve of miniscule groups of professionals, and in leisure had been trivialized into ‘hobbies’) with the routinized activity of modern work.
As tool becomes machine, man is estranged from the intellectual potentialities and aspects of work; and each individual is routinized in the name of increased and cheaper per unit productivity. The whole unit and the meaning of time is modified…. The introduction of office machinery and sales devices has been mechanizing the office and the salesroom, the two big locales of white-collar work…. None of the features of work as craftsmanship is prevalent in office and salesroom, and, in addition, some features of white-collar work, such as the personality market, go well beyond the alienating conditions of wage-work. (Mills 1951: 226-7)
C. Wright Mills’ analysis of the extent to which salaried work had come to mirror the alienating features of waged work broke new ground.
Lack of consciousness. In an argument that was later to be echoed by Kenneth Galbraith (1992) and others, C. Wright Mills suggested that people experiencing a history of increasing and uninterrupted contentment ‘are not likely to develop economic resentments that would turn their political institutions into means of ideological conflict, or turn their minds to political forms’ (Mills 1951: 340). For Mills indifference was the primary factor in the lack of political consciousness he found amongst the new middle class – and American society generally. US politics were ‘anchored in the economic sphere’ (Mills 951: 343). As such, activity was centred around gaining and securing limited economic, rather than political, ends. It had 'seldom involved more than immediate material profits and losses’ (op. cit.).
White Collar was a significant contribution to debates but was subject to some sharp critique (the arguments are summarized in Horowitz 1983: 244-54). Perhaps the most significant of these came from David Riesman (1952). Riesman questioned C. Wright Mills’ lack of attention to the ‘ethnic coloring of attitudes to white collar work’; his portrayal of the mass media (i.e. they were less exploitative than he suggests); and his judgement around the impoverishment and drabness of white-collar life. There is some merit in these criticisms – but they do not in the end harm in any substantive way the central lines of his analysis. There had been a profound change in American society with the emergence of a large, salaried, middle class, but the conditions under which it laboured were surprisingly similar to those experienced by wage earners.
The power elite
Within the ‘power trilogy’ there were changes in style and broad approach – and these can be seen with some force in The Power Elite. In this book C. Wright Mills both wrote directly and, at times, beautifully. Similarly Mills’ understanding of the nature of power relationships in US changed from the first to the third book in the trilogy. As John H. Summers (2006) has again put it, Mills ‘argued that the "sociological key" to American uneasiness could be found not in the mysteries of the unconscious or in the battle against Communism, but in the over-organization of society’.
The powers of ordinary men are circumscribed by the everyday worlds in which they live, yet in these rounds of job, family, and neighbourhood they often seem driven by forces they can neither understand nor govern. ‘Great changes’ are beyond their control, but affect their conduct and outlook none the less. The very framework of modern society confines them to projects not their own, but from every side, such changes now press upon the men and women of mass society, who accordingly feel that they are without purpose in an epoch in which they are without power (Mills 1956: 3)
Mills argued that a small group of men within the political, military and corporate spheres - the power elite - made ‘the decisions that reverberated into all areas of American life’ (Summers 2006). Within American society, ‘major national power now resides in the economic, the political and the military domains’ (Mills 1956: 6). Within each institution units had got bigger, became administrative and, ‘in the power of its decisions, ha[d] become centralized’ (op. cit.: 7). In the economic sphere he charted the rise of large corporations; in the political the move to more centralized executive establishments. In addition the military, in his words, had become ‘the largest and most expensive feature of government’ (ibid.).
In each of these institutional areas, the means of power at the disposal of decision makers have increased enormously; their central executive powers have been enhanced; within each of them modern administrative routines have been elaborated and tightened up.
As each of these domains becomes enlarged and centralized, the consequences of its activities become greater, and its traffic with the others increases. (Mills 1956: 7)
As might be expected from the book's title Mills looked to the discourses of elite theory that had been pioneered by Pareto (1935) and Michels (1949) (see Bottomore 1966 for an overview of elite theory). C. Wright Mills was dismissive of notions such as ruling class - which he described as a ‘badly loaded phrase’ (Mills 1956: 277). For him the theory underpinning the idea of a ‘ruling class’ did not give enough autonomy to the political order. In making sense of this we can see the influence in The Power Elite of Max Weber (not unexpectedly given the work that he and Hans Gerth had undertaken). The unity of the elite for Mills rested, ‘upon the corresponding developments and coincidence of interests among economic, political and military organizations (op. cit.: 292).
It also rests upon the similarity of origin and outlook, and the social and personal intermingling of the top circles from each of these dominant hierarchies. This conjunction of institutional and psychological forces, in turn, is revealed by the heavy personnel traffic within and between the big three institutional orders, as well as by the rise of go-betweens as in the high-level lobbying. (Mills 1956: 292)
The book’s controversial analysis both found a wider readership, and stimulated considerable and sometimes angry debate (Summers 2006). There were questions around the degree to which the analysis of power relationships held up (particularly with regard to the role of the judiciary and political parties) and to the concept of power employed. According to Parsons (1964: 199-225) power for Mills was a zero-sum concept (either you have it or you don’t) and failed to attend to way it is generated within social systems. However, as John H Summers (2006) has commented, the historical value of The Power Elite seems assured:
It was the first book to offer a serious model of power that accounted for the secretive agencies of national security. Mills saw the postideological "postmodern epoch" (as he would later call it) at its inception, and his book remains a founding text in the continuing demand for democratically responsible political leadership….
"The Power Elite" abounds with questions that still trouble us today. Can a strong democracy coexist with the amoral ethos of corporate elites? And can public argument have democratic meaning in the age of national security?
Personal troubles and public issues
C. Wright Mills argued that perhaps the most helpful distinction with which the sociological imagination works is that between personal troubles and public issues (Mills 1967: 395; Mills 1959: 8). For him troubles have to do with 'an individual's character and with those limited areas of social life of which he is directly and personally aware' (op. cit.). To describe those troubles and to resolve them, he argues, we must attend the individual's biography and the scope of their immediate milieux - what Mills describes as 'the social setting that is directly open to his personal experience and to some extent his willful activity' (Mills 1967: 395-6). A trouble is, thus, a private matter: 'values cherished by an individual are felt by him to be threatened' (ibid.: 396).
In contrast, issues have to do with 'matters that transcend these local environments of the individual and the limited range of his life' (Mills 1967: 396; Mills 1959: 8). He continues:
They have to do with the organization of many such milieux into the institutions of society as a whole... An issue is a public matter: values cherished by publics are felt to be threatened... It is the very nature of an issue, unlike even widespread trouble, that it cannot very well be defined in terms of the everyday environments of ordinary men. An issue, in fact, often involves a crisis in institutional arrangements.
This crisis can be seen in the experience of unemployment:
When, in a city of 100,000, only one man is unemployed, that is his personal trouble, and for its relief we properly look to the character of the man, his skills, and his immediate opportunities. But when in a nation of 50 million employees, 15 million men are unemployed, that is an issue, and we may not hope to find its solution within the range of opportunities open to any one individual. (Mills 1959: 9)
For much of the time governments tend to cloak or to present such public issues as private troubles: it is the fault of individuals that they cannot find work, rather than an outcome of structural or political arrangements. Furthermore, given the orientation of social workers and educators, when working with individuals or groups, it is all to easy to end up working with people around the immediate issue or trouble. In C Wright Mills’ (1967: 534) words they can ‘slip past structure to focus on isolated situations’ and consider problems ‘as problems of individuals’. We can confuse personal troubles with public issues. Indeed, this critique by Mills of the professional ideology of what he described as social pathologists (social workers who focus on individual adjustment rather than structural change) remains of fundamental concern.
On intellectual work
In an appendix of 31 pages to The Sociological Imagination (1959), C. Wright Mills provides us with one of the defining twentieth century statements concerning the nature of intellectual life - and the sort of qualities that we need to carry into our activities as practitioners. He begins the Appendix by making a point that many of us have learnt the hard way - 'the most admirable thinkers within the scholarly community you have chosen to join do not split their work from their lives. They seem to take both too seriously to allow such disassociation, and they want to use each for the enrichment of the other' (ibid.: 195). This is a theme that appears time and again in Mills's work. It involves him in constantly looking to the relationship between the whole and the parts. By looking to the whole - and seeing the parts as elements of the whole - we are able to see the connections between things. To see how one element cannot exist in this way or that - without the presence of another. Mills wrote:
Scholarship is a choice of how to live as well as a choice of career; whether he knows it or not, the intellectual workman forms his own self as he works toward the perfection of his craft; to realize his own potentialities, and any opportunities that come his way, he constructs a character which has as its core the qualities of a good workman.
What this means is that you must learn to use your life experience in your intellectual work: continually to examine and interpret it. In this sense craftsmanship is the center of yourself and you are personally involved in every intellectual product upon which you work. (Mills 1959: 196)
In these words we can see sentiments that are familiar to informal and community educators. We have had to focus on our selves, to develop a particular character or way of being as workers, and to make a commitment to our craft. We have had to use our life experience, to reflect on encounters and feelings, to build theories and commitments about how we may act and live our lives.
To Read the Entire Essay
Monday, April 20, 2009
C. Wright Mills: The Sociological Imagination; Stanley Aronowitz: A Mills Revival?
(Aronowitz is writing in 2003, but the need for a revival of Mills is even more important now. Also check out Mark K. Smith's C. Wright Mills: Power, Craftsmanship, and Private Troubles and Public Issues)
A Mills Revival?
by Stanley Aronowitz
Logos
...
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 compared to turn of the 20th century populist and socialist pamphleteers whose aim was to simultaneously educate and arouse workers and farmers to the evils of corporate power.
Yet in his most fertile period of intellectual work, the decade and a half ending with the publication of The Sociological Imagination (1959), with the possible exception of The Power Elite, Mills hardly expected to reach a popular, let alone mass public. Nevertheless, he always attempted to reach out to a wider public than did his fellow academics, even when he was formulating new theories, let alone engaging in public criticism. But Mills’s intention is entirely subversive of contemporary mainstream social science, especially the notion that intellectuals should remain neutral observers of economic, political and social life. While he performed his fair share of funded research—notably his study of Puerto Rico and the collective portraits of characteristic social types—most of his writing is addressed to potential and actual political publics. Following Marx and Weber, who at the end of his life was a major contributor in shaping the moral and legal framework of the Weimar Republic, Mills held that intellectuals and their ideas were embedded in the social antagonisms and struggles of their own time; they bring to their analysis a definite standpoint, whether or not they are prepared to acknowledge it.
Yet Mills adhered to none of the mainstream parties nor to those on the fringes of mainstream politics. While he was a figure of his own time (his main work was done in the 1940s and 1950s, when issues of sex, gender and ecology were barely blips on the screen), his position was congenitally critical—of the right, conservatives, liberals, the relatively tiny parties of the left and especially members of his own shrinking group, the independent leftists. Like one of his heroes, the economist and social theorist Thorstein Veblen, himself a pariah in his chosen discipline, to paraphrase a famous aphorism of Marx, Mills was “in but not of” the academy insofar as he refuses the distinction between scholarship and partisanship. But, unlike Veblen, whose alienation from conventional economics was almost total, Mills was, for most of his professional career, a sociologist in his heart as much as his mind The rhetoric and the methods embodied in his books on American social structure—The New Men of Power, White Collar, and The Power Elite—are firmly rooted in the perspectives of mainstream American sociology at the end of the war. These perspectives owed as much to the methodological precepts of Emile Durkheim as they did to the critical theory of Karl Marx and Max Weber. Using many of the tools of conventional social inquiry: surveys, interviews, data analysis—charts included—Mills takes pains to stay close to the “data” until the concluding chapters.
But what distinguishes Mills from mainstream sociology, and from Weber, with whom he shares a considerable portion of his intellectual outlook, is the standpoint of radical social change, not of fashionable sociological neutrality. At the height of the Cold War and in the midst of the so-called McCarthy era, he fearlessly named capitalism as the system of domination from within one of its intellectual bastions, Columbia University, and distanced himself from ex-radicals among his colleagues who were busy “choosing the west,” otherwise giving aid and comfort to the witch-hunters, or neutering themselves by hiding behind the ideology of value-free scholarship. Anti-Stalinist to the core, toward the end of his life he was, nevertheless, accused of pro-Communist sympathies for his unsparing criticism of the militarization of America and his spirited defense of the Cuban revolution.
In the light of his later writings which, to say the least, held out little hope for radical social change in the United States The New Men of Power, Mills’s first major work, occupies a singular place in the Mills corpus. Written on the heels of the veritable general strike of industrial workers in 1946, and the conservative counterattack the following year embedded in the Taft-Hartley amendments to the Labor Relations Act, the study of America’s labor leaders argues that for the first time in history the labor movement, having shown its capacity to shape the political economy, possessed the practical requisites to become a major actor in American politics as well. But as both “as army general and a contractor of labor,” a “machine politician” and the head of a “social movement,” the labor leader occupies contradictory space. (Mills, 1948) By 1948, the year of publication of the first edition of The New Men of Power, buoyed by American capitalism’s unparalleled global dominance, a powerful conservative force was arrayed against labor’s recently acquired power and, according to Mills, had no intention of yielding more ground without an all-out industrial and political war. Yet, he found union leaders curiously unprepared for the struggle. Even as their cause was being abandoned by liberal allies, and belittled and besmirched by their natural enemies among the corporations and their ideological mouthpieces, right-wing intellectuals and conservative politicians, union leaders remained faithful to the Democratic party and to the New Deal, which was rapidly fading into history. Mills and his collaborator, Helen Schneider, found that the concept that working people needed a labor party to truly represent their political interests had declined from the perspective of most labor leaders whereas a decade earlier, the apex of industrial unionism, a majority favored the formation of such a party, despite their expedient support of the Democrats.
To Read the Rest of the Essay
Scholarship is a choice of how to live as well as a choice of career; whether he knows it or not, the intellectual workman forms his own self as he works toward the perfection of his craft; to realize his own potentialities, and any opportunities that come his way, he constructs a character which has as its core the qualities of a good workman.
What this means is that you must learn to use your life experience in your intellectual work: continually to examine and interpret it. In this sense craftsmanship is the center of yourself and you are personally involved in every intellectual product upon which you work. (Mills, C. Wright (1959) The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press: 196)
A Mills Revival?
by Stanley Aronowitz
Logos
...
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 compared to turn of the 20th century populist and socialist pamphleteers whose aim was to simultaneously educate and arouse workers and farmers to the evils of corporate power.
Yet in his most fertile period of intellectual work, the decade and a half ending with the publication of The Sociological Imagination (1959), with the possible exception of The Power Elite, Mills hardly expected to reach a popular, let alone mass public. Nevertheless, he always attempted to reach out to a wider public than did his fellow academics, even when he was formulating new theories, let alone engaging in public criticism. But Mills’s intention is entirely subversive of contemporary mainstream social science, especially the notion that intellectuals should remain neutral observers of economic, political and social life. While he performed his fair share of funded research—notably his study of Puerto Rico and the collective portraits of characteristic social types—most of his writing is addressed to potential and actual political publics. Following Marx and Weber, who at the end of his life was a major contributor in shaping the moral and legal framework of the Weimar Republic, Mills held that intellectuals and their ideas were embedded in the social antagonisms and struggles of their own time; they bring to their analysis a definite standpoint, whether or not they are prepared to acknowledge it.
Yet Mills adhered to none of the mainstream parties nor to those on the fringes of mainstream politics. While he was a figure of his own time (his main work was done in the 1940s and 1950s, when issues of sex, gender and ecology were barely blips on the screen), his position was congenitally critical—of the right, conservatives, liberals, the relatively tiny parties of the left and especially members of his own shrinking group, the independent leftists. Like one of his heroes, the economist and social theorist Thorstein Veblen, himself a pariah in his chosen discipline, to paraphrase a famous aphorism of Marx, Mills was “in but not of” the academy insofar as he refuses the distinction between scholarship and partisanship. But, unlike Veblen, whose alienation from conventional economics was almost total, Mills was, for most of his professional career, a sociologist in his heart as much as his mind The rhetoric and the methods embodied in his books on American social structure—The New Men of Power, White Collar, and The Power Elite—are firmly rooted in the perspectives of mainstream American sociology at the end of the war. These perspectives owed as much to the methodological precepts of Emile Durkheim as they did to the critical theory of Karl Marx and Max Weber. Using many of the tools of conventional social inquiry: surveys, interviews, data analysis—charts included—Mills takes pains to stay close to the “data” until the concluding chapters.
But what distinguishes Mills from mainstream sociology, and from Weber, with whom he shares a considerable portion of his intellectual outlook, is the standpoint of radical social change, not of fashionable sociological neutrality. At the height of the Cold War and in the midst of the so-called McCarthy era, he fearlessly named capitalism as the system of domination from within one of its intellectual bastions, Columbia University, and distanced himself from ex-radicals among his colleagues who were busy “choosing the west,” otherwise giving aid and comfort to the witch-hunters, or neutering themselves by hiding behind the ideology of value-free scholarship. Anti-Stalinist to the core, toward the end of his life he was, nevertheless, accused of pro-Communist sympathies for his unsparing criticism of the militarization of America and his spirited defense of the Cuban revolution.
In the light of his later writings which, to say the least, held out little hope for radical social change in the United States The New Men of Power, Mills’s first major work, occupies a singular place in the Mills corpus. Written on the heels of the veritable general strike of industrial workers in 1946, and the conservative counterattack the following year embedded in the Taft-Hartley amendments to the Labor Relations Act, the study of America’s labor leaders argues that for the first time in history the labor movement, having shown its capacity to shape the political economy, possessed the practical requisites to become a major actor in American politics as well. But as both “as army general and a contractor of labor,” a “machine politician” and the head of a “social movement,” the labor leader occupies contradictory space. (Mills, 1948) By 1948, the year of publication of the first edition of The New Men of Power, buoyed by American capitalism’s unparalleled global dominance, a powerful conservative force was arrayed against labor’s recently acquired power and, according to Mills, had no intention of yielding more ground without an all-out industrial and political war. Yet, he found union leaders curiously unprepared for the struggle. Even as their cause was being abandoned by liberal allies, and belittled and besmirched by their natural enemies among the corporations and their ideological mouthpieces, right-wing intellectuals and conservative politicians, union leaders remained faithful to the Democratic party and to the New Deal, which was rapidly fading into history. Mills and his collaborator, Helen Schneider, found that the concept that working people needed a labor party to truly represent their political interests had declined from the perspective of most labor leaders whereas a decade earlier, the apex of industrial unionism, a majority favored the formation of such a party, despite their expedient support of the Democrats.
To Read the Rest of the Essay
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