C. Wright Mills (1916–62,) fully Charles Wright Mills, was an American sociologist and academic. With Hans H. Gerth, Mills applied and popularized Max Weber and Karl Mannheim’s theories in the U.S.
Born in Waco, Texas, he was educated at the universities of Texas and Wisconsin. He taught at Wisconsin and Maryland and became a professor at Columbia 1946–62. Mills is celebrated for promoting the notion that social scientists should not merely be disinterested observers but also assert their social responsibility.
Mills’s chief contributions to sociology were White Collar (1951,) a critical account of the ‘new’ post-war middle classes, and The Power Elite (1956,) a pessimistic study of social control by the military, politicians, and corporate wealth.
Mills’s The Causes of World War Three (1958) impacted the New Left in America. His last book was the highly prescient Listen Yankee: The Revolution in Cuba (1960.)
John Eric Thomas Eldridge wrote C Wright Mills (1983) as part of a series on prominent sociologists.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by C. Wright Mills
The professional celebrity, male and female, is the crowning result of the star system of a society that makes a fetish of competition. In America, this system is carried to the point where a man who can knock a small white ball into a series of holes in the ground with more efficiency than anyone else thereby gains social access to the President of the United States.
—C. Wright Mills
Topics: Fame
Prestige is the shadow of money and power. Where these are, there it is. Like the national market for soap or automobiles and the enlarged arena of federal power, the national cash-in area for prestige has grown, slowly being consolidated into a truly national system.
—C. Wright Mills
Topics: Respect, Respectability
In the world of the celebrity, the hierarchy of publicity has replaced the hierarchy of descent and even of great wealth.
—C. Wright Mills
Topics: Fame
Commercial jazz, soap opera, pulp fiction, comic strips, the movies set the images, mannerisms, standards, and aims of the urban masses. In one way or another, everyone is equal before these cultural machines; like technology itself, the mass media are nearly universal in their incidence and appeal. They are a kind of common denominator, a kind of scheme for pre-scheduled, mass emotions.
—C. Wright Mills
Topics: Media
America is a nation with no truly national city, no Paris, no Rome, no London, no city which is at once the social center, the political capital, and the financial hub.
—C. Wright Mills
Topics: City Life, Cities
Freedom is not merely the opportunity to do as one pleases; neither is it merely the opportunity to choose between set alternatives. Freedom is, first of all, the chance to formulate the available choices, to argue over them—and then, the opportunity to choose.
—C. Wright Mills
Topics: Freedom
The nearest the modern general or admiral comes to a small-arms encounter of any sort is at a duck hunt in the company of corporation executives at the retreat of Continental Motors, Inc.
—C. Wright Mills
Topics: The Military
The life-fate of the modern individual depends not only upon the family into which he was born or which he enters by marriage, but increasingly upon the corporation in which he spends the most alert hours of his best years.
—C. Wright Mills
Topics: Career
Power is not of a man. Wealth does not center in the person of the wealthy. Celebrity is not inherent in any personality. To be celebrated, to be wealthy, to have power requires access to major institutions.
—C. Wright Mills
Topics: Society
Not wishing to be disturbed over moral issues of the political economy, Americans cling to the notion that the government is a sort of automatic machine, regulated by the balancing of competing interests.
—C. Wright Mills
Topics: Government
Much work is merely a way to make money; much leisure is merely a way to spend it.
—C. Wright Mills
Topics: Money
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