The Legacy of C. Wright Mills

Not long ago, a student in one of my classes told me he had discovered C. Wright Mills. So enraptured was he by Mills’ theories as recorded in The Power Elite, that he recommended them to me. He was therefore a little deflated when I told him that I had read Mills and considered him an economic illiterate. I could also have added I thought him “a dangerous political illiterate” as well.
As it happened, I had recently read an intellectual biography of Mills written by Irving Lewis Horowitz. Sympathetic to his subject, Horowitz portrayed Mills as well meaning, but habitually given to confronting authority. In his early years, tolerated by his professors because they recognized his potential, he later came to be despised by colleagues whose work he regularly dismissed as inadequate.
One of the things the biography made clear is that Mills was an academic innocent. Almost completely bereft of direct experience in the world, he nevertheless felt entitled to write books that characterized the social universe in bold and apparently authoritative stokes.
How far this was from reality was confirmed by his judgment of the Castro regime in Cuba. While it was still new and untested—but after it had already executed many so-called counter-revolutionaries without a trial—he, on the basis of a few interviews with some of Castro’s cronies, decided that the Cuban Revolution was the wave of the future.
Ironically he, in print, boasted of the enormous economic achievements of the communists, based on the claims of Cuban officials that their citizens had already multiplied agricultural output thanks to their revolutionary ardor. What made this assertion particularly strange was that the island nation would eventually become an economic basket case, largely sustained by aid from the Soviet Union.
In any event, Mills was no less shy in evaluating the government of the United States. He decided that the country was ruled by a tripartite arrangement wherein politicians, military officers, and business leaders governed for their own advantage. These parties were described as forming an iron triangle from which ordinary citizens were excluded.
How absurd this was, was later revealed by the dramatic turnover in all of the players he cited. In Mills time one of the participants was U.S. Steel. It was a huge corporation that was presumed to be eternal. But where is this company now? It has been done in by foreign competition and the advent of plastics and other metals such as aluminum.
And how about the military officers who were theoretically so powerful that they dictated American foreign policy and domestic budgets. The individual officers have long since retired, but more than that, the military was not able to prevent its subsequent downsizing. Nor was it able to get all of the weapons it sought.
And as for the politicians, they really do get rotated by the electoral process. Sometimes Democrats are up, but at other times it is the Republicans. Some say these are interchangeable; nonetheless the advent of Barack Obama would argue otherwise. People complain of the vitriolic language endemic to contemporary politics, yet that is because the parties disagree. The one wants to expand government, while the other is intent on contracting it.
Mills was wrong—not only because times have changed, but because he was essentially addicted to conspiracy theories. This is a common failing of those who do not have direct experience with the operations of power. The poor, in particular, are wont to assume that a small band of individuals manipulate events from behind the scenes. But this is not true. Nor given human nature, could it be.
I am reminded of what Harry Truman said of Dwight Eisenhower. Just before he turned over the presidency to his successor, he observed that Ike was in more trouble than he realized. Ike, he opined, would give order as he did while a general and expect tit to be obeyed as formerly. The presidency, however, was different. He would give orders and nothing would happen. Then he would not know what to do.
But Truman too was wrong. Even though he had been an officer during the First World War, he was mistaken if he believed that military orders are always obeyed with alacrity. Human nature is such that people often do as they please—even in the military. People are not automatons. If they are able to, they assert what control they can over their own lives.
This means that no conspiracy, grand or small, can be as effective as the uninitiated imagine. Actual bosses know their power is circumscribed. Most also know that they cannot give preemptory orders; that their subordinates require some wiggle room. If they do not provide it, they can expect overt, and/or covert, insubordination.
The scary fact, the really scary fact, is not that conspiracies control the world. No, it is that no one is in charge. Some people have more power than others, but no one (or group) is so powerful as to determine everything that gets done. In the real world, not even children are reflexive pawns. Just ask their parents.
Melvyn L. Fein. Ph.D.
Professor of Sociology
Kennesaw State University