C. Wright Mills

[laughs] Uh, some of them, some of them are actually.

Um, one of the, um, most important textbooks, and that's, um, uh, Sociology 101, uh, it's, uh, C. Wright Mills', uh, Sociological Imagination, uh, where, um, like all the undergrads in sociology get to read that.

Uh, and his message is, um, what the sociological imagination is, it's the capacity of individual people, uh, to make sense of the broad historical movements that they live through and understand where their personal troubles are coming from.

That they're not only because they're...

Now, one theory is the power elite, and this is very interesting.

There was a sociologist, C. Wright Mills.

I love people who start off with an initial.

J. Edgar Hoover.

You got...

I love that.

C. Wright Mills.

Mills argued that American power had essentially become concentrated among overlapping corporate and military and political elites, and that these people didn't necessarily meet secretly, you know, in a basement somewhere.

And ultimately it can hook back up with capitalist politics.

You know, C. Wright Mills, the power elite, labor leaders, labor bureaucrats were part of the power elite and they came from the working class.

And, you know, for Christ's sake, the Soviet Union, you know, Nikita Khrushchev and I think Brezhnev too, but Gorbachev, they were all workers, right?

Who made it

But some people were concerned that the cookie cutter vision of the good life and the celebration of the middle class lifestyle was displacing other conceptions of citizenship.

Like the sociologist C. Wright Mills described a combination of military, corporate, and political leaders as a power elite whose control over government and the economy was such as to make democracy an afterthought.

In The Lonely Crowd, sociologist David Riesman criticized Americans for being conformist and lacking the rich inner life necessary to be truly independent.

And John Kenneth Galbraith questioned an affluent society that would pay for new cars and new missiles, but not for new schools.

For one thing, elite theory had pan-ideological appeal.

It claimed economic anti-statists, Vilfredo Pareto, and anti-oligarchic socialists, Robert Michels, alike, as well as conservative jurists like Gaetano Mosca and Vienna-trained economists like Joseph Schumpeter, progressive liberals like Dahl, and outright left-wing radicals like C. Wright Mills.

From their own ideological standpoints, each became reconciled to the idea that some elite presence would always play a role in politics.

The more conservative theorists rationalized elite rule by insisting that the tendency of wealth and power to concentrate in a few hands was natural and ineradicable.

And so that led to conflicts within the ranks of unions and the labor movement itself, as some who wanted to push back against this no-strike pledge did wage wildcat strikes in different locales and some larger strikes true like the coal miner strike of 1943 like some black workers wildcat strikes to defend themselves against white workers attacks and assert themselves and so it created a new role where some union presidents who had been insurgent leaders in the 1930s, became sort of more bureaucratic managers in the 1940s, or at least that tension.

Somebody who becomes one of the most famous sociologists coming out of the World War II years, C. Wright Mills, writes a book, The New Men of Power in the 40s, where he says, you know, these insurgent rebels are now sort of the managers of discontent.

The people who were stirring up strikes are now trying to suppress strikes as they sort of curry favor with democratic party leaders.

And so both the labor movement and the black civil rights movement get remarkable opportunities with the Franklin Roosevelt reform government and the World War II state because they need their labor as service members and defense workers.