"The Power Elite": Comment on Criticism
Mills, C. Wright
The recent publication of The Power Elite, C. Wright Mills' study of American society, has aroused a great deal of discussion and controversy in the press. Perhaps because it contains a...
...What many reviewers really want, I think, is less of a program than a lyric upsurge—at least at the end...
...They dd 'so by reiterating a few of my points with the comment that "most modern governments" are of this sort...
...Above all, we've refused to become silly about transferring the models of physical and mathematical proof into the social studies...
...Writing for me has always been, first of all, an effort to state what is so, as I see it...
...that there are counter-trends...
...The "tragic view of life," at least as it seems to be meant in this review, is not "barred" to me...
...It is a way of saying to oneself: "We're all in this together, the butcher and the general and the ditch digger and the Secretary of the Treasury and the cook and the President of the United States...
...But the world I'm trying to understand does not make me politically hopeful and morally complacent, which is to say, I find it difficult to play the cheerful idiot...
...But I'm afraid the distinction between "political accountability" and "tragic responsibility" which they make will not hold up...
...which is of course what I have tried to do...
...Yet one reviewer, for example, believes that I am "hinting at" an idea needed by my argument but which I can't really accept—the idea of an elite interest in "a permanent war economy...
...Well, I do believe that in the last resort, coercion is the "final" form of power, but I also believe—despite Hungary and Suez—that we are not constantly at the last resort...
...It will go forward out of highly self-conscious work on real problems...
...Seemingly realizing this, such reviewers then object to the examples I use as "...the most obvious ones conceivable...
...another is the psychological and status facts on which I've spent so many pages...
...The structural mechanics of institutions must indeed be given due weight...
...The only moral values I hold I've gotten from right inside history...
...XVI But the "radical" criticism goes deeper: it holds that there is some "latent ideological bias" in "the elite theory" and that it's this bias that's against "radical values," whatever they are...
...I don't of course accept that fashionable and easy equation...
...The answer is: "Does he have any choice...
...XV11 Many reviewers of The Power Elite— liberal, radical and highbrow— complain that the book is "too pessimistic" or "too negative...
...This—and I use the word with care—spiritual condition seems to me the key to much modern malaise, as well as the key to many political features of the power elite in the United States...
...V But, then, half a dozen reviewers exclaim: "In this book, you take it upon yourself to judge...
...If The Power Elite is about some world that's now long past, where is the image of the 1950's that stands in such irrefutable contrast...
...I want to make very clear that in so far as this is the meaning, I am not a Radical Critic and never have been...
...Each of these points I readily accept, indeed I've stated them myself, and nothing in my conception of the power elite, or in the nature of the big decisions of our time, is upset by them...
...But it's also true, given the shape of major institutions in the United States today, that those at the top are more than privileged persons: to a varying extent, in different historical situations, they are also powerful with all the means of power now at their disposal...
...One can examine trends in an effort to answer the question: "Where are we going...
...In fact, it is my job to make it explicit and to study it as a whole...
...And this I clearly have not done nor attempted to do in The Power Elite...
...Accordingly, I take such discussion of these pivotal events as an interesting and informed carrying on of the kind of social history I've urged, in which the idea of the ,power elite is refined and elaborated...
...There is no other way to write now, as a social student, about such large topics...
...When little is known, or only trivial items publicized, or when myths prevail, then plain description becomes a radical fact—or at least is taken to be radically upsetting...
...That's one feature of the intellectual situation in which I think I—along of course with others—have been trying to write...
...If it did hold up it would offer a convenient escape from the frustrations of politics, and at the same time provide a grand view of one's own role in human affairs...
...The historical structure of opportunity is more important, I hold, than "the seizure of power" by elites of which some critics talk so much...
...They then complain that I don't tell what these things are...
...If it's gloomy, too bad...
...you write "imperative coordination," which is neutral— and Scientific too...
...the question is where you stand within it...
...The point that is relevant to this criticism, I believe, is that authority is no longer so explicit as it was, say in the medieval epoch, and that along with, this, the ideology (justification or legitimations of power) of ruling groups is no longer so relevant to understanding phenomena of modern power...
...Basic agreement, however, is often hidden by the surface tone of the "highbrow" review...
...We" are not all in this together—so far as bearing the consequences of these decisions is concerned...
...Naturally I sought examples that were not questionable...
...They want a big thump on the intellectual and political back...
...That is the key meaning of the power elite for democracy...
...I think it's a fairly good description of what has in fact happened in most mass organization...
...Just so...
...But such reviewers seem to think that this refutes my idea of the power elite because (1) not a little crowd, but often only a few men, are in on such decisions...
...As for content, I must say such "highbrow" reviews of The Power Elite as I've seen seem in rather complete agreement with it...
...All concepts are "caricatures...
...Feeling no personal responsibility—I do not mean accountability in the social and political sense but rather involvement in the tragic and comic sense—their view is almost certain to be irresponsible...
...Most social scientists are today uneasily liberal...
...The question is to what extent they specify important features and to what extent they obfus cate them...
...The argument ("It's all old stuff") equates "old" with "untrue...
...Yet there is truth in one reviewer's assertion that I tend to confuse prediction with description...
...Do they mean only that "elite theory" reduces power to "a conquest theory of politics...
...if it's cheerful, well fine...
...That's all one can usefully say of the weary complaint about possible misuse of radical criticism...
...Your job—and it is your prime job— is to reveal to them just how a supposedly self-disciplined mind works...
...But this, of course, is a quite formal assertion which holds of other groups as well as of those on top...
...To say "old stuff" or "new stuff' is equally irrelevant—unless you get very specific, as my critics in this line have not done...
...Mills to comment on his critics...
...So let's all feel sad about one another, or if we're up to it, let's just see it all as one great comedy...
...IV "The judgment to be made of Mills," one scientific reviewer writes "is never that what he says is true but unimportant, as can be said for much of the reporting in the social sciences...
...This, of course, is to ask for a full-scale American history of our times, military, economic and political...
...But what is "the hidden ideological bias" in "the elite theory" or in empirical work on elite groups...
...I can't really conceive, as the question assumes, that the American elite is the author of all the happy values of American civilization...
...In such magazines as Partisan Review one finds writers who have made a real thing out of such pretension...
...most reviewers are liberals of one sort or another, or at least think of themselves as such...
...I1 There's one question most liberal reviewers find quite unanswerable: If the American elite is all this bad, "how come it hangs together—and, despite defects, provides people with the highest content of economic, esthetic and intellectual opportunity yet offered a population block of 165 million...
...I have never found either a transcendent or an immanent ground for moral judgment...
...You don't write "authority," for example, which has a clean, hard edge...
...rather what he says is clearly important but not unquestionably valid...
...To the literary empiricist, writing his balanced little essay, first on this and then on that, any attempt to see it whole is "extremism...
...After all, the only "potential" mentioned by critics who make this charge ends up merely as the commonplace thought that "prosperity" and "contemporary trends" will not last forever...
...Having examined it carefully, I have rejected it as a political blind alley, as sociologically unreal, and as morally irresponsible...
...So, concludes the re viewer, perhaps the pictures in The Power Elite of all the other groups —bureaucrats and politicians and millionaires—are also caricatures...
...You've got to remember that you are dealing with historic materials...
...VI Teaching, by the way, I do not regard as altogether in the same case as writing...
...Considering the book as political strategy, they make the point that it is negative in that it offers no "saving myth...
...I don't believe it is quite that simple...
...there's a very pretty apparatus at hand for that: the jargon of modern social science, especially sociology...
...XII The most important problem for political reflection in our time has to do with the problem of responsibility...
...That my book isn't primarily about prosperity and poverty but about power and status makes no difference to them...
...Of course the argument of The Power Elite is not "unquestionably valid...
...It is an interpretation of well-known historical events, not a notion of a secret cabal making decisions...
...This critic suggests that the test of social conceptions is whether or not those to whom they refer find them pleasantly in line with their own self-image...
...Exactly...
...Quite deliberately, of course, I have stated in The Power Elite an "extreme position"—which means that in order to make matters clear I try to focus on each trend just a little ahead , of where it now is, and more importantly, that I try to see all the trends at once, as parts of a total structure...
...Well," they ask (as if they'd just thought of it and all alone) , are you implying "that big business is increasingly in the position to dominate political democracy...
...This, and not "scientific objectivity" is what is really wanted by those who complain about "value judgments...
...they see quite clearly that the intellectual target of my attack is the classic liberal image of modern American society...
...what such reviewers are doing is wallowing in that intellectual climate, now so fashionable, which is based solely upon the fact of material prosperity...
...I've never studied any group that had an adequate view of its own social position...
...But you have further responsibilities when you are teaching...
...Well, if not that, what do they mean...
...It is a tone which assumes superior accomplishment without ever revealing it...
...Here is his reply...
...It is possible to say, as I do, that socially their decisions run to a maintenance of the status quo and personally, to a consolidation of their personal stake, both materially and ideally, in it...
...I don't quite see why, especially since they seem to agree with my judgment of the intellectual and moral character of the power elite as well as my statement of the mass society...
...Such judgments as I wish to make I try to make explicitly...
...We've tried to use what we found useful of newer research techniques, but we've refused to give up the larger problems because of any initial dogma about method...
...The study of elites does not rule out an acceptance of the kind of structural view one finds, for example, in Marx...
...War and the preparation for war, is one of its major conditions, although not its only one...
...ever...
...To deny either statement is to deny the facts of power, in particular the fact that different men hold very different portions of such power as is now available...
...I believe that is true just now, for example, in many corporations...
...it is an attempt to turn all questions, in particular the question of truth, into matters of taste...
...Only he who accepts the basic structure of his society—and is not aware of his acceptance—can turn his back on the problem of moral judgment...
...The key to this posture is simply a lack of moral confidence...
...This, I believe, is too rationalistic a means of interpretation...
...Were they to do that, such critics might come to see more of the world they live in, as well as in the work of writers they read, than "strategies of presentation...
...in fact, it has become the very token of what is sometimes called "brilliant...
...they restate and accept my view of the newer relations of property and the state...
...I think it obvious that war and the preparation for war as we know it is a perfectly marvelous way of solving and of ditching all sorts of problems confronted by the several members of the power elite, as well as by many other people...
...In the same vein one might ask: If the Soviet elite are such villains as all good Americans know them to be, how come in a mere thirty years they've raised an illiterate, backward, starving peasant mass into the biggest nation in the world, created one of the world's two foremost industrial plants, demonstrated for the first time in human history that classic capitalism is only one of the ways to industrialize, etc...
...xlv Several reviewers assert that I don't "really know what power is," but one radical critic spells this out: I put too much emphasis on HI force...
...This again is either to ask for a detailed history—this time in large part a psychological one—or it is to assume that there must be some one all-embracing, unifying interest, in short, that the unity of the elite must be based on conscious interests, or even ideology...
...This of course is merely to accept the facts as if they were inevitable and obvious while refusing to confront the democratic problem of responsibility, in fact any problems of democracy, to which they lead...
...Such an assumption makes them much more omnipotent than I've ever thought them to be...
...Why indeed...
...And on Korea: "This decision was made in the course of a few hours by a few men...
...And I not only imply it...
...In the meantime, in striving to be intellectually fastidious, they only succeed in displaying moral weakness...
...But I think such reviewers have the notion—although they certainly didn't get it from my book—that, if there's anything to the idea, the power elite must be all the time secretly at work doing secret things that nobody knows about...
...A second objection along the same line is that I don't really say "what are the interests on the basis of which the power elite decides policy...
...In any case," one acknowledges, "the first atomic bomb was dropped on the responsibility of one man who was the beneficiary of very sketchy advice from a handful of other men...
...Of course, although it means something to me, the comparison is a little unreal...
...In fact, one of the major themes of the book is that many key decisions are made outside the parliamentary mechanism which thus drops to a secondary position, to the middle levels ofpower...
...in a classzoom you are trying to show others how one man thinks—and at the same time reveal what a fine feeling you get when you do it well...
...But then they call this "posturing...
...All this is very hard to do...
...They invite attention to selected features of some object...
...This anger, I believe, is due to the fact that whether it is generally right or generally wrong, the book is taken as a blow at the smooth certainties and agreeable formulas that now make up the content of liberalism...
...Simple descriptions of elite persons and groups can be politically neutral, but I don't think they usually are...
...My point, in this connection, is simply that the shape of these institutions—for example, their extreme centralization—makes the action and the policies of those who exercise such human control over them and through them as nowadays exists, more consequential, more rele• vant to an understanding of the history of our times—than, let us say, in the model society of the Jeffersonian scatter...
...If you are worth a damn as a teacher, you are something of a model to them...
...There is no one such thing...
...Here is my answer to this: Yes, I do feel that I stand, with most other people, outside the major history-making forces of my epoch, but at the same time I feel that I am among those who take the consequences of these forces...
...He suggests further that they should know best since it is "one kind of life that they [know] about...
...But above all, you've got to see the several major trends together—structurally, rather than as a mere scatter of happenings adding up to nothing new, in fact not adding up at all...
...But no writer about such topics as these is writing "forever...
...The way to overcome it is also clear: to take on a substantive job of work, one that forces you to deal imaginatively with a mass of facts...
...VII What I suppose has to be called "highbrow" criticism tends to pay less attention to the content of a book than to its publication as an event and a strategem...
...If you have ever seriously studied, as I have, for a year or two some thousand hour-long interviews, carefully coded and punched, you'll have begun to see how very malleable these thousands of bits of fact really are...
...In a book you are trying to persuade others of the result of your thinking...
...Since the war, neither business nor government can be understood as a separate realm of power...
...It's usual to say that what they produce is true but un important...
...Personally, as you know, I'm a very cheerful type, but I must say that I've never been able to make up my mind whether something is so or not in terms of whether or not it leads to good cheer...
...That is not enough for the True Radicals...
...It is difficult to think of a more misleading test...
...Certainly not today, certainly not in the United States today...
...They want to believe that the corporations and the state are identical, that they have become one big structure...
...Foremost among them is the chance of truth...
...For radical criticism to have any meaning it must utter its judgments from some moral norm that transcends the system, or from some standard that recognizes an immanent, unfulfilled, potential in the existing state of things...
...But I certainly am not aware of any desire to be more like the rich in the sense that I am sometimes aware of wanting to be more like some of the crack mechanics I know...
...Now, I take "resentment" to mean that I want to be like somebody else but can't be, so I dislike them...
...In fact, one must pay attention to both...
...When there's no public that might accept the ideas and act upon them with consequence, one still has to go ahead and try to say what's so...
...The art of teaching is the art of thinking out loud...
...Only if all men everywhere were actors of equal power in an absolute democracy of power could we seriously hold the "tragic view" of responsibility...
...He puts his point this way: Mills sees himself standing outside society...
...Much of this work, I am convinced, has become the mere following of a ritual—which happens to have gained commercial and foundation value—rather than, in the words of The Social Scientist, any "commitment to the hard [why hard?] demands of scientific social analysis...
...No one is outside society...
...So far as ideologies are concerned, that is one of the interpretative guides I've found most helpful in trying to understand the nature of contemporary types of power...
...This line of reflection permits reasonable liberals to accept much of my account with a little moral shrug which helps bury the conse quences of accepting it...
...I don't suppose it could survive a really disastrous slump, but I don't see the conditions of such a slump in the immediately foreseeable future...
...If he spends his intellectual force on the petty details of elections or boy gangs or what not, he is of course as a man of intellect making himself irrelevant to the political conflicts and forces of his time...
...And of course they are obvious...
...By refusing to comment on these images, much less to take them in hand, the pseudo-scientific know-nothings allow, as it were, these literary types to create and to sustain all the images that guide and all the myths that obfuscate—as the case may be—our view of social reality...
...The only sure-fire way to avoid this situation is silence or suicide...
...Let us not be so urgent for hope of fundamental change that we slip over into the falsely wise mood of This Too Shall Pass, as many "radical" philosophers border on doing...
...That is an omnipotent theory of the elite and an elite theory of history from which I have been very careful to dissociate my view...
...Even though he's "generally humanistic in outlook," he makes a rigid distinction between life and history...
...Of course...
...The whole idea of the power elite is set up and presented in this way in order to avoid the kind of "conspiracy" theory into which some reviewers, with a rather crude lack of theoretical acuteness, try to force a much more complicated and quite different view...
...I don't think I agree with that: more and more I wonder how true it is...
...Dear friends: I hope you will forgive me if—being more interested in criticism than in critics—I don't mention names but rather bring up points...
...III To blunt the edge of an argument, contemporary critics often try to assimilate it to old stereotypes—the common coin of the lazier reviewer's mint...
...My trouble here is that I don't really understand what is meant by "the elite theory...
...Svanemollevej 64 Yours truly, Copenhagen, Denmark C. WRIGHT MILLS...
...In fact, sometimes the norms of selection and the shaping influences of institutional structures are more important to understanding human affairs and even the affairs of the powerful than, the actual circles of men on top at any given time...
...2) these men don't always agree but are divided in their counsel...
...Moreover, increasingly I come to feel that it is very important when some of the best minds among us spend their lives studying trivialities because the methods to which they are dogmatically committed don't allow them to study anything else...
...in the United States such opposition has not been recently available, has not been effective enough to create the felt need for ideologies of rule...
...To some extent your students are a captive audience, and to some extent they are dependent upon you...
...I'm a third type of man—and on the whole glad to be such...
...In modern times, ideology, and hence legitimate authority, arises as a response to effective debunking, to thorough-going criticism...
...The tone they imitate from one another is therefore obviously a mere surface manner rather than intrinsic to some point of view that is truly their own...
...Only one of them it seems to me, has been self-conscious enough to be altogether honest about this: he writes that he does not "respond more readily" to the book "in part, no doubt, because [its] conclusions are gloomy...
...This liberalism now determines the standard view of American civilization...
...to pay attention to present trends without being merely journalistic...
...But that's no answer for the True Radicals, for, you see, I've not used the old romantic words loosely enough to make them feel happy...
...The power elite is not a homogeneous circle of a specified number of men whose solidified will continuously prevails against all obstacles...
...I'm really sorry that only one reviewer takes up what is of course the chief moral theme of The Power Elite...
...You ought then, it seems to me, to make very, very explicit the assumptions, the facts, the methods, the judgments...
...1 One journal of liberal opinion, rather than review the book, runs a piece containing one thought: professors who read White Collar "liked every part of it except the one about professors...
...They thought this part `only half true, a kind of caricature...
...I don't of course believe that the contemporary power elite is here "for...
...They conform to the prevailing tone of liberal American politics and the accompanying fear of any passionate commitment...
...As a result, there has come about neither acceptance nor rejection of the old symbols of authority, but simply political indifference...
...On the other hand, there are many literary and journalistic people who distribute larger images of the social structure in which we live...
...XV Another complaint from the left is that all this business of the elite does not jibe with true "radical values...
...Therefore they become very angry...
...one writes for now...
...Whether he wants it or not, anyone today who spends his life studying society and publishing the results is acting politically...
...In the language of the social studies, it's an elaborated hypo thesis, anchored, I believe, at key points to acknowledged fact...
...Perhaps because it contains a caustic criticism of much that is happening in American society and to American thought, the book evoked strong reactions from many reviewers...
...I want briefly to comment on some of the criticism of The Power Elite not because I believe the book invulnerable to criticism nor because I want to take a crack at people who have taken one at me, but because I think the angry character of many of the reviews suggests political and moral questions that are of intellectual interest...
...There isn't any documented image...
...XI Some of the most interesting reviews I've seen are given over to consideration of the several pivotal decisions which I've used to il lustrate the nature of decision-making in our time: Hiroshima, Dien bienphu, etc...
...The tragic, view of life is barred to them [people like Mills...
...It is a romanticism which in his social and personal loneliness the American adolescent finds very attractive, but it is not a mood that will stand up to even a little reflection...
...In brief: such critics have swallowed the vulgar notion that the "success" of a nation, however defined, is the basis on which to judge that nation's elite...
...I think to state the assumption is to indicate its inadequacy...
...in fact they are values proclaimed by many and, within the possibilities of various life-ways, practiced by small circles in western history whose members I've taken as models of character...
...In the meantime, the charges of irresponsibility, the pseudo-crying for a program, are really signs of fear, of an incapacity to face facts as they are, even if these facts are decidedly unpleasant— and so irrelevant to the truth or falsity of my views...
...We've kept the problem, whatever it is, foremost in mind and we've felt, I suppose, as working researchers rather than self-appointed Statesmen of Research, that we'd just have to work out the best methods we could as we went along trying to solve the problem...
...In the belief that The Power Elite raises issues of the first importance, the editors of DisSENT invited Mr...
...Institutions, as I've repeatedly documented, select and form those who come to their top...
...That is why I do not make a rigid distinction between "life and history," and that is one major reason why I am a political man...
...Merely to study elite groups is not automatically to accept some one definite theory of elites...
...That's the foremost point...
...Of course they are...
...Such a reviewer is likely to ask: "If the contemporary trends in corporate business power and its influence in government are as here suggested, why pretend that government and business are any longer importantly apart...
...The fundamental political error of so much "radicalism" is its tendency, borrowed directly from the optimistic boureeois notion of progress, to confuse the cry for hope with the metaphysics of history...
...Of course...
...When you publish a book it becomes a public property...
...The more interesting question underneath this charge of "old stuff" is how best to study trends...
...It is much easier for the liberal to acknowledge one trend at a time, keeping them scattered as it were, than to make the effort to see them altogether...
...Do the critics mean Pareto's theory of the circulation of the elite...
...On this level, there is very often a semi-organized stalemate...
...Such reviewers typically acknowledge the only points I felt the need to make in connection with these examples: that they are pivotal and that very few persons indeed had any real say-so about them...
...In doing so I have tried to study history rather than to retreat into it...
...Perhaps the Craving For Authenticity stands in place of, or at least in the way of, a passion to know what's what...
...XI11 I've seen only two reviews in which the reviewer tries to pigeon-hole the book from the left of it...
...They don't question the general idea I've constructed...
...Moral judgment, I suppose, is a matter of wanting to generalize and to make available for others those values you've come to choose...
...Therefore they are easily upset...
...your only responsibility to your reading public is to make it as good a book as you can, and you are the sole judge of that...
...Many people 'tend, often without knowing it, to judge a position in terms of optimism-pessimism, the pessimistic being not nearly so good as the optimistic...
...What is interesting is the way they wiggle...
...It would not, as you know, be difficult to hide them...
...Authority (or power that is made legitimate by the beliefs of the obedient) and manipulation (power that is wielded unbeknown to the powerless) —along with coercion—make up the major and well-known types of power which must constantly be sorted out when we think about the elite...
...that they do change very fast...
...But apart from that, if this is all old stuff, where is the new stuff...
...But whether that is always true or not, merely to assume the contrary, is to assume a degree of rational self-consciousness and self-knowledge that not even eighteenthcentury psychologists would allow...
...VIII But the salient point about so much "highbrow" reviewing is that in it presentation simply runs away with belief...
...And so can reviewers' criticism of radical criticism...
...IX Contemporary reviewers make wide use of the ad hominum argument: anyway, it's all resentment, these shrewd psychologists con clude—the implication being that therefore it's all a little personal show and nothing else...
...Michels' iron law of oligarchy...
...Should I seek out esoteric ones...
...If they want me merely to evoke the good old party emotions that flood up in some people when they are told that the state is "a committee of the ruling class," I am sorry, I can't oblige...
...But "we" are not all in this together—so far as such decisions as are made and can be made are concerned...
...That's one reason why very successful lectures don't usually print well...
...to gauge the future of these trends without being prophetic...
...In "highbrow" reviews of The Power Elite this posture doesn't come off because—for one thing—the "highbrows" try to stand outside or above the book, but in fact they have no place to stand...
...This is of course the expected imputation to make of any critical book about the higher circles...
...Surely...
...Further, more often than not such ideologies as are available for the power elite are neither taken up nor used by them...
...One of them borders on an obstinate silliness over words like "capitalism" and "class"—words that have become cliches by which True Radicals try to retain the insurgency of their political adolescence yet avoid thinking freshly about what might be going on in the world today...
...Quite true...
...Having come of age in a time when poverty was the key problem, they can't really recognize any other...
...Of course, my idea of the power elite is not of that order...
...The social studies, I am convinced, will not be advanced by pontifical dogma about method or pretentious cowardice about Social Science...
...The fact is I don't hint at all...
...That is my major judgment...
...What we've recognized as conviction is not necessary, in either the ruling or the ruled, for the structure of power as well as its elite formations to persist and even flourish...
...If so, then certainly I do not hold "the elite theory...
...An account of the power elite, in one volume at least, must work from examples...
...the fact is simply accomplished...
...Because there are so many myths about American society, merely to describe it neutrally is considered, in the words of one reviewer, a "savage naturalism...
...And you've always got to balance the precision of knife-edge description with the generality needed to bring out their meaning for your time...
...it is their interpretation that we are arguing about...
...Such reviewers ignore their own agreement or disagreement with the book at hand and adopt a tone...
...Anyway, just now isn't it obvious that it's not at all a question of what "we're" going to do...
...Given that, they can't conceive of any critical statement of a modern society being credible...
...Such criticism is more likely to be buttressed by general statements about "the latent political bias" of "elite theory" than by concrete reference to The Power Elite...
...These two, however, are not to be sharply separated, and they are not the only ways of looking at trends...
...For it means that were I just dying to become a millionaire, this would not in itself effect the truth or falsity of what I've written about the millionaires in American society...
...But what are "radical values...
...They are of course the big events of our time which have involved major decisions: Hiroshima, Korea, etc...
...Nevertheless, they continue: "Mills' failure to deal with the meanings for democracy of the impressive power trends he analyzes is the colossal loose-end of The Power Elite...
...One key to such elite unity as exists lies in the "coincidence" of the several structural trends I've traced...
...But, in fact, it is nothing more than a shallow form of fatalism, which, adorned with a little liberal rhetoric, leads to political irresponsibility...
...4) sometimes the decision made is "taken against the better judgment of the power elite...
...Only third and last have I brought into the picture the explicit following of explicitly known interests...
...But he is also, in a tacit way and in effect, "accepting" the whole framework of the society...
...3) in their decisions, they sometimes take into account the state of public opinion or the policy of other coun tries...
...I spell it out in detail...
...The study of elite groups, at least as I have carried it on, does not blind one "to the real potential for fundamental social change...
...I don't accept that...
...The recent publication of The Power Elite, C. Wright Mills' study of American society, has aroused a great deal of discussion and controversy in the press...
...I don't think history is merely a succession of elites which, one after the other, conquer the institutional means of power...
...So far as the social fact of their existence and its consequence goes, my liking or disliking the power elite, whether it shows in the book or not, is altogether irrelevant...
...Considering the book as an event, one such reviewer makes the point that (like all other products) radical criticism in America can become a "saleable commodity...
...Of course, I have elected to do more than that...
...In the post-war period it has gone very well with the ostentatious boredom with political questions of larger scope—which is to say, with conservatism...
...the question is what are a lot of other people doing...
...They want a sturdy little mood of earnest optimism, out of which we step forward all nice and fresh and shining...
...A second question occurs to the True Radicals...
...X One type of reasonable liberal broadly accepts my "account of who holds the power in American society" but complains that I really don't say "what the elite does with its power...
...Now I do not merely assume that structure...
...The relation of institutional structure and elite formations is of course a two-sided play...
...Such decisions do enter into it, but they are by no means its defining characteristic...
...You ought not to hold back anything, but you ought to take it very slowly and at all times and repeatedly make clear what the full range of moral alternatives are before you give your own choice...
...For many of the great decisions of our time, mass "persuasion" has not been "necessary...
...It is also cheap and easy in that it merely assumes that the book's author shares the values of those about whom he writes and therefore wants them for himself...
...But many reviewers seem really to believe, and their question certainly implies, that American prosperity may be taken as proof of the virtues of the contemporary elite...
...The difference between this "tragic view" and the romantic pluralism of ordinary balance-of-power theories is that, being more politically sophisticated, the tragedians generalize the "we" to the generically human and in so doing try to shove it beyond the political sphere...
...But since they are often intelligent as well, their liberalism is rather insecure...
...The "highbrow" style, it seems to me, often consists merely of telling the revolutionaries they are not revolutionary enough, the theologians they aren't theologically pure, the Freudians that they disregard The Founder's biases...
...To write that way would be enormously dull, and impossibly self-conscious...
...In the social studies today there are many know-nothings who re fuse to say anything, or at least really to believe anything, about mod ern society unless it has been through the fine little mill of The Statisti cal Ritual...
...now really, should a sociologist judge...
...First you try to get it straight, to make an adequate statement...
...Therefore, they want to wiggle out of any arguments about the liberal platitudes and qualifications to which they cling...
...The question is whether you face that and make up your own mind or whether you conceal it from yourself and drift morally...
Vol. 4 • January 1957 • No. 1
