The Anthem Companion to C. Wright Mills
The Anthem Companion to C. Wright Mills
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‘The Anthem Companion to C. Wright Mills’ offers the best contemporary work on C. Wright Mills, written by the best scholars currently working in this field. Original, authoritative and wide-ranging, the critical assessments of this volume will make it ideal for Wright Mills students and scholars alike.
‘Anthem Companions to Sociology’ offer authoritative and comprehensive assessments of major figures in the development of sociology from the last two centuries. Covering the major advancements in sociological thought, these companions offer critical evaluations of key figures in the American and European sociological tradition, and will provide students and scholars with both an in-depth assessment of the makers of sociology and chart their relevance to modern society.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783085484 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Anthem Press |
| Publication date: | 06/19/2016 |
| Series: | Anthem Companions to Sociology |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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Read an Excerpt
The Anthem Companion to C. Wright Mills
By Guy Oakes
Wimbledon Publishing Company
Copyright © 2016 Guy Oakes editorial matter and selectionAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78308-548-4
CHAPTER 1
C. WRIGHT MILLS ON LAW AND SOCIETY: HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT?
William Rose
During her 2001 presidential address to the annual meeting of the Law and Society Association (held jointly that year with its European counterpart in Budapest, Hungary), Kitty Calavita invoked the memory and work of C. Wright Mills (Calavita 2002) in service of encouraging her audience to reflect on the important role of the public intellectual in contemporary sociolegal studies, and to urge them to consider a place for "engaged research" in their own scholarship. Just one year before, in his presidential address to the same association – and largely for the same reasons – then-president Frank Munger also cited to the work of Mills (Munger 2001). Why Mills?
Although Mills died in 1962, two years before the Law and Society Association was founded, it would seem that he has not been forgotten. As Stanley Aronowitz observed in 2003, with the coming of the new century, we also were witness to something of a "revival" of interest in Mills's work (Aronowitz 2003, 67). Munger and Calavita, both trained as sociologists, might have been tapping into – and simultaneously contributing to – this revival. Their references to Mills might have been a kind of academic "shorthand" gesturing to the "Mills brand" (Oakes 2014) as a way to situate a larger message. Mills is offered up as the "daring iconoclast: the Texas intellectual who wrote by riding and shooting, the unflinching advocate of a 'politics of truth,' determined to counter the distortions of salesmanship, advertising, public relations, and propaganda with hard truths about the social realities of his time" (Oakes 2014, 253). However, it also seems reasonable to believe that there might have been something more than a Mills revival, or scholarly name checking, at work, informing the intellectual references of both speakers. That is, given the subject matter of their respective addresses – on the place of engaged, activist socio-legal scholarship in the academic work of the members of the Law and Society Association - and given the history and orientation of the association itself, the references by Munger and Calavita should probably not be too surprising. Law and Society is an interdisciplinary professional association that was founded in the early 1960s out of a desire to help foster the production of scholarship that might guide progressive legal reform measures and with an ongoing concern for social justice issues. Further, many of its members, both historically and presently, have sought to articulate a progressive political orientation for the association (Merry 1995, 13). In this context, referencing the work of a radical sociologist, still remembered for his aspirations to interdisciplinarity, and for his efforts to carve out the space for a critically engaged public sociology – ongoing revival or not – perhaps is to be expected.
However, even if we accept the foregoing to be the case, it is nonetheless somewhat strange for socio-legal scholars, no matter their location or purpose, to be mentioning Mills at all. Why? Because throughout his relatively brief career as sociologist, polemicist and public intellectual, Mills was virtually silent on matters of law and on questions regarding the relationship among law, politics and society. To all of those questions that socio-legal scholars like those involved with Law and Society have been engaged with – Do the "haves" really come out ahead in litigation? Why do people obey the law? What is the role of law in social transformation? How does law matter? How does law shape ordinary life? What is the relationship between race and rights? – Mills had little of significance to say. On all of the issues that have preoccupied sociologically informed legal scholars throughout the twentieth century, Mills, for the most part, was silent. Why this might have been the case and with what implications for our understanding of Mills's contributions to sociological thought are the subjects of this chapter.
Those familiar with the classical tradition of sociological thought know that law-related questions have featured prominently in the work of thinkers such as Weber, Durkheim and even Marx. Clearly, Mills was very familiar with this tradition. However, careful readers might come away from a close engagement with Mills's major texts rather puzzled. For all his concern with matters of power and a politics of truth, with social conflict and the machinations of the new American mandarins, why did Mills choose not to engage – or simply not bother to engage – with the legal dimensions of these questions? The relative absence of any sustained and meaningful discussion of law by Mills is fairly clear; how we are to interpret this absence is perhaps a bit more complicated.
Finally, it is important to note that Mills's silence on law was not total. There are scattered references to law-related concerns in his lectures and essays, and there is a brief but focused discussion of law - specifically, the legal profession in White Collar. Therefore, I will turn first to what Mills did say about law, however limited, in the belief that this might provide some clue as to why he did not say more. I will then give a brief overview of the state of sociologically informed legal scholarship in the United States during the 1940s and 1950s in order to establish the context against which we might situate Mills's work.
White Collar, the Legal Profession and the New Middle Class
Writing to his parents toward the end of the summer of 1946, Mills offers them a glimpse into his reading habits at the time: "I read a lot late into the night: books on history and politics mostly. I think maybe I am almost secretly 'preparing' for something with all this, but I don't really know what" (Mills and Mills 2000, 100). The provocative suggestion of secret preparation for something to come is more clearly identified and fleshed out in another letter to his parents, which he sent in December of that year. After addressing some minor personal details, Mills brings his parents up to date on the progress of the work he was doing that would culminate five years later in the publication of White Collar:
The book on white collar workers is coming along slow but sure. I'm not wanting to rush it. After all, the translation Gerth and I did was a book for specialists [...] but this white collar book: ah, there's a book for the people; it is everybody's book. So I am trying to make it damn good all over. Simple and clean cut in style, but with a lot of implications and subtleties woven into it. It is my little work of art; it will have to stand for the operations I never will do, not being a surgeon, and for the houses I never built, not being an architect. So, you see, it has to be a thing of craftsmanship and art as well as science. (Mills and Mills 2000, 101)
There is a good deal to unpack from Mills's December letter; much of it is beyond the scope of this chapter, but the letter reveals what Mills wanted to accomplish with his book. Mills began working on the White Collar project in 1944, several years before the publication of his first book, The New Men of Power, a somewhat conventional study of union leadership in the United States (Mills 1948). At the time that he wrote his parents, he was still a number of years away from completing White Collar. The project was large in scope and in Mills's aspirations for the final product; according to Daniel Geary, "It was the most ambitious book Mills ever wrote" (Geary 2009, 107). Moreover, White Collar marked a transition in Mills's scholarship; with this book, Mills was targeting a broader readership, one well beyond (yet still including) the traditional "specialist" audience for academic sociology. Accordingly, he was also struggling to find a new language through which he could best convey the meaning of his research. He was not leaving sociology, but he did want to expand what counted as sociological knowledge. He well understood that all of this would take time. But, for Mills, the stakes were high. The book that was to become White Collar was to be a book both about and for the "new little man":
There is no hurry. It will stand a long time, when it is finally done. It is all about the new little man in the big world of the 20th century. It is about that little man and how he lives and what he suffers and what his chances are going to be; and it is also about the world he lives in, has to live in, doesn't want to live in. It is, as I said, going to be everybody's book. For, in truth, who is not a little man? (Mills and Mills 2000, 101)
Mills would finally publish White Collar in 1951. However, rather than understanding his efforts to have resulted in a book for the "new little man," many of Mills's readers – then and now – believed that Mills had produced something of a jeremiad against the middle class. Nonetheless, the importance of the book was widely recognized as well. For example, in 1952 David Riesman observed that "Mills [was] grappling resourcefully with the big questions of our day" (Riesman 1952, 515). And, writing in 2006, Robert Johnston contends that, despite Mills's "demonization of the American middle class," White Collar remains "the most important book we have about the American middle classes" (Johnston 2006, 4).
White Collar is a dark and despairing book. Its language, tone and approach suggest a volume intended to be some distance from a conventional academic monograph; the book is sometimes sarcastic, sometimes parodic; it aspires to a certain "literariness," and, for a scholarly text, it is unusually passionate. Yet Mills clearly is also fully engaged with the relevant academic literature of his time. White Collar is Mills's attempt to understand and explain a fundamental transformation in American culture and society and to take stock of the psychological effects of this profound social change. It traces the decline of the old and the emergence and growth of the new middle classes. And, for the purposes of this chapter, White Collar is one of the few places where Mills writes about law or law-related matters.
Mills's focus in White Collar is on the increasing bureaucratization of American life in both the public and the private sectors and the concomitant rise of the new middle class. But the project is an expansive one, and in it Mills also sketches out his positions on themes that he would continue to develop in later works such as The Power Elite and The Sociological Imagination: the power and quality of American democracy, the politics of the production of knowledge about society and the role of the critical public intellectual and the search for a language and a style of writing that were appropriate to the task of conveying the full meaning of the events with which he was engaged.
According to Mills, the white-collar world that was becoming more and more visible through various cultural representations – for example, Arthur Miller's play Death of a Salesman, or Edward Hopper's painting The Office at Night – was a place where dreams were dashed and excitement quickly bled out into boredom. Increasingly, people were spending their lives as clerks and sales staff, in drab offices, engaged in tedious and ultimately meaningless tasks. We were becoming a nation significantly distant from the world of the yeoman farmer and small entrepreneur of nineteenth-century America – a world that Mills nostalgically valorized. The distance traveled from the nineteenth to the twentieth century was marked for Mills by a decline in the independence and individuality of the old middle class and by a rise in the indifferent subservience to larger external forces that seemed to characterize the new middle class: "The twentieth-century white-collar man has never been independent as the farmer use to be, nor as hopeful of the main chance as the businessman. He is always somebody's man" (Mills [1951] 2002, xii).
Mills was especially interested in capturing the psychic life of those inhabiting the new middle class, in understanding how the social transformation – the "outer life" – marked by the structural and institutional changes related to the rise of the modern bureaucratic form was constitutive of the "inner life" of white-collar workers. According to Mills, the growth in the size of the white-collar population was directly proportional to the decline of the truly free and autonomous individual. On Mills's analysis, the majority of workers had become "cheerful robots"; they were stripped of all independence of thought and simply followed and internalized bureaucratically produced rules and regulations (see Mills [1951] 2002, 233 – 5). Members of this new middle class were only vaguely aware of their situation, experiencing a malaise that was "deep-rooted; for the absence of any order of belief has left them morally defenseless as individuals and politically impotent as a group" (Mills [1951] 2002, xvi). Given this state of affairs, the task for the politically self-aware and engaged scholar was clear:
We need to characterize American society of the mid-twentieth century in more psychological terms, for now the problems that concern us most border on the psychiatric. It is one great task of social studies today to describe the larger economic and political situation in terms of its meaning for the inner life and the external career of the individual, and in doing this to take into account how the individual often becomes falsely conscious and blinded. (Mills [1951] 2002, xx)
According to Mills, the members of the new middle class were managers, salaried professionals, office workers and university professors, among others. And, by 1951, they comprised an increasing proportion of the US population. Rolled into this new white-collar population were also many members of the old middle class – for example, members of the medical and legal professions. The arrival of the new middle class was unheralded yet profound; white-collar workers, in Mills's analysis, were a fragmented group and lacked any sense of collective agency. Worst of all, they were largely ignorant of the sources of their own increasing malaise. Still, they were the representative class of modern society, and their problems were problems that we all would be forced to confront. According to Mills:
The white-collar people slipped quietly into modern society. Whatever history they have had is a history without events; whatever common interests they have do not lead to unity; whatever future they have will not be of their own making. If they aspire at all it is to a middle course at a time when no middle course is available, and hence to an illusory course in an imaginable society. [...] As a group, they do not threaten anyone; as individuals, they do not practice an independent way of life. [...] They have been taken for granted as familiar actors of the urban mass. Yet it is to this white-collar world that one must look for much that is characteristic of twentieth-century existence. (Mills [1951] 2002, ix)
From Mills's perspective, "In no sphere of twentieth-century society [had] the shift from the old to the new middle-class condition been so apparent, and its ramification so wide and deep, as in the professions" (Mills [1951] 2002, 112). Mills's overarching historical narrative portrayed the old professional classes as having been inhabited by relatively independent and creatively minded individuals. In contrast, the new professionals were seen to be increasingly oriented toward serving the purely economic interests of those for whom they labored. With the independence of thought and judgment that had typified earlier professionals on the wane, professional knowledge had taken on the character of purely applied knowledge – knowledge produced primarily in the service of making money – by the middle of the twentieth century. As a consequence, professional knowledge narrowed and became identified with larger commercial interests rather than with the interests of ordinary citizens. A further, yet related, product of this transformation was greater specialization within the practice areas of the professions. For example, lawyers were no longer "generalists" representing a range of clients and interests; instead, they specialized, working in discreet areas of the law and having the limited or partial perspective such specialization entailed. The knowledge produced by the professions, and over which the professions claimed a monopoly of expertise, became increasingly fragmented.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Anthem Companion to C. Wright Mills by Guy Oakes. Copyright © 2016 Guy Oakes editorial matter and selection. Excerpted by permission of Wimbledon Publishing Company.
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Table of Contents
1: C. Wright Mills on Law and Society: Hidden in Plain Sight? (William Rose); 2: Mills on the Economics of the Old Middle Class (Nahid Aslanbeigui and Guy Oakes); 3: Revisting C. Wright Mills on the Militarization of Postwar American Society (Andrew D. Grossman);4. A Critical Assessment of the Historical and Economic Underpinnings of C. Wright Mills’s The Power Elite (Michele I. Naples); 5: Mills as Ethical Theorist: The Military Metaphysics and the Higher Immorality (Guy Oakes); 6: C. Wright Mills and Latin America (Verónica Montecinos); 7: For a Feminist Sociological Imagination: A Personal Retrospective on C. Wright Mills (Stevi Jackson); 8: The Sociological Imagination: An Unredeemed Promise (Gerhard Wagner and Kai Müller); 9: Recent Changes in the Shape of Power (Stanley Aronowitz)