C. Wright Mills and the Analysis of Power in American Politics

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the legacy of C. Wright Mills’ analysis of the American power structure in The Power Elite. After briefly describing Mills’ core analysis and several criticisms made of it in the years after it was published, it describes how power structure research, and related areas on inquiry, were incorporated into radical American social science literature in the 1970s, only to fall into decline in the 1980s and 1990s. Mills came to maturity in the 1930s and 1940s amid the upsurge of American liberalism represented politically by the presidencies of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman and intellectually by pragmatism. After examining several attempts by prominent political scientists to bring attention to the shortcomings of the discipline, and how they have been received by scholars working in the Mills tradition, the chapter concludes that their arguments would be strengthened if political scientists reengaged with the scholarly tradition within which C. Wright Mills’ work has been of central importance.