C. Wright Mills and the Politics of Truth: The Power Elite Revisited

Abstract

Power Elite. Few books of its kind have been more widely read or more vigorously debated; fewer yet have retained so much urgent relevancy for so long a time. The Power Elite raised questions of enduring importance, and it gave answers that still provoke considerable disagreement. But if the book has not yet lost its controversial immediacy, it has also, subtly and by degrees, won a measure of popular acceptance. Certain of Mills's arguments that most thought heretical and wrong in 1956 that power is concentrated and oppressive, that a mass society is emerging in America, that liberal theory is outmoded-today seem not only familiar but accurate as well. Over the years the book has become almost respectable. Only an ungenerous critic could now deny The Power Elite a central place in the intellectual history of our age. ' My purpose here is not to test the power elite thesis yet another time. This task is best left to disciplinary specialists who can explore Mills's hypothesis with the empirical tools of the social sciences. I propose instead to place The Power Elite in its historical context; to consider the volume in terms of the general reorientation of American social thought after 1940; to assess Mills's contribution in this book as one of sensibility as well as of theory; to explore certain ambiguities of analysis; and along the way to relate the book more closely than has yet been done to the personality of the