The development of social thought in the United States and Germany: Critical observations on the occasion of the publication of C. Wright Mills'White Collar

Abstract

C. Wright Mills' White Collar*** is among the most important works published by an American since World War II. Within the first week of its publication one thousand copies were sold; soon after, the sale of over 35,000 copies is testimony to the magnitude of its success. The prestigious journal, the New Statesman and Nation's dedication of a feature article on Mill's book, a work consciously not written in the King's English, was a rare occurrence. The book was highly and assiduously commended. "Mills is one of our most distinguished social scientists," wrote Horace M. Kallen, an eminent scholar of the older generation, in a New York Times review. 1 "Mills has drawn his contemporary portrait of the representative American from the works of novelists and writers as well as social scientists." He has thereby renounced the professional jargon of sociology and presented his thesis with dramatic verve, literary skill and epigrammatic sharpness, to make the book a unique statement even among his own professional white collar group. And yet, as one critic later stated, "should someone wish to assert that the representation resembles a caricature more closely than a reliable depiction," I would not contest the point. "The repulsive image drawn in White Collar [Stehkragen] appears to me closer to an account drawn out of personal resentment than to an image arising from the object itself." These citations