The Intellectual Pedigree of C. Wright Mills: A Reappraisal

Abstract

WRIGHT MILLS was perhaps the most influential radical social theorist that America has producted since Thorstein Veblen. This alone makes ? his intellectual pedigree and ideological genesis significant. Unfortunately, many of his critics and supporters do not understand the highly eclectic nature of his work and its relationship to the broad spectrum of both European and American social thought.l Consequently, there is much disagreement, imprecision and inaccuracy in the interpretation of his intellectual perspective. For example, some of his radical interpreters have mistakenly portrayed Mills as a Marxist. With more accuracy of analysis other radicals indict him for not being a Marxist. Liberals are often disturbed by what they perceive as a strong Marxist orientation in his work, although they are sometimes puzzled by the intellectually eclectic framework from which it emerges. Finally, conservatives are repelled and angered by most of what he wrote, except his indictment of the moral and political bankruptcy of liberalism, and consequently have made little effort to examine his intellectual background. As is evident, then, much of the analysis of his work has been acutely ideological in nature, and polemical in tone. Interpreters of Mills' ideological genesis and intellectual perspective can be placed in roughly nine basic categories although it should be noted that some of the differences of interpretation stem from analysis of different parts of his work written at various stages of his career. The nine are: (1) that Mills took a Marxian position, or at least worked within the Marxian tradition;2 (2) that he was influenced by