White collar from start to finish

Abstract

C. Wright Mills completed his study of the "new" middle classesa decadelong obsession just as the 1940s passed bleakly into history. He had "some hopes," but could not yet know for sure, that ten years of strenuous effort had finally culminated in a work of decisive intellectual significance. Time has justified his expectations. It is now apparent that White Collar belongs to a select group of major theoretical works, all published within a year or two of 1950, expressing a common sense that "reality" had changed than an "era in human sensibility" or a "cultural cycle" was coming to an end. The book remained unusual in its militant advocacy of a radical or adversary stance that, with the decline of Modernism, most intellectuals had come to disavow. But it nevertheless joined such breakthrough works as The Liberal Imagination and The Lonely Crowd, among others, in shifting from "old" toward "newer" forms of sociopolitical and cultural analysis. White Collar retained some assumptions from earlier Progressive and marxist paradigms while also anticipating the 1950s symptomatic concern with "consensus" as well as "conflict," with "status" as well as "class," with elusive psychological as well as hard material reality. This in-between work, put differently, both reflected and darkly foresaw a potentially ominous transformation from the "modern" to what Mills by 1959 would be calling the "post-modern" epoch of human history.1