Hi, folks. Below, I'm pasting an essay on Mills' Power Elite from today's
Book Review. Here's the link so's I don't violate copyright
(http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/14/books/review/14summers.html?pagewanted=print).
May 14, 2006
Essay
The Deciders
By JOHN H. SUMMERS
"The powers of ordinary men are circumscribed by the everyday worlds in
which they live, yet even in these rounds of job, family and neighborhood
they often seem driven by forces they can neither understand nor govern."
The opening sentence of "The Power Elite," by C. Wright Mills, seems
unremarkable, even bland. But when the book was first published 50 years ago
last month, it exploded into a culture riddled with existential anxiety and
political fear. Mills a broad-shouldered, motorcycle-riding anarchist from
Texas who taught sociology at Columbia argued that the "sociological key"
to American uneasiness could be found not in the mysteries of the
unconscious or in the battle against Communism, but in the over-organization
of society. At the pinnacle of the government, the military and the
corporations, a small group of men made the decisions that reverberated
"into each and every cranny" of American life. "Insofar as national events
are decided," Mills wrote, "the power elite are those who decide them."
His argument met with criticism from all sides. "I look forward to the time
when Mr. Mills hands back his prophet's robes and settles down to being a
sociologist again," Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote in The New York Post. Adolf
Berle, writing in the Book Review, said that while the book contained "an
uncomfortable degree of truth," Mills presented "an angry cartoon, not a
serious picture." Liberals could not believe a book about power in America
said so little about the Supreme Court, while conservatives attacked it as
leftist psychopathology ("sociological mumbo jumbo," Time said). The Soviets
translated it in 1959, but decided it was pro-American. "Although Mills
expresses a skeptical and critical attitude toward bourgeois liberalism and
its society of power," said the introduction to the Russian translation,
"his hopes and sympathies undoubtedly remain on its side."
Even so, "The Power Elite" found an eclectic audience at home and abroad.
Fidel Castro and Che Guevara debated the book in the mountains of the Sierra
Maestra. Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir published excerpts in their
radical journal, Les Temps Modernes. In the United States, Mills received
hundreds of letters from Protestant clergymen, professors and students,
pacificists and soldiers. This note came from an Army private stationed in
San Francisco: "I genuinely appreciate reading in print ideas I have thought
about some time ago. At that time, they seemed to me so different that I
didn't tell anyone." In the aftermath of the global riots of 1968, the
C.I.A. identified Mills as one of the most influential New Left
intellectuals in the world, though he had been dead for six years.
The historical value of "The Power Elite" seems assured. It was the first
book to offer a serious model of power that accounted for the secretive
agencies of national security. Mills saw the postideological "postmodern
epoch" (as he would later call it) at its inception, and his book remains a
founding text in the continuing demand for democratically responsible
political leadership a demand echoed and amplified across the decades in
books like Christopher Lasch's "Revolt of the Elites" (1995), Kevin
Phillips's "Wealth and Democracy" (2002), Chalmers Johnson's "Sorrows of
Empire" (2004) and Thomas Frank's "What's the Matter With Kansas?" (2004).
Much of "The Power Elite" was a tough-talking polemic against the "romantic
pluralism" embedded in the prevailing theory of American politics. The
separation of powers in the Constitution, the story went, repelled the
natural tendency of power to concentrate, while political parties and
voluntary societies organized the clash of interests, laying the people's
representatives open to the influence of public opinion. This "theory of
balance" still applied to the "middle levels of power," Mills wrote. But the
society it envisioned had been eclipsed.
For the first time in history, he argued, the territories of the United
States made up a self-conscious mass society. If the economy had once been a
multitude of locally or regionally rooted, (more or less) equal units of
production, it now answered to the needs of a few hundred corporations. If
the government had once been a patchwork of states held together by
Congress, it now answered to the initiatives of a strong executive. If the
military had once been a militia system resistant to the discipline of
permanent training, it now consumed half the national budget, and seated its
admirals and generals in the biggest office building in the world.
The "awesome means of power" enthroned upon these monopolies of production,
administration and violence included the power to prevent issues and ideas
from reaching Congress in the first place. Most Americans still believed the
ebb and flow of public opinion guided political affairs. "But now we must
recognize this description as a set of images out of a fairy tale," Mills
wrote. "They are not adequate even as an approximate model of how the
American system of power works."
The small groups of men standing at the head of the three monopolies
represented a new kind of elite, whose character and conduct mirrored the
antidemocratic ethos of their institutions. The corporations recruited from
the business schools, and conceived executive training programs that
demanded strict conformity. The military selected generals and admirals from
the service academies, and inculcated "the caste feeling" by segregating
them from the associational life of the country. Less and less did local
apprenticeships serve as a passport to the government's executive chambers.
Of the appointees in the Eisenhower administration, Mills found that a
record number had never stood for election at any level.
Above the apparent balance of powers, Mills said, "an intricate set of
overlapping cliques" shared in "decisions having at least national
consequences." Rather than operating in secret, the same kinds of men who
traded opinions in the same churches, clubs and schools took turns in the
same jobs. Mills pointed to the personnel traffic among the Pentagon, the
White House and the corporations. The nation's three top policy positions
secretary of state, treasury and defense were occupied by former corporate
executives. The president was a general.
Mills could not answer many of the most important questions he raised. How
did the power elite make its decisions? He did not know. Did its members
cause their roles to be created, or step into roles already created? He
could not say. Around what interests did they cohere? He asserted a
"coincidence of interest" partially organized around "a permanent war
establishment," but he did little more than assert it. Most of the time, he
said, the power elite did not cohere at all. "This instituted elite is
frequently in some tension: it comes together only on certain coinciding
points and only on certain occasions of 'crisis.' " Although he urged his
readers to scrutinize the commanding power of decision, his book did not
scrutinize any decisions.
These ambiguities have kept "The Power Elite" vulnerable to the charge of
conspiracy-mongering. In a recent essay in Playboy called "Who Rules
America?" Arthur Schlesinger Jr. repeated his earlier skepticism about
Mills's argument, calling it "a sophisticated version of the American
nightmare." Alan Wolfe, in a 2000 afterword, pointed out that while Mills
got much about the self-enriching ways of the corporate elite right, his
vision of complacent American capitalism did not anticipate the competitive
dynamics of our global economy. And of late we have seen that "occasions of
crisis" do not necessarily serve to unify the generals with the politicians.
Yet "The Power Elite" abounds with questions that still trouble us today.
Can a strong democracy coexist with the amoral ethos of corporate elites?
And can public argument have democratic meaning in the age of national
security? The trend in foreign affairs, Mills argued, was for a militarized
executive branch to bypass the United Nations, while Congress was left with
little more than the power to express "general confidence, or the lack of
it." Policy tended to be announced as doctrine, which was then sold to the
public via the media. Career diplomats in the State Department believed they
could not truthfully report intelligence. Meanwhile official secrecy
steadily expanded its reach. "For the first time in American history, men in
authority are talking about an 'emergency' without a foreseeable end," Mills
wrote in a sentence that remains as powerful and unsettling as it was 50
years ago. "Such men as these are crackpot realists: in the name of realism
they have constructed a paranoid reality all their own."
John H. Summers teaches intellectual history at Harvard. He is currently
writing a biography of C. Wright Mills.
<html><DIV>D. Angus Vail <BR>Associate Professor of Sociology <BR>Willamette
University <BR>900 State Street <BR>Salem, OR 97301 <BR>Phone: 503.370.6313
<BR>Fax: 503.370.6512 <BR><BR>"It's not enough to know that things work.
<BR>The laurels go to those who can show HOW they work."</DIV></html>
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