C. Wright Mills
C. Wright Mills
Charles Wright Millswas an American sociologist, and a professor of sociology at Columbia University from 1946 until his death in 1962. Mills was published widely in popular and intellectual journals, and is remembered for several books, among them The Power Elite, which introduced that term and describes the relationships and class alliances among the U.S. political, military, and economic elites; White Collar, on the American middle class; and The Sociological Imagination, where Mills proposes the proper relationship in sociological scholarship...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionSociologist
Date of Birth28 May 1916
CountryUnited States of America
C. Wright Mills quotes about
[A]s a proportion of the labor force, fewer individuals manipulate things , more handle people and symbols .
Those in authority within institutions and social structures attempt to justify their rule by linking it, as if it were a necessary consequence, with moral symbols, sacred emblems, or legal formulae which are widely believed and deeply internalized. These central conceptions may refer to a god or gods, the 'votes of the majority,' the 'will of the people,' the 'aristocracy of talents or wealth,' to the 'divine right of kings' or to the alleged extraordinary endowment of the person of the ruler himself.
Seldom aware of the intricate connection between the patterns of their own lives and the course of world history, ordinary people do not usually know what this connection means for the kind of people they are becoming and for the kind of history-making in which they might take part.
People with advantages are loath to believe that they just happen to be people with advantages. They come readily to define themselves as inherently worthy of what they possess; they come to believe themselves 'naturally' elite; and, in fact, to imagine their possessions and their privileges as natural extensions of their own elite selves.
The market is sovereign and in the magic economy of the small entrepreneur there is no authoritarian center... in the political sphere... the equilibrium of powers prevails, and hence there is no chance of despotism.
[O]ne could translate the 555 pages of The Social System into about 150 pages of straightforward English. The result would not be very impressive.
Much work is merely a way to make money; much leisure is merely a way to spend it.
The economy - once a great scatter of small productive units in autonomous balance, has become dominated by two or three hundred giant corporations, administratively and politically interrelated... The political order, once a decentralized set of several dozen states with a weak spinal cord, has become a centralized executive establishment which has taken up into itself many powers previously scattered... The military order, once a slim establishment in a context of distrust fed by state militia, has become the largest and most expensive feature of government.
Here's to the day when the complete works of Leon Trotsky are published and widely distributed in the Soviet Union. On that day the USSR will have achieved democracy!
IBM Plus Reality Plus Humanism=Sociology
Fate has to do with events in history that are the summary and unintended results of innumerable decisions of innumerable men.
The point is that we are among those who cannot get their mouths around all the little Yeses that add up to tacit acceptance of a world run by crackpot realists and subject to blind drift. And that, you see, is something to which we do belong; we belong to those who are still capable of personally rejecting. Our minds are not yet captive.
If we accept the Greek's definition of the idiot as an altogether private man, then we must conclude that many American citizens are now idiots. And I should not be surprised, although I don't know, if there were some such idiots even in Germany.
Prestige is the shadow of money and power.