C. Wright Mills

For more information on Charles Wright Mills, visit Britannica.com.

American sociologist and political polemicist C. Wright Mills (1916-1962) argued that the academic elite has a moral duty to lead the way to a better society by actively indoctrinating the masses with values.

On Aug. 28, 1916, C. Wright Mills was born in Waco, Tex. He received his bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Texas and his doctorate from the University of Wisconsin in 1941. Subsequently, he taught sociology at the University of Maryland and Columbia University and during his academic career received a Guggenheim fellowship and a Fulbright grant. At his death, Mills was professor of sociology at Columbia.

Mills has been described as a "volcanic eminence" in the academic world and as "one of the most controversial figures in American social science." He considered himself, and was so considered by his colleagues, as a rebel against the "academic establishment." Mills was probably influenced very much in his rebellious attitude by the treatment his doctoral mentor, Edward Allsworth Ross, had received at Stanford. Ross was fired from Stanford in 1900, largely, it is thought, because he urged immigration laws against bringing Chinese coolies into America to work on railroad building. (Stanford was funded primarily by monies from a railroad which employed such labor.) The firing of Ross spurred the movement for academic freedom in the United States under the leadership of E.R.A. Seligman of Columbia University. Ross then went on to Wisconsin, where, together with John R. Gillin, he built up one of the broadest sociology departments in the nation and where Mills was one of his early doctoral students.

Mills emerged as an acid critic of the so-called military-industrial complex and was one of the earliest leaders of the New Left political movement of the 1960s. Against the overwhelming number of academic studies, Mills insisted - and this is the central thesis of virtually all of his works - that there is a concentration of political power in the hands of a small group of military and business leaders which he termed the "power elite." Essentially, what he proposes as a cure for this immoral situation is that this power be transferred to an academic elite, a group of social scientists who think as Mills does.

As to how the power is to be transferred, Mills is not too clear, as he died before he was able to complete a final synthesis of his thought. In general, he maintains that the academic elite already wields the power but that it is subservient to a corrupt military-industrial complex which it unthinkingly serves simply because it is the going system, the establishment. The task, then, is to convert the academic elite through moral suasion or a kind of "theological preaching," as one sympathetic critic has commented. A major reason why the academic elite unwittingly serves this complex is the elite's behavioral approach, its commitment to value-free social science. In the past, conservatives have attacked the academic intelligentsia on the same grounds, that it has been immoral not to inculcate moral values.

Now Mills and the New Left made the same criticism, although in the interest of rather different moral values. Mills and his followers argued that the so-called value-free commitment to analyze "what is," that is, the existing system, automatically buttresses that system and - since the system is wrong - is thus immoral. In a sense, then, as one commentator has observed, what Mills's program amounts to is: "Intellectuals of the world, unite!"

Mills's analysis of political influence has received a much more favorable response. Mills, like a number of other, earlier writers, as far back as Plato and as recent as Walter Lippmann, perceptively pointed out that eminence in one field is quickly transformed into political influence, especially in a democracy, where public opinion is so crucial. Thus, movie stars, sports stars, and famous doctors use their fame to secure elections or political followings. However, there is no rational basis for this, since competence is related to function. If one functions as a film actor or doctor, that does not mean that he has political wisdom. Mills thus advocated his social science elite to replace such corrupt manifestations of the existing system, thereby calling into question many of the fundamental assumptions of democracy. He advocated a community of social scientists, similar to Plato's philosopher-kings, throughout the world, but especially in the United States, and this elite would wield power through knowledge.

Further Reading

For a sympathetic assessment of Mills see the work by the American Marxist theoretician Herbert Aptheker, The World of C. Wright Mills (1960), and Irving L. Horowitz, ed., The New Sociology: Essays in the Social Science and Social Theory in Honor of C. Wright Mills (1964). Criticism of Mills is in Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology (1960; new rev. ed. 1961); various works by Robert Dahl, particularly Who Governs? (1961); and Raymond A. Bauer and others, American Business and Public Policy: The Politics of Foreign Trade (1963).

nuclear engineer

Personal Information

Born Joseph Chester Mills Jr. on February 26, 1946, in Los Angeles, CA; son of Joseph Chester Mills Sr. and Mildred Craddock Mills; married (divorced); married Gail, 1982; children: two (first marriage), two stepchildren
Education: University of California-Los Angeles, BS, engineering, 1967; University of California-Los Angeles, MS, nuclear engineering, 1969; University of California-Los Angeles, PhD, nuclear engineering, 1972.
Politics: Democrat.
Memberships: American Nuclear Society; American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Career

Rockwell International, Atomics International (later Rocketdyne), Canoga Park, California, various project and program management positions in the development of new nuclear power systems, 1972-87, Rockwell International, program director for development of nuclear power systems for military and exploratory space missions, 1987-94, Rockwell and the Boeing Company, director of the Power Module/Cargo Element Team for the International Space Station, 1994-97; Boeing, Canoga Park Site Director, 1997-98; Boeing, Huntington Beach Site Director, 1998-99; Boeing, Houston, TX, vice president and deputy program manager for ISS contract, 1999-01; Boeing, vice president and program manager for ISS contract, 2001-03; Boeing Integrated Defense Systems, Pasedena, CA, vice president and program manager for JIMO Phase A Trade and Concept Design Study, 2003-04; Boeing, Canoga Park, CA, vice president and executive focal of space science initiative, 2004-05.

Life's Work

In a career spanning more than three decades, Dr. Joseph C. Mills contributed significantly to our understanding of nuclear reactor safety and the development of a new generation of nuclear reactors for use in space. He played pivotal roles in the design, construction, launch, and assembly of the International Space Station (ISS). Dr. Mills also headed The Boeing Company's effort to design and build the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter (JIMO) for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA's) Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

Remained Focused on Education

Born on February 26, 1946, in Los Angeles, California, Joseph C. Mills, Jr., grew up in the tough neighborhoods of South Central L.A. His mother, Mildred Craddock Mills (subsequently Lehman), a clerk for the Los Angeles County Marshall's Office, stressed the importance of education for her children's success. Joe's father, Joseph C. Mills, Sr., worked for the U.S. Postal Service for a few years, but was often unemployed. The Mills divorced when Joe was eleven and he and his younger brother and sister were raised by their mother. She kept Joe focused on his education at a time when athletics and friends pulled him in other directions.

In addition to his mother, Joe Mills was strongly influenced by his fourth-grade teacher who recognized his abilities and challenged him in mathematics. He also looked to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., as his role model--a man from a humble background who accomplished great feats.

However, for the most part, it was negative experiences that challenged Mills. He attended Los Angeles High School, which was about 70 percent white, and shared his accelerated classes with only one or two other black students. He told Contemporary Black Biography (CBB) that during his junior year a school counselor told him: "Sometimes you can keep up with the other students just by working harder." The counselor was implying that, despite being a superior math and science student, Mills lacked innate ability. When he entered the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), a counselor said to him: "Are you really this good?" as he related to CBB. Mills took such negative comments as challenges to succeed.

Became a Reactor Safety Expert

Despite having grown up near the heart of the aerospace industry, when he entered U.C.L.A. in 1963, on a four-year California State Scholarship, Mills had only the vaguest notion of what an engineer did. In the end he chose engineering because it lacked a foreign-language requirement. However Mills soon found that he loved engineering and its applications. He told CBB: "Engineers take science and turn it into practical things.... God put me in the right place for my skill set." Mills earned his Bachelor of Science degree in engineering in 1967.

Fellowships and traineeships from the Atomic Energy Commission enabled Mills to complete his graduate studies at UCLA. He earned his master's of science in nuclear engineering in 1969 and his Ph.D. in nuclear engineering in 1972, studying nuclear reactor core disruption accidents. He developed a multi-dimensional computational model for predicting the way in which a reactor would meltdown and the consequences for the reactor core and radiation escape.

Following graduation Mills joined Atomics International, a small division of Rockwell International that later merged with Rocketdyne, another Rockwell division. During his first year at Rockwell, Mills participated in a joint Rockwell-UCLA program in which he taught algebra to incoming minority students. Over the next two decades, in various project and program management positions in Canoga Park, California, Mills helped to develop a new generation of nuclear power systems.

During the first 12 years of his career, Mills published numerous technical reports on nuclear power systems and safety and became an internationally-known expert on safety systems for liquid-metal fast-breeder nuclear reactors (LMFBRs). During the early 1980s he served on numerous task forces and committees that studied the development of LMFBRs, both domestically and internationally.

Designed Power Systems for Spacecraft

Between 1987 and 1994 Mills was a Rockwell program director in charge of developing nuclear power systems for military applications and civilian exploratory missions in space. Among his projects were the NASA Space Exploration Initiative and the Dynamic Isotope Power System for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the U.S. Air Force. Mills also was program manager for Rockwell's space nuclear power systems component of the "Star Wars" missile defense--the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (SDIO)--initiated by President Ronald Reagan. Mills worked on both a multimegawatt nuclear power system for the DOE/SDIO and a 40-kilowatts-electric (kWe) Thermionic Space Nuclear Power System for the DOE/Air Force/SDIO.

However by the early 1990s the world had changed dramatically. When the predicted energy crisis failed to materialize, plans for a new generation of nuclear-powered electrical-generating systems were put on hold. With the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s, interest in the military applications dwindled. In 1994 Mills went to work on the International Space Station (ISS). It was to be the high point of his career.

Initially Mills worked on Rockwell's solar power systems for the ISS, as director of the Power Module/Cargo Element Team at Canoga Park. When Rockwell merged with The Boeing Company in 1996, followed by Boeing's acquisition of McDonnell Douglas, the companies' ISS contracts came under Boeing's administration. In 1997 Mills became the site director at Canoga Park and in 1998 he became site director at the Huntington Beach, California, facility. In these positions Mills oversaw the design, development, testing and evaluation, production, and flight preparation of the hardware and software used for the assembly of ISS components in space. These out-board and in-board trusses and their associated electrical power systems, produced under McDonnell Douglas and Rockwell contracts, were launched from the space shuttle for the construction and instrumentation of the ISS.

Spent Nine Years on the ISS

In 1999 Mills spent three months as the ISS site director in Huntsville, Alabama, correcting problems and overseeing the production of pressurized element hardware and associated software for the ISS. From there he moved to the central ISS headquarters in Houston, Texas. As vice president and program manager in Houston, Mills was in charge of the entire Boeing role as prime integrating contractor for the ISS. To service this multibillion-dollar contract that saw the orbiting laboratory through its design, development, testing, launch, and operation, Mills coordinated several thousand Boeing engineers at five major locations around the country, as well as subcontractors and suppliers in 23 states. Additionally Mills was responsible for integrating the contributions of the ISS's 16 partner countries. Dr. Mills told CBB that his work on the ISS was, by far, the most satisfying project of his career. "In the early part of my career, working at the leading edge of nuclear science--Star Wars and nuclear energy--nothing was ever built. The ISS was my first opportunity to see the fruits of my labor--from design all the way to launch, utilization, and discoveries. I was leading the thousands of folks who were doing it and nurturing young careers."

Because of his background in nuclear power systems, in 2003 Boeing asked Mills to try to secure NASA's JPL JIMO contract. JIMO was a major component of NASA's ambitious Prometheus Program to develop nuclear-fission-powered propulsion systems for the exploration of deep space. The Prometheus Jupiter Icy Moons spacecraft would be designed to orbit three planet-sized moons of Jupiter--Callisto, Ganymede, and Europa--which may contain huge oceans beneath their icy surfaces. Plans for JIMO included the use of nuclear-electric power, a technology that uses converters to transform reactor heat into electricity to power the spacecraft thrusters more directly than conventional reactors that heat steam to turn turbines. Mills believed that such a system would enable JIMO to orbit the Jovian moons for years, conducting detailed scientific observations and experiments.

Failed to Win JIMO Contract

From the fall of 2003 to the spring of 2004, Mills was in charge of Boeing's JIMO Phase A Trade and Concept Design Study, working in Pasadena, California, for Boeing Integrated Defense Systems, one of the world's largest defense and space businesses. Boeing hoped to win the JPL contract to co-design, develop, build, launch, and operate JIMO. However in the fall of 2004, Northrop Grumman Space Technology was awarded the contract.

Mills stayed on at Canoga Park as vice president and executive focal of Boeing's space science initiative, one of four NASA initiatives to which a Boeing executive was assigned as the focal contact between the company and NASA. In this position Mills helped plan Boeing's future undertakings in space.

In 2002 Mills was named Aviation Week's Laureate of the Year for Space, in recognition of his contributions to the ISS. In 2004 he was awarded the Rotary National Award for Space Achievement (RNASA) Stellar Award--also known as the NASA Rotary Stellar Award for Late Career Achievement--for his nine years of leading the Boeing ISS program and his contributions to the development and delivery of every major ISS component and system. Mills also was recognized with Black Engineer's 2004 Pioneer Award for his work on the ISS. The Pioneer Award is reserved for engineers who have made contributions to areas in which very few black Americans have worked. Dr. Joseph C. Mills retired from the Boeing Company in March of 2005, devoting more time to his family, to volunteering in the community, and to playing golf.

Awards

LA-San Fernando Engineers' Council, Distinguished Engineering Project Achievement Award for the ISS Electric Power System, 1998; Aviation Week, Laureate of the Year for Space, 2002; Boeing 30-Year Service Award, 2002; Black Engineer, Black Engineer of the Year Pioneer Award, 2004; Rotary National Award for Space Achievement (RNASA) Stellar Award, 2004.

Works

Selected writings

• "An Axial Kinetics Model for Fast Reactor Disassembly Accidents," Proceedings of the Conference on New Developments in Reactor Mathematics and Applications (Idaho Falls, Idaho), March 1971.
• "An Industry-University Cooperative Program: AAP," Blacks in Science and Engineering Manpower Symposium (Cleveland, Ohio), October 1974.
• "Inherent Safety in Liquid Metal-Cooled Breeder Reactors," Los Angeles Energy Symposium, October 1980.
• "Development of Scaling Requirements for Natural Convection LMFBR Shutdown Heat Removal Test Facilities," Specialists Meeting on the Safety Aspects of Natural Circulation Decay Heat Removal in LMFBRs (Grenoble, France), May 1981.
• "Phenomenological Sodium Tests to Investigate Intank Natural Circulation Behavior under LMFBR Design Heat Removal Conditions," ANS/ENS Reactor Safety Meeting (Lyon, France), July 1982.
• "An Analytical Study of Stratification in Horizontal Pipes with Fluid Temperature Transient Imposed at Inlet," ASME Winter Meeting (New Orleans), December 1984.
• "COMMIX Code Validation Studies with Phenomenological Sodium Natural Convection Experiments," BNL Specialists Meeting on Decay Heat Removal and Natural Convection in LMFBRs (New York), April 1985.

Further Reading

On-line

• "Black Engineer of the Year Award Winners, 2004," BlackEngineer.com, www.blackengineer.com/artman/publish/printer_204.shtml (February 4, 2005).
• "Four Boeing Engineers Receive National Black Engineer Awards," Boeing News Release, www.boeing.com/news/releases/2004/q1/nr_040218s.html (February 4, 2005).
• "Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter," Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, www.jpl.nasa.gov/jimo/ (February 8, 2005).

• Additional information for this profile was obtained through an interview with Dr. Joseph C. Mills on February 16, 2005, and through materials provided by Boeing Company-NASA Systems.

— Margaret Alic

Quotes:

"The professional celebrity, male and female, is the crowning result of the star system of a society that makes a fetish of competition. In America, this system is carried to the point where a man who can knock a small white ball into a series of holes in the ground with more efficiency than anyone else thereby gains social access to the President of the United States."

"In the world of the celebrity, the hierarchy of publicity has replaced the hierarchy of descent and even of great wealth."

"The nearest the modern general or admiral comes to a small-arms encounter of any sort is at a duck hunt in the company of corporation executives at the retreat of Continental Motors, Inc."

"Not wishing to be disturbed over moral issues of the political economy, Americans cling to the notion that the government is a sort of automatic machine, regulated by the balancing of competing interests."

"Power is not of a man. Wealth does not center in the person of the wealthy. Celebrity is not inherent in any personality. To be celebrated, to be wealthy, to have power requires access to major institutions."

"Commercial jazz, soap opera, pulp fiction, comic strips, the movies set the images, mannerisms, standards, and aims of the urban masses. In one way or another, everyone is equal before these cultural machines; like technology itself, the mass media are nearly universal in their incidence and appeal. They are a kind of common denominator, a kind of scheme for pre-scheduled, mass emotions."

See more famous quotes by C. Wright Mills

C Wright Mills
Born	28 August 1916(1916-08-28) Waco, Texas
Died	20 March 1962 (aged 45) West Nyack, New York

Charles Wright Mills (August 28, 1916, Waco, Texas – March 20, 1962, West Nyack, New York) was an American sociologist. Mills attended the University of Detroit Jesuit High School. Mills is best remembered for his 1959 book The Sociological Imagination in which he lays out a view of the proper relationship between biography and history, theory and method in sociological scholarship. He is also known for studying the structures of power and class in the U.S. in his book The Power Elite. Mills was concerned with the responsibilities of intellectuals in post-World War II society, and advocated public, political engagement over disinterested observation.

Contents 1 Life and work 2 Works 3 Outlook 4 Personal life 5 Awards 6 See also 7 Further reading 8 External links 9 Notes

Life and work

Mills initially attended Texas A&M University but left after his first year and subsequently graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 1939 and received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1941. After a stint at the University of Maryland, College Park, he took a faculty position at Columbia University in 1946, which he kept, despite controversy, until his untimely death by heart attack. In the mid-1940s, together with Paul Goodman, he contributed to Politics, the journal edited during the 1940s by Dwight Macdonald.^[1]

Works

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v • d • e

• The New Men of Power: America's Labor Leaders (1948) studies the Labor Metaphysic and the dynamic of labor leaders cooperating with business officials. Mills concluded that labour had effectively renounced its traditional oppositional role and become reconciled to life within a capitalist system. Appeased by "bread and butter" economic policies, Mills argued labour adopted a pliantly subordinate role in the new structure of American power.

• White Collar: The American Middle Classes (1951) contends that bureaucracies have overwhelmed the individual city worker, robbing him or her of all independent thought and turning him into a sort of a robot that is oppressed but cheerful. He or she gets a salary, but becomes alienated from the world because of his or her inability to affect or change it.

• The Power Elite (1956) describes the relationship between the political, military, and economic elite (people at the pinnacles of these three institutions), noting that these people share a common world view:

the military metaphysic: a military definition of reality;

possess class identity: recognizing themselves separate and superior to the rest of society;

have interchangeability (horizontal mobility): they move within and between the three institutional structures and hold interlocking directorates;

cooptation / socialization: socialization of prospective new members is done based on how well they "clone" themselves socially after such elites.

These elites in the "big three" institutional orders have an "uneasy" alliance based upon their "community of interests" driven by the "military metaphysic," which has transformed the economy into a 'permanent war economy'.

• The Sociological Imagination (1959), Mills' most influential work, describes a mindset—the sociological imagination—for doing sociology that stresses being able to connect individual experiences and societal relationships. The three components that form the sociological imagination are:

1. History: how a society came to be and how it is changing and how history is being made in it

2. Biography: the nature of "human nature" in a society; what kind of people inhabit a particular society

3. Social Structure: how the various institutional orders in a society operate, which ones are dominant, how are they held together, how they might be changing, etc.

In The Sociological Imagination, Mills asserts that one must look inside oneself to help important research problems, and that social scientists "translate private troubles into public issues." ^[2] Additionally on this topic, Mills maintained throughout The Sociological Imagination that it is very difficult for most individuals in society to link their personal troubles to the cultural institutions in which they live.

The Sociological Imagination gives the one possessing it the ability to look beyond their local environment and personality to wider social structures and a relationship between history, biography and social structure.

Other important works include: The Causes of World War Three (1958), Listen, Yankee: The Revolution in Cuba (1960), and The Marxists (1962).

In a 1997 survey of members of the International Sociological Association which asked them to identify the ten books published in the 20th century which they considered to be the most influential for sociologists, The Sociological Imagination ranked second, preceded only by Max Weber's Economy and Society. [2].

The novel The Death of Artemio Cruz (1962), by Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes, is dedicated "To C. Wright Mills, true voice of North America, friend and companion in the struggle of Latin America". Dwight Macdonald had an off-again-on-again association with Mills, and sometimes, in his capacity as magazine editor, published Mills' material.

Outlook

There has long been debate over Mills' overall intellectual outlook. Mills is often seen as a "closet Marxist" because of his emphasis on social classes and their roles in historical progress and attempt to keep Marxist traditions alive in social theory. Just as often, however, others argue that Mills more closely identified with the work of Max Weber, whom many sociologists interpret as an exemplar of sophisticated (and intellectually adequate) anti-Marxism and modern liberalism.

While Mills never embraced the "Marxist" label, he nonetheless told his closest associates that he felt much closer to what he saw as the best currents of flexible, humanist Marxism than to its alternatives. He considered himself as a "plain Marxist", working in the spirit of young Marx as he claims in his collected essays: "Power, Politics and People" (Oxford university press, 1963). In a November 1956 letter to his friends Bette and Harvey Swados, Mills declared "[i]n the meantime, let's not forget that there's more [that's] still useful in even the Sweezy ^[3] kind of Marxism than in all the routineers of J.S. Mill ^[4] put together." ^[5]

There is an important quotation from Letters to Tovarich (autobiographical essay) dated Fall 1957 titled "On Who I Might Be and How I Got That Way":

“

You've asked me, 'What might you be?' Now I answer you: 'I am a Wobbly.' I mean this spiritually and politically. In saying this I refer less to political orientation that to political ethos, and I take Wobbly to mean one thing: the opposite of bureaucrat. […] I am a Wobbly, personally, down deep, and for good. I am outside the whale, and I got that way through social isolation and self-help. But do you know what a Wobbly is? It's a kind of spiritual condition. Don't be afraid of the word, Tovarich. A Wobbly is not only a man who takes orders from himself. He's also a man who's often in the situation where there are no regulations to fall back upon that he hasn't made up himself. He doesn't like bosses –capitalistic or communistic – they are all the same to him. He wants to be, and he wants everyone else to be, his own boss at all times under all conditions and for any purposes they may want to follow up. This kind of spiritual condition, and only this, is Wobbly freedom.[6]

”

These two quotations are the ones chosen by Kathryn Mills for the better acknowledgement of the nuanced thinking of C.W.Mills.

It appears that Mills understood his position as being much closer to Marx than to Weber, albeit influenced by both, as Stanley Aronowitz argued in A Mills Revival?. ^[7] Mills argues that micro and macro levels of analysis can be linked together by the sociological imagination, which enables its possessor to understand the large historical sense in terms of its meaning for the inner life and the external career of a variety of individuals. Individuals can only understand their own experiences fully if they locate themselves within their period of history. The key factor is the combination of private problems with public issues: the combination of troubles that occur within the individual’s immediate milieu and relations with other people with matters that have to do with institutions of an historical society as a whole. Mills shares with Marxist sociology and other "conflict theorists" the view that American society is sharply divided and systematically shaped by the ongoing interactions between the powerful and powerless. He also shares their concerns for alienation, the effects of social structure on the personality, and the manipulation of people by elites and the mass media. Mills combined such conventional Marxian concerns with careful attention to the dynamics of personal meaning and small-group motivations, topics for which Weberian scholars are more noted.

Mills had a very combative outlook regarding and towards many parts of his life, the people in it, and his works. In this way, he was a self proclaimed outsider.

“

I am an outlander, not only regionally, but deep down and for good. [8]

”

C Wright Mills' ideas also involve the Soviet Union. Mills was invited to the Soviet Union and acknowledged there for being critical of American society, yet Mills used the opportunity to attack Soviet censorship while there. Mills also holds in his ideas that the United States and Soviet Union are ruled by similar bureaucratic power elites and thus the two are convergent rather than divergent societies, which is a very controversial idea of Mills'.

Above all, Mills understood sociology, when properly approached, as an inherently political endeavor and a servant of the democratic process. In The Sociological Imagination, Mills wrote:

“

It is the political task of the social scientist -- as of any liberal educator -- continually to translate personal troubles into public issues, and public issues into the terms of their human meaning for a variety of individuals. It is his task to display in his work -- and, as an educator, in his life as well -- this kind of sociological imagination. And it is his purpose to cultivate such habits of mind among the men and women who are publicly exposed to him. To secure these ends is to secure reason and individuality, and to make these the predominant values of a democratic society. [9]

”

Personal life

When studying at the University of Texas, Mills met his first wife, Dorothy Helen Smith, who was also a student there. After they were married in 1937, Dorothy Helen, who became known as "Freya," worked to support the couple while Mills did graduate work, in addition to copyediting and typing many of the texts he wrote during this period, including his Ph.D. dissertation. They separated in New York City in 1945 and were divorced in 1947.

Mills' second wife was Ruth Harper, a statistician who worked with Mills on White Collar, published in 1951 and The Power Elite, published in 1956. Mills and Ruth were married in 1947, separated in 1957, and divorced in 1959.

Mills' third wife was Yaroslava Surmach, an American artist of Ukrainian descent whose varied work included glass paintings, book illustrations, and stained glass window designs. They were married in 1959, about three years before Mills' death in 1962.

By a strange coincidence, all three women died within a period of less than three months, Ruth on July 1, 2008, Freya on August 19, 2008, and Yaroslava on September 17, 2008. Mills had one child with each wife: Pamela (with Freya), Kathryn (with Ruth), and Nikolas (with Yaroslava).

Awards

The Society for the Study of Social Problems established the C. Wright Mills Award in 1964 for the book that "best exemplifies outstanding social science research and an great understanding the individual and society in the tradition of the distinguished sociologist, C. Wright Mills." The criteria are for the book that most effectively:

1) critically addresses an issue of contemporary public importance,

2) brings to the topic a fresh, imaginative perspective,

3) advances social scientific understanding of the topic,

4) displays a theoretically informed view and empirical orientation,

5) evinces quality in style of writing,

6) explicitly or implicitly contains implications for courses of action.[3].

See also

• Military-industrial complex

Further reading

• Irving Louis Horowitz, C. Wright Mills, an American Utopian (1983).
• Rick Tilman, C. Wright Mills, A Native Radical and his American Roots (1984). ISBN 0-02-915010-8.
• John Eldridge, C. Wright Mills, Key sociologist (1983).
• Kathryn Mills, ed., with Pamela Mills, C. Wright Mills: Letters and Autobiographical Writings, introduction by Dan Wakefield (University of California Press, 2000). ISBN 0-520-23209-7.
• Tom Hayden with Contemporary Reflections by Stanley Aronowitz, Richard Flacks, and Charles Lemert, Radical Nomad: C. Wright Mills and His Times (2006). ISBN 1-59451-202-7.
• Kevin Mattson, Intellectuals in Action: The Origins of the New Left and Radical Liberalism, 1945-1970 (2002). ISBN 027102206X.
• G. William Domhoff, "Mills's The Power Elite 50 Years Later" in Contemporary Sociology, November 2006.
• Stanley Aronowitz, "A Mills Revival?", in Logos Journal, Summer 2003.
• Keith Kerr. Postmodern Cowboy: C. Wright Mills and a New 21st Century Sociology. (Paradigm 2008) ISBN 1594515794
• Daniel Geary, "Radical Ambition: C. Wright Mills, the Left, and American Social Thought" (University of California Press 2009). ISBN 0520258363
• Daniel Geary, "'Becoming International Again': C. Wright Mills and the Emergence of a Global New Left" in "Journal of American History," December 2008 [4]

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: C. Wright Mills

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Charles Wright Mills

• Official website
• Contemporary Analysis
• Frank Elwell's page at Rogers State
• An interview with Mills's daughters, Kathryn and Pamela
• C.Wright Mills, The Power Elite
• C.W Mills,Structure of Power in American Society,British Journal of Sociology,Vol.9.No.1 1958
• A Mills Revival?
• C.Wright Mills,The Causes of World War Three
• C.Wright Mills, Letter to the New Left
• C.Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination
• C.Wright Mills, On intellectual Craftsmanship
• Sociology-Congress in Köln 2000 workshop: C. Wright Mills and his Power Elite: Actuality today?

Notes

1. ^ TIME April 4, 1994 Volume 143, No. 14 - "Biographical sketch of Dwight Macdonald" by John Elson (Accessed 4 December 2008)
2. ^ [Mills, C Wright. THE SOCIOLOGICAL IMAGINATION Fortieth Anniversary Edition. Oxford University Press, 2000.]
3. ^ Paul M. Sweezy, founder of Monthly Review magazine, "an independent socialist magazine".
4. ^ I.e., liberal intellectuals.
5. ^ 7-nov-2007 17.07 library.umass.edu Remo, I just reviewed the Mills correspondence in the Swados Papers, and, yes, that is an accurate quote. In a letter dated Nov. 3rd [1956] Mills writes, "What these jokers -- all of them -- don't they realize that way down deep and systematically I'm a goddamned anarchist. I'm really quite serious and I'm going over the next few years to work out the position in a positive and clean-cut way. In the meantime, let's not forget that there's more still useful in even the Sweezy kind of Marxism than in all the routineers of JS Mills put together." I'm happy to send you a photocopy of the entire letter if you like. Please let me know if you have any questions, or if I can be of further assistance. Best regards, Danielle -- Danielle Kovacs Curator of Manuscripts Special Collections and University Archives W.E.B. Du Bois Library University of Massachusetts 154 Hicks Way Amherst, MA 01003 (413) 545-2784 [1].
6. ^ From C. Wright Mills: Letters and Autobiographical Writings, edited by Kathryn Mills with Pamela Mills, introduction by Dan Wakefield (University of California Press, 2000.), pag.252. Wobblies were members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and the direct action they favored included passive resistance, strikes, and boycotts. They wanted to build a new society according to general socialist principles but they refused to endorse any socialist party or any other kind of political party. Site of IWW.
7. ^ "These perspectives owed as much to the methodological precepts of Emile Durkheim as they did to the critical theory of Karl Marx and Max Weber. Using many of the tools of conventional social inquiry: surveys, interviews, data analysis—charts included—Mills takes pains to stay close to the “data” until the concluding chapters. But what distinguishes Mills from mainstream sociology, and from Weber, with whom he shares a considerable portion of his intellectual outlook, is the standpoint of radical social change, not of fashionable sociological neutrality." A Mills Revival?.
8. ^ [Horowitz, Irving L. C. Wright Mills: An American Utopian. New York: Free Press, 1983.]
9. ^ [Mills, C Wright. THE SOCIOLOGICAL IMAGINATION Fortieth Anniversary Edition. Oxford University Press, 2000.]

Persondata
NAME	Mills, C. Wright
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Mills, Charles Wright thinking
SHORT DESCRIPTION	American sociologist
DATE OF BIRTH	28 August 1916
PLACE OF BIRTH	Waco, Texas, United States
DATE OF DEATH	20 March 1962
PLACE OF DEATH	West Nyack, New York, United States

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