Us and Them in the 1950s

[Paul Mackin]

It occurs to me some may not be familier with C. Wright Mills. It WAS a
long time ago. In the 50s he was required reading for college students
(whether it happened to be assigned or not). In light of the discussion
yesterday of the relation between government and corporations let me quote
a sentence or two from _The Power Elite_ (1956):

The idea of the power elite rests upon and enables us to make sense of (1) 
the decisive institutional trends that characterize the stucture of our epoch,
in particular, the military ascendancy in a privately incorporated econony,
and more broadly, the several conincidences of objective interests between
economic, military, and political institutuions; (2) the social similarities
and the psychological affinities of the men who occupy the command posts of
these structures, in particular the increased interchangeability of the top
positions in each of them and the increased traffic between these orders in
the carrers of men of power; (3) the ramifications, to the point of virutal
totality, of the kind of decisions that are made at the top, and the rise to
power of a set of men who, by training and best, are profesional organizers
of considerable force and who are unrestrained by democratic party training.
(p. 296)

Mills was no Pynchon in making the hair on the back of your neck stand up
but compared to the theoretical and statistical sociologists of his day
a treasured resource in debating one's parents on the subject of AmeriKa
(as Mills sometimes like to spell the word in his later more polemical 
writings).
		
			P.

On Sun, 9 Jul 2000, Paul Mackin wrote:

> 
> Newly published letters and biographical material of sociologist C.
> Wright Mills is reviewed in todays NYTimes.
> 
> Mills called the two groups "White Collar" and "The Power Elite."
> 
> 
> 			P. 
> 
> 
> 
> http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/07/09/reviews/000709.09judist.html
>