The Half-Forgotten Prophet: C. Wright Mills (Page 2)

What can be said of Mills in his time, now that the time is past? He clearly thought that class society, with its visible stratification--and with much agitated awareness of it, at the top, the bottom and in between--had given way to a mass society. Where others, triumphantly or resignedly, saw in the postwar nation a society liberated from material worries and turned, creatively or neurotically, to cultural self-definition, he thought of it as a place of new compulsions and old constraints. Certainly, the imagery of White Collar was recognizable to anyone who knew the social criticism of Partisan Review writers Clement Greenberg and Dwight Macdonald, or of Robert Warshow at Commentary. Dissent, where this argument was axiomatic, was founded by Irving Howe and Lewis Coser in 1954--and in its early years some of it was a prolonged, if critical, footnote to Mills. Mills's Columbia colleague and friend Richard Hofstadter was melancholic about the fate of our Republic: citizenship was obsolete.

What lent Mills's account of the situation a special pathos were two elements--which Mills spent the rest of his life trying desperately to join. One was the larger historical analysis he learned from Hans Gerth, in which the United States was a specific case of a general tendency, despite all our differences from Europe. Bureaucratization in a merged public and private sphere, the concentration of power in politics, a leveling and enforced homogenization in culture were its outward signs. Modern society made freedom in the liberal sense of autonomous and reflective citizenship increasingly impossible. Many contemporaries stopped there, sadly but helplessly. Mills became angry--an anger that grew with time. It drove him in a relentless search for actors who could reset the historical clock.

The search was all the more relentless because in those days we feared extirpation in nuclear war. Much has been written about the intellectuals--some former radicals, some former Communists, some New Dealers, many driven by one or another ethnic or religious obsession--who formed our ideological expeditionary force. Some were reckless in demanding that Western governments risk nuclear war to "stop Communism"; others were equally reckless in assuring us that war would not occur. Less has been written about the smaller group who warned that a war that would terminate much of human existence was all too possible. This group was no less varied in composition and motive than were its antagonists. It included the Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling, the Los Alamos physicist Philip Morrison, the Christian pacifist A.J. Muste, the historians H. Stuart Hughes and William Appleman Williams, the educator Robert Maynard Hutchins, the pediatrician Benjamin Spock and Congressmen like Robert Kastenmeier of Wisconsin. Mills argued that a society in which critical reflection had given way to instrumental rationality was so heedless of its own humanity that it had no way to distinguish fantasies of destruction from routine political calculation. His passion for peace grew out of his iron hatred of the cold war's intellectual profiteers.

Mills left a great deal out. Ethnicity and race in the United States (and elsewhere) did not particularly interest him. Despite his affinity for the early twentieth-century sociologist Max Weber, a very profound student of religion, Mills was himself religiously unmusical. He was concerned with the social setting of personal development, but his portraits of human existence were frequently one dimensional. Summers has titled the collection The Politics of Truth--but how much ambiguity, or openness, did Mills allow himself in considering his own truths? He was occasionally amenable to correcting his notions of historical sequence but much less self-critical about his belief that humans were potentially antagonistic to hierarchy. On his own account, many were glad to serve.

Reviewing White Collar in Partisan Review, Dwight Macdonald said that with the expiration of Marxist eschatology, we were all looking for a new key to social existence--Mills no less than the rest of us. Mills's eventual answer, after encountering in Europe in the late '50s strong oppositional stirrings that were to follow later in the United States, was that the new bearers of a project of social transformation were the intellectual vanguard. Allowed by society to think, but told not to think too much, they resented being denied autonomy--or ascribed the role of court jesters. In the American '50s, Mills and others across the political spectrum were described not as social thinkers but as social critics. The implication was that the major structures of society would remain intact, no matter what was said.

Yet for some years Mills was the clearest voice of the American opposition to the Democratic Party's fusion of welfare and warfare. In 1958 he published the short book The Causes of World War Three, in which, several years before Eisenhower's warning about the military-industrial complex, he described an academic-military-industrial complex that gave us a poorly disguised one-party state. He characterized colleagues like Kissinger and theorists of nuclear war as "crackpot realists." When the United States broke off relations with Cuba and began its still unconcluded attempt to destroy Castro's revolution, Mills visited the island and returned to write Listen, Yankee (1960), in which he voiced the Cubans' bitterness at American ignorance of Cuban history--and of our own imperial past and present. Among its hundreds of thousands of readers was, apparently, John F. Kennedy. A month before his murder, the president received the French journalist Jean Daniel, who was en route to Cuba. In his discussion of Cuban history and the state of Cuban-American relations, Kennedy gave Daniel what could only have been a message meant for Castro: I am "President of the United States and not a sociologist"; I am under constraints. Was the Kennedy of the June 10, 1963, American University speech, which had called for a truce in the cold war, telling Castro to be patient, that he planned changes? In any event, the elegantly shaped fissures in the Kennedy project turned into the brutal contradictions of the Johnson presidency. Advances in civil rights and economic redistribution were accompanied by the destruction of much of our national moral substance in Vietnam.

Mills decried the "cheerful robots" produced by cold war culture. His younger readers, and some older ones, had an answer. The slogan of the 1965 Berkeley Free Speech Movement, evoking the computer cards used for data entry, was "I am a human being: do not bend, fold, spindle or mutilate." At its beginnings, the new movement politics skipped over class and material interests to return to the search for a world more human. Mills at the start of his career was enthusiastic about John Dewey's pragmatism precisely because it joined human purpose to the alteration of historical circumstances. At the end, the circumstances--as crushing as they were--struck him as rendering new purposes even more necessary.

Upon examination, however, these turned out to be the familiar old ones: the re-creation of a public sphere, the self-activation of citizens, the construction and consolidation of civic freedoms. His intellectual journey was thoroughly American, and he was far truer to liberalism than many of its most strident conventional defenders. The last piece in The Politics of Truth is a "Letter to the New Left" of 1960--a response to an anthology some of us published in London earlier that year under the title Out of Apathy. In it, Mills tried to settle accounts with the proponents of the idea then circulating about an "end of ideology." Unfortunately, he did not acknowledge that the society described by the proponents of the idea (Raymond Aron and Daniel Bell, most prominently) was remarkably similar to Mills's account of society. Routine's soporific effect on politics, as his disillusioned contemporaries saw it, wasn't all that different from the civic vacuum Mills deplored. Like everyone else, Mills was tied to his times. His call to revolt was one of the influences that produced, in the end, not revolution but rebellion--enough to disprove his own long conviction of the immobility of our society, sufficient to change society in major ways but hardly the rupture he yearned for. Mills is half forgotten--perhaps because much of what he said is now taken for granted. In the end, this splendid dramatist gave us not a night on the barricades but a full afternoon of historical questions, many of them with us still.

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