3
The Intellectual as Historical Agency of Change
1958‑1962
The Showdown between Idiocy and Coherence
Mills locates the root of the unbalanced mentality, the cause of the intellectual deficiency of the complacent, in the alienation of personal from political life, [1] in the divorce of political reflection from cultural work. [2] This separation creates a context in which human development will continue to be trivialized, human sensibilities blunted, and the quality of life distorted and impoverished. [3] This trivialized, blunted, distorted and altogether private human being is an idiot and I should not be surprised, although I do not know, if there were not some such idiots even in Germany. This—and I use the word with care—this spiritual condition seems to me the key to many modern troubles of political intellectuals, as well as the key to much political bewilderment in modern Society. [4] The idiocy is characterized by mute acceptance—or even unawareness—of moral atrocity; the lack of indignation when confronted with moral horror. [5] Mills looks for historical origins of this mental illness, and locates some of them in World War II, when Man had become an object; and insofar as those to whom he was an object felt about the spectacle at all, they felt powerless, in the grip of larger forces, with no part in those affairs that lay beyond their immediate areas of daily demand and gratification. It was a time of moral somnambulance. [6] In The Causes of World War Three, Mills makes it lucidly clear that the enemy, whose name was Nazi during World War Two, was not defeated in 1945: In the expanded world of mechanically vivified communication the individual becomes the spectator of everything but the human witness of nothing. Having no plain targets of revolt, men feel no moral springs of revolt The cold manner enters their souls and they are made private and blase.. . . . It is not the number of victims or the degree of cruelty that is distinctive; it is the fact that the acts committed and the acts that nobody protests are split from the consciousness of men in an uncanny, even a schizophrenic, manner. The atrocities of our time are done by men as 'functions' of a social machinery—men possessed by an abstracted view that hides from them the human beings who are their victims and, as well their own humanity. They are inhuman acts because they are impersonal. They are not sadistic but merely businesslike; they are not aggressive but merely efficient; they are not emotional at all but technically clean cut.
This insensibility was made dramatic by the Nazis; but the same lack of human morality prevailed among fighter pilots in Korea, with their petroleum‑jelly broiling of children and women and men. And is not this lack raised to a higher and technically more adequate level among the brisk generals and gentle scientists who are now planning the weapons and the strategy of World War III? [7]
The schizophrenia of the cheerful robot, of the technological idiot, of the crackpot realist, all of whom embody a common ethos: rationality without reason [8] is contrasted by Mills with the ethos of craftsmanship. . . as the central experience of the unalienated human being and the very root of free human development. [9] Craftsmanship is characterized by a unity of design, production and enjoyment. [10] As soon as this unity is destroyed, as soon as these activities become separate masks which "compose" a person, and separate roles which "compose" a social structure, the individual loses coherence and the society lacks reason. This cleavage or rupture, this split between thought, action and feeling, creates a rift, a great cultural vacuum, and it is this vacuum that the mass distributor, and his artistic and intellectual satrap, have filled up with frenzy and trash and fraud. [11] Just like profiteers and capitalist doctors who manage to extort enormous personal gain from war and illness, the cultural middlemen—professional designers, advertisers and propagandists, hired professors, scientists and artists—have managed to extort enormous personal gain from schizophrenia. The world men are going to believe they understand is now, in this cultural apparatus, being defined and built, made into a slogan, a story, a diagram, a release, a dream, a fact, a blue‑print, a tune, a sketch, a formula; and presented to them. Such part as reason may have in human affairs, this apparatus, this put‑together contraption, fulfills; such role as sensibility may play in the human drama, it enacts; such use as technique may have in history and in biography, it provides. . . . In the USA the cultural apparatus is established commercially: it is part of an ascendant capitalist economy. This fact is the major key to understanding both the quality of everyday life and the situation of culture in America today. [12]
Among the new profiteers, the cultural, artistic and scientific entrepreneurs, Mills' colleagues are not a set of Representative Men whose conduct and character are above the taint of the pecuniary morality, and who constitute models for American imitation and aspiration. In The Causes of World War Three Mills observes that Most cultural workmen are fighting a cold war in which they echo and elaborate the confusions of officialdoms. . . . They have generally become the Swiss Guard of the power elite—Russian or American, as the case happens to be. Unofficial spokesmen of the military metaphysic, they have not lifted the level of moral sensibility; they have further depressed it. They have not tried to put responsible content into the political vacuum; they have helped to empty it and to keep it empty. [13] . . . many, perhaps in fear of being thought Unpatriotic, become nationalist propagandists; others, perhaps in fear of being thought Unscientific, become nationalist technicians. [14]
The first step away from social schizophrenia is to unite one's split self, or at least to define the conditions for one's own coherence. Mills tries to define these conditions by referring to the model of the craftsman, whose mind and body are both his own, whose thought and action are inseparable components of projects which consist of intelligent practical activity. In craftsmanship, plan and performance and are unified, and in both, the craftsman is master of the activity and of himself in the process. The craftsman is free to begin his working according to his own plan, and during the work he is free to modify its shape and the manner of its shaping. The continual joining of plan and performance brings even more firmly together the consummation of work and its instrumental activities, infusing the latter with the joy of the former. Work is a rational sphere of independent action. . . Since he works freely, the craftsman is able to learn from his work, to develop as well as use his capacities. His work is thus a means of developing himself as a man as well as developing his skill. [15] In political activity, this type of craftsmanly coherence, this unity of plan and performance, requires a definition of reality which sheds light on available courses of action and on obstacles which prevent or block their realization. The less adequate one's definitions of reality and the less apt one's program for changing it, the more complex does the scene of action appear. 'Complexity' is not inherent in any phenomena; it is relative to the conceptions with which we approach reality. It is the task of those who want peace to identify causes and to clarify them to the point of action. [16] However, even though Mills refers to the model of craftsmanship, he does not suggest that social critique is "constructive thinking" in the sense that it finds solutions to the problems of the ruling class, since then we are foolishly trapped by the difficulties those now at the top have got us into. They do not want us to identify their difficulties as theirs; they want us to think of their difficulties as if these were everybody's. That is what they call 'constructive thinking about public problems.' To be constructive in their sense is merely to stick our heads further into their sack. So many of us have already stuck our heads in there that our first job is to pull them out and look around again for genuine alternatives. In this sense it must be said: the first job of the intellectuals today is to be consistently and altogether unconstructive. For to be constructive within the going scheme of affairs is to consent to the continuation of precisely what we ought to be against. [17] What Mills prophetically called for was a confrontation between idiocy and coherence, a showdown between the fully developed human being and the cheerful robot, technological idiot, crackpot realist, a destruction of the rationality without reason which degrades and deranges the modern human being: that is the real, even the ultimate, showdown on 'socialism' in our time. For it is a showdown on what kinds of human beings and what kinds of culture are going to become the models of the immediate future, the commanding models of human aspiration . . . To make that showdown clear, as it affects every region of the world and every intimate recess of the self requires a union of political reflection and cultural sensibility of a sort not really known before. [18]
Mills lucidly defined a large goal, and shortly after his premature death a new left began to take concrete steps toward its realization in every region of the world; even a new American left began to move upstream against the main drift. However, in order to define the available courses of action and the obstacles on the way, Mills himself had to struggle against the frenzy and trash and fraud which had been stuffed into his mind and file by academic bureaucrats and their hired and scared satraps. In this struggle, he had to spend vast amounts of energy to reach a level of coherence and clarity which he had already reached in 1948.
In The Causes of World War Three, his analysis of the collective self‑alienation, the daily activity which reproduces the Power Elite, does not go beyond insights into the apathy of the population and the powerlessness of' intellectuals developed a decade earlier. They are allowed to occupy such positions, and to use them in accordance with crackpot realism, because of the powerlessness, the apathy, the insensibility of publics and masses; they are able to do so, in part, because of the inactionary posture of intellectuals, scientists, and other cultural workmen. [19] Mills does not regard the daily self‑renunciation as a practical activity (the sale of one's productive power for a wage) or even as an intelligent practical activity (the sale of one's mental skills for a salary or a grant), but as a passive condition (apathy, powerlessness, insensitivity). As a result, he is unable to give meaning to a phrase which he believes to be profoundly true but which he cannot substantiate, namely that men are free to make history. [20] The years devoted to Max Weber and Professor Gerth now drive him to repress Rousseau, the Wobblies, Veblen, Marx, and his own experience, and keep him from asking how and why men make power elites through their daily acts of self‑alienation. Mills compulsively repeats: elites of power make history. [21]
This definition of reality does not adequately clarify how reality can be changed. If the elites of power make history, then the elites of power change history, and the very possibility of changing the reality dominated by The Power Elite is excluded by definition. Mills' attempt to emerge from this paradox created by his training is less pathetic than silly. This mid‑twentieth century radical in his early forties is able to write, What man of God can claim to partake of the Holy Spirit, to know the life of Jesus, to grasp the meaning of that Sunday phrase 'the brotherhood of man'—and yet sanction the insensibility, the immorality, the spiritual irresponsibility of the Caesars of our time? [22] The same man who raises the goal of unifying plan and performance seeks to implement his plan by appealing to the very men who profiteer from the rift between plan and performance, the culture salesmen, the creators of weapons, the makers of images, the perpetrators of religion, the trivializers of knowledge. [23] It is to these men that Mills says, if we are to act as public intellectuals, we must realize ourselves as an independent and oppositional group. Each of us, in brief, ought to act as if he were a political party. [24]� It is to the men who specialize in adapting men to what they have become in the modern United States that Mills writes about a showdown on all the modern expectations about what man can want to become. [25] Mills appeals to the symbol experts, the fragmented men who occupy the freest places in which to work precisely because of their fragmentation, as if they were coherent craftsmen, yet he knows that it is the absence of such a stratum of cultural workmen in close interplay with such a participating public, that is the signal fault of the American cultural scene today. [26] Mills' dilemma deepens: not only are the cultural workmen who could define it strategy of change absent; there is, in addition, no real public for such programs. [27] In the absence of both, Mills calls on scientists, priests and professors to tell the Power Elite what they are doing to the United States. To those with power and awareness of it, we must publicly impute varying measures of responsibility for such consequences as we find by our work to be decisively influenced by their actions and defaults. [28] Mills then questions the point of doing this. Any such public role for the intellectual workman makes sense only on the assumption that the decisions and the defaults of designatable circles are now history‑making; for only then can the inference be drawn that the ideas and the knowledge—and also the morality and the character—of these higher circles are immediately relevant to the human events we are witnessing. [29] But even the Mills influenced by Max Weber is a recalcitrant man, and he calls on inexistent cultural workmen and on profiteering culture experts to change history by changing the ideas of the Power Elite. I am contending that the ideology and the lack of ideology of the powerful have become quite relevant to history‑making, and that therefore it is politically relevant for intellectuals to examine it, to argue about it, and to propose new terms for the world encounter. [30] But this position takes the sometime "radical" too far, and he backs up. To appeal to the powerful, on the basis of any knowledge we now have, is utopian in the silly sense of that term. [31] Yet, finding no other alternative in his file, We must accept what perhaps used to be the utopian way . . . [32]
In 1958, Mills had not achieved a unity of plan and performance. Looking for a properly developing society. . . built around craftsmanship as the central experience of the unalienated human being and the very root of free human development, [33] he convinced himself that It is now sociologically realistic, morally fair, and politically imperative to make demands upon men of power and to hold them responsible for specific courses of events. [34] And C. Wright Mills pulled his head out of the sand in an isolated spot of the U.S. desert, and he shouted guidelines and conditions which included "demands" ranging from a senior civil service firmly linked to the world of knowledge and sensibility to a complete dismantling of the corporate‑military structure of the United States. [35]
The Whole Man as Promethean History‑Maker
In 1959 Mills writes, I do not know the answer to the question of political irresponsibility in our time or to the cultural and political question of The Cheerful Robot. [36] Yet he tries, once again, to locate himself in the midst of impotent spectators, apolitical idiots, expert apologists, sophisticated escapists, detached complacents; he tries, once again, to find an exit from a world of rationality without reason. He finds spectacular symbols which embody precisely the opposite traits from those of his friends, his colleagues, his contemporaries. To the clerk with a title, the fragment of a vast project whose sense he cannot grasp, the incapacitated expert, Mills opposes the fully developed man, the man for whom nothing human is alien. The values involved in the cultural problem of freedom and individuality are conveniently embodied in all that is suggested by the ideal of the Renaissance Man. [37]� To the helpless spectator, the political non‑man who watches human life from a distance, the servant who considers himself free the very moment he's bought, Mills opposes the man who creates his own environment, the man who steals his self‑powers whenever they're not at his free disposal, the man who bows neither to Zeus nor any master. The values involved in the political problem of history‑making are embodied in the Promethean ideal of its human making. [38] For Mills, the fully developed man is not a passive spectator engaged in contemplating all that is human, nor is the creative man a detached intellectual whose spirit creates freely. Both are aspects of a practical man whose coherence does not reside in the comprehensive rationality of his grand theory, but in the unity between his thought and his action. They are symbols of practical‑critical activity, revolutionary activity; they are the two aspects of craftsmanship, the central experience of the unalienated human being and the very root of free human development. In the previous year's article, Mills had written, Craftsmanship cannot prevail without a properly developing society. [39] In the article on Renaissance Man and Prometheus, he adds that a properly developing society is one in which men deliberately develop their lives to a level which corresponds to the available instruments, namely a society in a permanent state of revolution. In a Properly Developing Society, one might suppose that deliberately cultivated styles of life would be central; decisions about standards of living would be made in terms of debated choices among such styles; the industrial equipment of such a society would be maintained as an instrument to increase the range of choice among styles of life. [40]
In his next major work, Mills tries to put these precepts into practice. The Sociological Imagination is a work about craftsmanship. It is the work of a fully developed twentieth century man attempting to link his practical activity to the history of his time. It is an attempt to join thought and action, to unite power with sensibility, to be coherent and not just to think rationally. Mills brings the problem into focus by turning his attention to those nearest to him who are under the impression that they practice a craft, the sociology professors. He exposes them as professional escapists, obfuscators and bureaucrats. Mills again turns to the two dominant schools of social "scientists." The first rationally constructs a society where abstractions ("values," "order") relate to each other as in a medieval Great Chain of Being. In the grand schema of Talcott Parsons, main representative of this school, the idea of conflict cannot effectively be formulated. Structural antagonisms, large‑scale revolts, revolutions—they cannot be imagined. In fact, it is assumed that 'the system,' once established, is not only stable but intrinsically harmonious; disturbances must, in his language, be 'introduced into the system.' . . . The magical elimination of conflict, and the wondrous achievement of harmony, remove from this 'systematic' and 'general' theory the possibilities of dealing with social change. With history. Not only does the 'collective behavior of terrorized masses and excited mobs, crowds and movements—with which our era is so filled—find no place in the normatively created social structures of grand theorists. But any systematic ideas of how history itself occurs, of its mechanics and processes, are unavailable to grand theory. . . [41] The "scientific" practice of the second school is as old as the scribes and tax collectors of the Pharaoh, the bureaucrats hired to gather data which the monarch needs to administer his empire. In so far as such research efforts are effective in their declared practical aims, they serve to increase the efficiency and the reputation—and to that extent, the prevalence of bureaucratic forms of domination in modem society. But whether or not effective in these explicit aims (the question is open), they do serve to spread the ethos of bureaucracy into other spheres of cultural, moral and intellectual life. Mills notes that it is precisely the men whose work serves administration and repression who claim to be morally neutral, to make no value judgments in their work. It might seem ironic that precisely the people most urgently concerned to develop morally antiseptic methods are among those most deeply engaged in 'applied social science' and 'human engineering. [42] The result is that professors become administrative technicians, agents of the ruling bureaucracies. Their positions change—from the academic to the bureaucratic; their publics change—from movements of reformers to circles of decision‑makers; and their problems change—from those of their own choice to those of their new clients. The scholars themselves tend to become less intellectually insurgent and more administratively practical.
Generally accepting the status quo, they tend to formulate problems out of the troubles and issues that administrators believe they face. They study. . . workers who are restless and without morale, and managers who 'do not understand' the art of managing human relations. They also diligently serve the commercial and corporate ends of the communications and advertising industries. [43]
It is into this world of hired clerks and servants of repression that Mills sticks his ideal of the intellectual craftsman, the fully developed human being whose knowledge is the basis for changing the world. The projects of such a man are chosen in terms of their contribution to the quality of life, not in terms of their contribution to his personal career. The quality and content of available styles of life among which he can choose are displayed to him by the daily activities of his contemporaries; his ability to see a possible self in the lives of others, an ability acquired by a child when he becomes aware of himself as a choice‑making individual, is what Mills calls the sociological imagination. The first fruit of this imagination—and the first lesson of the social science that embodies it—is the idea that the individual can understand his own experience and gauge his own fate only by locating himself within his period, that he can know his own chances in life only by becoming aware of those of all individuals in his circumstances. This understanding leads to the awareness that the constraints to his own development are not rooted in his deficiencies, but in the accepted daily activities of others, and with this awareness he is able to translate personal uneasiness into social troubles and public issues. By such means the personal uneasiness of individuals is focused upon explicit troubles and the indifference of publics is transformed into involvement with public issues. [44] Aware of the connection between personal constraints and social activities, the individual learns that the collective transformation of the structure of social activity is the condition for his own liberation. He understands that what he thinks and feels to be personal troubles are very often also problems shared by others, and more importantly, not capable of solution by any one individual but only by modifications of the structure of the groups in which he lives and sometimes the structure of the entire society. Men in masses have troubles, but they are not usually aware of their true meaning and source; men in publics confront issues, and they usually come to be aware of their public terms. [45] Mills has said much of this before, but in 1959 he is impatient to exit from the Society full of private people in a state of public lethargy. In a speech delivered over the Canadian Broadcasting Company (The Big City: Private Troubles and Public Issues) he is very clear about the connection between people's daily activities and the shape of their social environment: We must realize, in a word, that we need not drift blindly; that we can take matters into our own hands; [46] he ends the speech with the statement, Let us begin this here and now. [47]
Yet in spite of the lucidity with which he points to the connection between people's personal constraints and their daily activities, Mills does not begin here and now by cleaning out his files; he leaves matters in the hands of the Power Elite. [48] Consequently, Mills does not translate private troubles into public issues; he does not link his own activity with the daily activities of the underlying population; he does not formulate strategies which can lead to modifications of the structure of the entire society. According to his files elites make history, and consequently Mills addresses himself to the people characterized by Veblen as "the noble and the priestly classes, together with much of their retinue," [49] the intellectuals, artists, ministers, scholars, and scientists. [50] Mills himself had called them the Swiss Guard of the Power Elite, yet he calls on these fragmentary men whose social positions rest on their service to power to annihilate their own "roles," their "persons," by becoming Renaissance Men and Promethean history‑makers; Mills calls on Carpetbaggers to overthrow the slave system of the South. He justifies his choice of these profiteering middlemen as a historical agency of change on the grounds that no other group, just now is as strategically placed for possible innovation as those whose work joins them to the cultural apparatus;� to the means of information and knowledge; to the means by which realities are defined, by which programs and politics are elaborated and presented to publics. [51] Mills further justifies his choice by adding that, I do not believe, for example, that it is only 'Labor' or 'The Working Class' that can transform American society and change its role in world affairs. . . . I, for one, do not believe in abstract social forces—such as The Working Class—as the universal historical agent. [52] In other words, it is profiteers who are chosen as historical agents of change; furthermore, it is not because they are manipulated that the ideological middlemen are to struggle for liberation, but because they manipulate. This appeal to the consciences of fragmentary men who live off the scraps of social power they receive in exchange for faithful service to the ruling class has nothing in common with Mills' definition of the unalienated human being.
The Intellectual as Revolutionary
In 1960, The Fourth Epoch [53] suddenly begins; fully developed human beings take matters into their own hands and start to make history here and now.
Isn't all this, isn't it something of what we are trying to mean by the phrase, 'The New Left?' Let the old men ask sourly, 'Out of Apathy—into what?' The Age of Complacency is ending. Let the old women complain wisely about 'the end of ideology.' We are beginning to move again. [54] Yankee "intellectuals" continue to do what they've been doing: They see the good, they see the bad, the yes, the no, the maybe—and they cannot take a stand. So instead they take up a tone. But they are never in it; they are just spectators. And as spectators they are condescending, with such little reason to be. . . [55] They continue to be "detached" while serving power. But they no longer matter. In the showdown these days such people are just no good—for the hungry world. [56] While they were busy intimidating the powerless with the enormity of the spectacle, while they accumulated career and status by serving the bureaucracy, A man said No! to a monster. . . . And then he began to see it; The only real politics possible for honest men in the old Cuba was the politics of the gun, the politics of the guerrilla. The revolution was the only 'politics' for an honest man. [57] The human stature of this refusal and this struggle is in sharp contrast to the weariness of many NATO intellectuals with what they call 'ideology,' and their proclamation of 'the end of ideology.' The end‑of‑ideology is in reality the ideology of an ending; the ending of political reflection itself as a public fact. It is a weary know‑it‑all justification—by tone of voice rather than by explicit argument—of the cultural and political default of the NATO intellectuals. [58] The elaborate verbal schemas of the experts who serve corporate and military bureaucracies are destroyed by practical activity, because The revolution. . . smashes whatever is mere artifice. [59] Revolutionary practice, practical‑critical activity, is the test of the politics of truth, the test of the adequacy of one's definition of reality:
The revolution is a way of defining reality.
The revolution is a way of changing reality—and so of changing the definitions of it.
The revolution in Cuba is a great moment of truth. [60]
This is why the activity of the intellectual craftsman who unifies plan and performance, the practice of the Renaissance Man who is also a Promethean history‑maker, is revolutionary practice. In revolutionary activity, self‑changing and the changing of circumstances are part of the same process, the creation of the fully developed individual and of the property developing society. So it is only, we think, in a revolutionary epoch that intellectuals can do their real work, and it is only by intellectual effort that revolutionaries can be truly successful. [61]
The same year that he wrote about the revolutionary moment of truth which changed reality and so changed the definitions of it, Mills published another book, on The Classic Tradition in Sociological Thinking. [62] This book is not Mills' attempt to begin here and now. It is a return to his files, where all projects with me begin and end. [63] The Cuban revolution did not smash whatever was mere artifice in Mills' files. Mills' "classics" are not the men who defined reality in ways that clarified possible strategies for revolutionary change. They are the men who shaped Mills' definition of reality—or rather his definitions of realities, since the book contains the intellectual ancestry of both men who wrote under the name of C. Wright Mills. Here Karl Marx and Max Weber. . . , stand up above the rest, [64] and Veblen, the best social scientist America has produced, who probably. . . was at heart an anarchist and syndicalist, [65] stands awkwardly next to, or slightly behind, the father of The Sociology of Leadership. Rousseau is conspicuously absent among The Classics. The man who rebelled against the fact that "Man is born free, yet everywhere he's in chains," [66] is replaced by a man who takes this fact for granted: In all societies— from societies that are very meagerly developed and have barely attained the dawnings of civilization, down to the most advanced and powerful societies—two classes of people appear—a class that rules and a class that is ruled, [67] and by another man for whom the separation between masses and elites is the basic characteristic of social life: So we get two strata in a population: (1) A lower stratum, the non‑elite, with whose possible influence on government we are not just here concerned; then (2) a higher stratum, the elite, which is divided into two: (a) a governing elite (b) a non‑governing elite. [68] The image of man defined by revolutionary practice is obscured by images of man which make it impossible to define revolutionary practice. Mills the independent revolutionary continues to coexist with Mills the academic cynic, even though he is at pains to find justifications for this peaceful coexistence: Back in the American thirties, there was quite a craze for Pareto. . . I have never understood why, unless it was some kind of attempted antidote to Marxism which was so fashionable at the time. Pareto's is one of the tougher, even cynical, styles of thought; he seems to relish this posture for its own sake, although he disguises it, imagine, by supposing it to be an essential part of Science. Of course it is nothing of the sort. As a whole, I find his work pretentious, dull and disorderly. Yet if one digs hard, one does find useful reflections. [69]
This is the year when Mills comes face to face with the most important issue of political reflection—and of political action—in our time: the problem of the historical agency of change, of the social and institutional means of structural change. [70] But instead of dealing with the problem in terms of the living experience of revolutionary practice, he pulls dead arguments out of old files. He repeats earlier observations about the collapse of our historical agencies of change [7l] (by which he means trans‑historical Levers which he never believed in, and which therefore could not collapse for him), and then he states, unambiguously, It is with this problem of agency in mind that I have been studying, for several years now, the cultural apparatus, the intellectuals—as a possible, immediate, radical agency of change. [72] To document his thesis, he lists the activities of students all over the world, [73] and in his book on the Cuban revolution he underlines the fact that The revolution was incubated at the university [74] and that its leaders have been young intellectuals and students from the University of Havana. [75] However, Mills' documentation is not a proof of his thesis, but an apology for it. Neither the Cuban revolutionaries nor the revolutionary students around the world have anything in common with the intellectuals, artists, ministers, scholars and scientists. . . fighting a cold war in which they echo and elaborate the confusions of officialdoms. [76] The young revolutionaries are clearly not the people who are strategically placed for possible innovation as those whose work joins them to the cultural apparatus; to the means of information and knowledge; to the means by which realities are defined, by which programs and politics are elaborated and presented to publics [77]; the struggling students are the victims of these people, the ones who are manipulated by them.
Mills' inability to distinguish the bureaucratic agent of repression from his victim does not prove that the Classic Sociology helps one to understand what is happening in the world, nor that its relevance to the life‑ways of the individual and to the ways of history‑making in our epoch is obvious and immediate. [78] Concerned with documenting the role of intellectuals as a revolutionary agency of change and with applying the Sociology of Leadership, Mills does not apply his own analysis of the social function of the university, nor his own analyses of the Leading Roles of academics, to explain why the university was the cradle of the revolutionary ideas, nor why the politics made there were the politics of revolt and insurgency, of rebellion—�the politics of the revolution. [79] Mills mentions the fact that the Cuban peasants are the people our learned young men joined up with, and mobilized, to make our revolution. Know that we//: these people are the base, the thrust, the power. It is from them that the rebel soldiers came. They are the revolutionaries. [80] He is also aware that the liberation of one individual requires a collective transformation of the structure of the entire society because his problems are not capable of solution by any one individual. . . [81] Furthermore, Mills already knew twenty years earlier that such an individual is able to formulate a political strategy, namely motives for action which appeal to others. [82] Yet he does not, in any of his last works, ask about the relationship between the radical individual and the individuals with whom he communicates. Years of interrupted development have closed this question for Mills; it is replaced by a question given to Mills by his intellectual benefactors; the question is,
Who the hell's yer leader anyhow?
Who's yer leader?
Mills poses this question "in spite of himself," or rather, because of an uncritical acceptance of an image of man based on a separation of men into leaders and led, elites and masses. But he is not comfortable in this framework; he is incoherent: there is a rift between his theory and his practice; his definition of reality does not guide his activity. His single critique of the New Cuban government is: I do not like such dependence upon one man as exists in Cuba today, nor the virtually absolute power that this one man possesses. [83] In spite of rigid influences which pulled him in the opposite direction, Mills tried to remain a masterless, recalcitrant man, a sort of intellectual Wobbly. What knowledge does to a man (in clarifying what he is, and setting it free)—that is the personal ideal of knowledge. . . [84] For Mills it remained a personal ideal. What he was is perhaps clarified by the suggestion he puts into the words of the Cuban speaker in Listen Yankee: We Cuban revolutionaries don't really know just exactly how you could best go about this transforming of your Yankee imperialism. For us, with our problems, it was simple: In Cuba, we had to take to our 'Rocky Mountains'‑—you couldn't do that, could you? Not yet, we suppose. (We're joking—we suppose. But if in ten years, in five years—if things go as we think they might inside your country, if it comes to that, then know this, Yankee: some of us will be with you. God almighty, those are great mountains!) [85] Mills' knowledge did not set him free for the struggle; it locked him up in a conceptual framework without exit. Unable to think of himself as a leader precisely because he could not accept the "role" of a follower, his knowledge did not inform him that man—all men, not 'elites'—can make history. Unable to take on the Yankee imperialism by himself, he looked around for eleven companeros to take up the politics of the guerilla. the only 'politics' for an honest man, but what peered back was the cold stare of the scared employee, the hostile indifference of the only agents of change he had found among the Yankees, the intellectuals, artists, ministers, scholars and scientists.
And you Yankees are a vigorous people, or at least once upon a time you were.
If you'd just forget the money—Mother of God, haven't YOU already enough?
If you'd just abandon the fear—aren't you strong enough to?
If you'd just stop being so altogether private and become public men and women of the world—you could do great things in the World. [86]
An Ambiguous Retreat and an Incomplete Task
Bent by several men, Mills bowed to no man. If he sometimes admired the independence and self‑determination of elites, he felt nothing but contempt for official keepers of seals, and among the keepers, he singled out NATO intellectuals and Stalinists for his greatest contempt. He kept far away from the Talmudic scholars, the high priests and the grand executioners for whom Marx was a Prophet who wrote numerous testaments of a new Bible. And to keep his distance from them, Mills kept his distance from Marx as well. Consequently, when he turns to Marx in his last book, he does not "use Marx" as an occasion for rethinking questions he has not been able to answer, or at times even to pose. He keeps his distance. As a result, he does not read Marx in the clear light of fresh and living revolutionary experience, but through the obscure veil of stale files and dead arguments. Mills' last book is not a final struggle for coherence; it is not a confrontation between incompatible, never‑synthesized elements which pulled him in opposite directions. It is a retreat from this confrontation. Mills' The Marxists, published two years after Listen Yankee, does not show that, for Mills, the revolution is a way of defining reality, nor that, for Mills, the revolution in Cuba is a great moment of truth. The Cuban revolution, and the beginning of student rebellions all over the world, stimulated Mills, not to change his definitions of‑reality, but to append revolutionary experience to The Classic Tradition in Sociological Thinking. By storing Marx and the Marxists in the Hall of Classical Fame Mills enlarged his menagerie of images of man; he did not emerge with a coherent synthesis of his own.
For eighteen years, from his attempt to characterize The Powerless People, through his analysis of White Collar to his essay on craftsmanship, Mills tried, at times successfully, to deal with the alienation of the individual's power over his circumstances as a fact about social life in capitalist society. Yet in his last work he reduces the problem of alienation to The question of the attitude of men toward the work they do. . . [87] He reduces alienation to psychic exploitation, and using this definition he adds, alienation does not necessarily, or even usually, result in revolutionary impulses. On the contrary, often it seems more likely to be accompanied by political apathy than by insurgency of either the left or right. [88] This superficial definition is a public‑relations man's concept of alienation: it means disaffection with the dominant symbols, and can be remedied by changing the image with mass circulation newspapers, television, and expensive advertising; if this campaign does not succeed in transforming disaffection to happy acceptance, it can at least channel it into political apathy and thus avoid insurgency. This is not, however, the way Mills had defined alienation in White Collar. When white‑collar people get jobs, they sell not only their time and energy but their personalities as well. The white collar man sells his creative power and his gestures no matter what attitude he has toward the work he does. Self‑alienation is thus an accompaniment of his alienated labor. [89] In other words, the salesgirl at Macy's sells (alienates, separates herself from) her time, energy and gestures even if she enjoys selling herself and thinks she's Supergirl or Elizabeth Taylor. Public relations men are hired to change her attitude toward her work, and they sometimes succeed, but she remains alienated, because the alienation is a fact about her social situation and not about her image of it. Mills must have thrown away his file cards for White Collar, or perhaps he wrote that work before he had developed his files. In either case, the trivial conception of alienation presented in The Marxists is unrelated to the ideas developed in White Collar. It is related to the textbook Mills wrote with Gerth nine years before The Marxists. It was in that book that alienation was treated as a psychic phenomenon, as a concept which did not refer to man's daily life but to the symbol sphere, the image of life. It was there that Mills agreed to put his name over a description of a public relations world where detachment is a step towards alienation, a world where, In the scholar's study or the agitator's den the symbols which legitimate various kinds of political systems may be, rearranged, debunked, or elaborated. . . . For changes in the legitimating symbols to be realized, masses of people must shift their allegiances. [90]
In his Celebration of Marx, [91] Mills says that Marx's structural view of a total society results from a classic sociological technique of thinking. With its aid Marx translated the abstract conceptions of con�temporary political economy into the concrete terms of the social relations of men. However, rejecting even his own structural view of alienation, or forgetting his own characterization of the alienation of living power, time, and gesture which accompany the sale of one's labor, Mills cannot emerge with a structural view of the total society even in this last work where he directly confronts Marx's structural view. Having reduced alienation to an attitude, Mills is unable to relate the state or the corporation or the military to people's daily activities, he cannot see these "forces" as concentrations of the alienated self‑powers of a population. He need not have taken his clue from Marx; he could have taken it from Rousseau. In his twenty year long struggle to find the roots of the powerlessness, the private idiocy, Mills might have traced the process through which the voluntarily alienated powers of people become transformed into economic, political and military "institutions." But Mills retreats from such an analysis once again; he again backs into the textbook he wrote with Gerth. Instead of reducing the "institutions" to the daily activities of people, the daily routines through which they alienate their powers, Mills retreats to the institutional orders which stand, sui generis, as structures separate from the activities of daily life which create and reproduce them. Each institutional order contains decision‑making elites and passive masses; the higher circles of these orders are the ones who make history; since a population's alienation of energy, mind and time is not seen by Mills as voluntary activity, but as a state of mind, an attitude, these masses do nothing voluntarily, they do not make history, they simply shift under the symbols dangled before them by the intellectuals who serve the higher circles. On the basis of this definition of reality, Mills states that it follows that our conception of the higher circles in capitalist society must be seen as more complex than the rather simple 'ruling class' of Marx, and especially later marxists. [92] And especially later marxists. Mills seems to have forgotten that the later marxists who apparently "interpreted" Marx for him in the 1930s, and against whom he reacted for the rest of his life, turned up among the noisiest NATO intellectuals of the 1950s. Yet Mills continues to respond to the stale Marx of the later marxists with the stale arguments in his files, and finally he evades the problem of alienation altogether by stating flatly that the problem is to define the state, with Max Weber, simply as an organization that 'monopolizes legitimate violence over a given territory.' [93] With this statement, Mills chooses to keep a bureaucratic conception of reality: society consists of three separate hierarchies, which are not themselves explained in terms of people's activities; they are defined, and as definitions they are the starting point for analysis: people's activities are explained in terms of the hierarchies.
Mills insists on the principle of historical specificity, [94] although it has little meaning in his conception. He cannot study the historical forms of concentration of people's alienated powers, the historical forms of social activity. His framework reduces him to the study of historical successions of institutional orders; historical problems are reduced to questions about the supremacy of one or another order, and his more complex analysis consists of nothing more than the observation that the economic order is not always supreme. [95]
With this definition of reality, Mills cannot come face to face with the most important issue of political reflection—and of political action—of our time: the problem of the historical agency of change, of the social and institutional means of structural change. If Mills does not see that people create their institutions through their daily activities, then he cannot see how they can change the social system by changing their daily activities, and a historical agency of change must be introduced into the system. In other words, Mills' historical agency is an abstraction which is separate from people's daily activities; it is some kind of mechanical lever generated by a social machine, and at some point in history the lever automatically destroys the machine. Since such a lever has not overthrown the West European or American capitalist machine, Mills concludes that the agency collapsed. The trends supposed to facilitate the development and the role of the agency have not generally come off—and when they have occurred, episodically and in part, they have not led to the results expected. [96] In other words, Mills defines an entity which cannot exist, projects an event which cannot take place, and then concludes that the entity collapsed because the event did not take place.
In order to prove that the agency which collapsed was Marx's agency, Mills has to prove that Marx had such a conception of an agency. To prove this, Mills has to disprove much of what he learned from Marx. Mills' often‑repeated proposition that men make their own history within given though transformable material circumstances, comes from Marx. [97] However, in order to attribute the theory of the mechanical lever to Marx, Mills has to show that, for Marx, men do not make their own history; that history is inevitable. But in all of the vast tomes of Marx's writings, stretching over half a century of creative activity, Mills could not find a conclusive statement to that effect by Marx. Mills is too intellectually honest to yank out of context a statement which proves Marx said something which is denied by what precedes and follows it. Consequently, in order to prove that history is inevitable according to Marx, Mills quotes a statement about the inevitability of history written by Engels. [98] But this method of proof is not so honest either, since Engels is Marx and Marx, Engels only for the "marxologists" of the Marx�Engels Institute in Moscow, and not even for all of them. The fact is that men do not make history according to the theory Mills derived from Max Weber; it is because of the influence of Weber that we must construct another model in which events may be understood in closer and in more conscious relation to the decisions and lack of decisions of powerful elites, political and military as well as economic. [99] It is this theory which keeps Mills from seeing that the decisions and lack of decisions of underlying populations create the power of the elites, and consequently that the decisions of these people can also abolish the power of the elites and thus change history. (Mills even suggests that it is the higher circles of the Soviet bureaucracy who might institute socialism. [100]) Since Mills does not regard the alienation of people's self‑powers as a daily activity but as a psychic condition, he cannot regard the de‑alienation of these powers as revolutionary activity but merely as another psychic condition. In other words, people are doomed to eternal alienation. All that can change is the institutional form of alienation, the type of bureaucratic orders within which people perform their roles. And such change can take place either through the intervention of a mechanical lever, which collapsed, or through the morally inspired initiation of the very elites whose power is the inverse reflection of the powerlessness Mills struggled against for over two decades.
The last year of his life, Mills refers nostalgically to the seemingly insignificant groups of scholarly insurgents in the nineteenth‑century capitals of Europe—a kind of man we do not know so well today. . . [101] This is the kind of man Mills did not become when he chose the new and fascinating career chances which often involved opportunities to practice his skill rather freely. [102] And in the intervening years, Mills developed a definition of reality which failed to define what such a scholarly insurgent could possibly do: neither a mechanical agency of change, nor a member of the power elite, such an insurgent is reduced to the impotence of a passive spectator critically observing the moves of elites and the shifts of masses from the fringes of society. Mills' nostalgia is not related to his theory; he has not achieved the unity of thought, action and feeling which characterizes his ideal of' all intellectual craftsman. In terms of his theory one cannot imagine what these scholarly insurgents accomplished in the nineteenth‑century capitals of Europe. Perhaps because of' the influence of his intellectual benefactors, or perhaps in order to justify his chosen career as professor, Mills has removed the very possibility of politically relevant action from such scholarly insurgents. Throughout his writings, a different Mills had crept into the margins, and at times to the very center of his work: a masterless man, a Promethean history‑maker. But in his last book, a book about revolution, the Promethean history‑maker is conspicuously absent; all that remains is the nostalgia. And even the nostalgia is no longer propped up with theoretical support: whatever might have supported it is beaten and removed from sight. Mills is at pains to remove the very possibility that the practical activity of an insurgent can lead to a transformation of his circumstances. In the process he has to deny much that he once knew. In The Marxists he returns to a problem which he had treated throughout his works, but which he never developed further than he had taken it in 1942 (in his dissertation), the problem of strategy, of motives of action which appeal to others. He uses different words in 1962. This connection of ideal or goal with agency is at once amoral and an intellectual strategy. But he immediately restates this proposition using the terms of the theory constructed during the intervening period: This connection between built‑in agency and socialist ideal is the political pivot around which turn the decisive features of his [Marx's] model of society and many specific theories of historical trend going on within it. [103] And on the basis of this formulation, Mills reduces the motives for action into the marxian doctrine of later marxists, and he transforms the others into a built‑in agency, the mechanical lever which collapsed. In this context, an analysis of society which defines the conditions for social change, namely the required material instruments and the required knowledge, is not a statement about necessary conditions, but a prediction about the future. And in this context, an individual's practical attempt to create some of the conditions, namely to provide the required knowledge, to define reality, to formulate a strategy and communicate it to others, is not practical activity at all; it is speculation about what is going to happen in the future, automatically, all by itself. In terms of these cynical, detached and apolitical criteria, Marx was not a committed scholarly insurgent trying to create those conditions for social change which were within his reach; he was a nineteenth century metaphysician who devoted fifty years to speculations, expectations and predictions about the inevitable future. This being so, it must immediately be said that Marx's major political expectation about advanced capitalist societies has collapsed., the central agency which he designates has not developed as expected; the role he expected that agency to enact has not been enacted. [104] In other words, if I state that in order to write an article I need certain materials and certain knowledge, I am not stating conditions but making predictions about my future; if I add that my goal is to write an essay on Mills, then this is not a commitment to a project but an expectation that in the face of the books, pen and paper, my mind and hand will mechanically write the essay. If for one of various reasons I fail to write it, then my expectations about myself have collapsed; the central agency which I designated for the task of writing the essay (my hand) has not developed as expected; the role which I expected my mind and hand to enact has not been enacted.
Perhaps because he stood alone for too long, perhaps because lie was recovering from his first heart attack, Mills the detached academic can now only imagine intellectual activity as detached academic activity. Gone is the intellectual craftsman as Promethean history‑maker. Gone is the intellectual architect who wrote, We must realize, in a word, that we need not drift blindly; that we can take matters into our own hands. [105] What is left is a detached academic who can merely interpret matters from a distance; who cannot define the conditions required for changing reality, but can only guess about the future; who cannot commit himself to political tasks, but can only have speculative expectations about what others are going to do. Mills' anthology of Marxist writings contains a short selection which he has either never read or which he has forgotten; in any case, he makes no reference to its presence in the book despite the fact that it is a selection about intellectual craftsmanship, about Promethean history‑making, about the relationship between defining reality, self‑making and history‑making. Mills makes no reference to this selection despite the fact that it takes up questions he regarded as central during more than two decades, and despite the fact that it explicitly denies the main theses he tries to uphold in The Marxists. . . . he does not understand human activity itself as objective activity. . . . He therefore does not comprehend the significance of 'revolutionary,' or practical‑critical' activity. The question whether objective truth is an attribute of human thought—is not a theoretical but a practical question. Man must prove the truth, i.e. the reality and power, the 'this‑sidedness' of his thinking in practice. The dispute over the reality or non‑reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question. . . . The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self‑changing can only be comprehended and rationally understood as revolutionary practice. . . . All social life is essentially practical. All the mysteries which urge theory into mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice. . . . The philosophers have only interpreted the world differently, the point is, to change it. [106] It was in the spirit of these statements that Mills had written, twenty years earlier, that Franz Neumann's book on Nazi Germany will move all of us into deeper levels of analysis and strategy. It had better. Behemoth is everywhere united.
Kalamazoo
April, 1969
[—> Contents]
Notes to Chapter 3
1 "The Complacent Young Men: Reasons for Anger," Anvil and Student Partisan, Vol. IX, No. 1 (1958), in Power, Politics and People, p. 389. [—> main text]
2 Ibid., p. 390. [—> main text]
3. "The Man in the Middle: The Designer," Industrial Design (November, 1958), in Power, Politics and People, p. 386. [—> main text]
4 "The Structure of Power in American Society," The British Journal of Sociology, Vol. IX, No, 1 (March, 1958), in Power, Politics and People, p. 24. [—> main text]
5 The Causes of World War Three, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1958, p. 77. [—> main text]
6 Ibid., p. 78. [—> main text]
7 Ibid., pp. 78‑79. [—> main text]
8 "T he Complacent Young Men," loc. cit., p. 393. [—> main text]
9 "The Man in the Middle," loc. cit., p. 386. [—> main text]
10 Ibid., p. 383. [—> main text]
11 Ibid., pp.383‑384. [—> main text]
12 Ibid., p. 377. [—> main text]
13 The Causes of World War Three, p. 85. [—> main text]
14 Ibid., p. 7. [—> main text]
15 "The Man in the Middle," loc. cit., pp. 384‑385. [—> main text]
16 The Causes of World War Three, p. 82. [—> main text]
17 Ibid., p. 137. [—> main text]
18 "The Complacent Young Men, loc. cit., p. 393. [—> main text]
19 The Causes of World War Three, p. 89. [—> main text]
20 Ibid., p. 14. [—> main text]
21 Ibid. [—> main text]
22 Ibid., p. 125. [—> main text]
23 Ibid., Part Four. [—> main text]
24 Ibid., p. 135. [—> main text]
25 Ibid., p. 172. [—> main text]
26 "The Man in the Middle," loc. cit., p. 386. [—> main text]
27 The Causes of World War Three, p. 93. [—> main text]
28 Ibid., p. 132. [—> main text]
29 Ibid., p. 133. [—> main text]
30 Ibid. [—> main text]
31 Ibid. [—> main text]
32 Ibid., p. 93. [—> main text]
33 "The Man in the Middle," loc. cit., p. 386. [—> main text]
34 The Causes of World War Three, p. 95. [—> main text]
35 Ibid., pp. 118‑121. [—> main text]
36 "Culture and Politics: The Fourth Epoch," The Listener, Vol. LXI, No. 1563 (March 12, 1959), in Power, Politics and People, p. 246. [—> main text]
37 Ibid., p. 245. [—> main text]
38 Ibid. [—> main text]
39 "The Man in the Middle," loc. cit., p. 386. [—> main text]
40 "Culture and Politics: The Fourth Epoch," loc. cit., p. 240. [—> main text]
41 The Sociological Imagination, p. 42. [—> main text]
42 Ibid., p. 101. [—> main text]
43 Ibid., p. 96. [—> main text]
44 Ibid., p. 5. [—> main text]
45 Ibid., p. 187. [—> main text]
46 'The Big City: Private Troubles and Public Issues" (Speech over the Canadian Broadcasting Company) in Power, Politics and People, p. 399. [—> main text]
47 Ibid., p. 402. [—> main text]
48 The Sociological Imagination, pp. 182‑183. [—> main text]
49 Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class, New York: New American Library, p. 21. [—> main text]
50 Mills, The Sociological Imagination, p. 183. [—> main text]
51 "The Decline of the Left," The Listener, Vol. LXI, No. 1566 (April 2, 1959), in Power, Politics and People, pp. 231‑232. [—> main text]
52 Ibid., p. 232. [—> main text]
53 from the title of "Culture and Politics: The Fourth Epoch," loc. cit. [—> main text]
54 "Letter to the New Left," loc. cit., p. 259. [—> main text]
55 Listen, Yankee: The Revolution in Cuba, New York: McGraw Hill Book Company, 1960, p. 150. [—> main text]
56 Ibid. [—> main text]
57 Ibid., p. 40. [—> main text]
58 " Letter to the New Left," loc cit., pp. 247‑249. [—> main text]
59 Listen, Yankee, p. 133. [—> main text]
60 Ibid., p. 114. [—> main text]
61 Ibid., p. 133. [—> main text]
62 Images of Man: The Classic Tradition in Sociological Thinking (anthology with introduction), New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1960. [—> main text]
63 The Sociological Imagination, p. 200. [—> main text]
64 Images of Man, p. 12; following quotation on page 13. [—> main text]
65 The Marxists, New York; Dell Publishing Company, 1962, p. 35. [—> main text]
66 Rousseau, Du Contrat Social, p. 50. [—> main text]
67 Gaetano Mosca, "The Ruling Class," in Mills, Images of Man, p. 192. [—> main text]
68 Vilfredo Pareto, "Elites, Force and Governments," in Ibid., p. 264. [—> main text]
69 Mills in Ibid., p. 14. [—> main text]
70 "Letter to the New Left," loc. cit., p. 254. [—> main text]
71 Ibid., p. 255. [—> main text]
72 Ibid., p. 256. [—> main text]
73 in Listen Yankee, pp. 33‑34, and in "Letter to the New Left," loc. cit., pp. 257‑259. [—> main text]
74 Listen Yankee, p. 39. [—> main text]
75 Ibid., p. 46. [—> main text]
76 The Sociological Imagination, p. 183. [—> main text]
77 "The Decline of the Left." loc. cit., pp. 231‑232. [—> main text]
78 Images of Man, pp. 16‑17. [—> main text]
79 Listen Yankee, p. 39. [—> main text]
80 Ibid., p. 45. [—> main text]
81 The Sociological Imagination, p. 187. [—> main text]
82 "Situated Actions and Vocabularies of Motive" (1940), loc. cit., p. 443. [—> main text]
83 Listen, Yankee, p. 182. [—> main text]
84 "On Knowledge and Power, loc. cit., p. 606. [—> main text]
85 Listen, Yankee, p. 166. [—> main text]
86 Ibid., p. 167. [—> main text]
87 The Marxists, p. 112. [—> main text]
88 Ibid., pp. 112‑113. [—> main text]
89 White Collar, p. xvii. [—> main text]
90 Mills and Gerth, Character and Social Structure, p. 298. [—> main text]
91 Chapter 2 of The Marxists; the quotation which follows is from page 36. [—> main text]
92 The Marxists, p. 118. [—> main text]
93 Ibid., p. 119. [—> main text]
94 Ibid., p. 38. [—> main text]
95 Ibid., pp. 116‑126. [—> main text]
96 Ibid., p. 128. [—> main text]
97 Ibid., p. 122. Mills gives a fuller statement of this view in the last paragraph of Character and Social Structure, and also in the first seven chapters of The Causes of World War Three. [—> main text]
98 The Marxists, p. 91. [—> main text]
99 Ibid., p. 122. [—> main text]
100 Ibid., p. 474. [—> main text]
101 Ibid., p. 27. [—> main text]
102 The New Men of Power, p. 281. [—> main text]
103 The Marxists, p. 81. [—> main text]
104 Ibid., p. 128. [—> main text]
105 "The Big City: Private Troubles and Public issues," loc. cit., p. 399. [—> main text]
106 Karl Marx, "Theses on Feuerbach," in Mills, The Marxists, pp. 70‑71. [—> main text]
SOURCE: Perlman, Fredy. The Incoherence of the Intellectual: C. Wright Mills’ Struggle to Unite Knowledge and Action. Detroit: Black & Red, 1970.
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