C. Wright Mills condemns American sociology (1943)

In approaching the notion of adjustment, one may analyze the specific illustrations of maladjustment that are given and from these instances infer a type of social person who in this literature is evaluated as “adjusted.” The ideally adjusted man of the social pathologists is “socialized.” This term seems to operate ethically as the opposite of “selfish;” it implies that the adjusted man conforms to middle-class morality and motives and “participates” in the gradual progress of respectable institutions. If he is not a “joiner,” he certainly gets around and into many community organizations. If he is socialized, the individual thinks of others and is kindly toward them. He does not brood or mope about but is somewhat extrovert, eagerly participating in his community’s institutions. His mother and father were not divorced, nor was his home ever broken. He is “successful”—at least in a modest way— since he is ambitious; but he does not speculate about matters too far above his means, lest he become “a fantasy thinker,” and the little men don’t scramble after the big money. The less abstract the traits and fulfilled “needs” of “the adjusted man” are, the more they gravitate toward the norms of independent middle-class persons verbally living out Protestant ideals in the small towns of America.

SOURCE: Mills, C. Wright. “The Professional Ideology of Social Pathologists,” American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 49, No. 2, September 1943, pp. 165-180. Reprinted in Power, Politics and People: The Collected Essays of C. Wright Mills, edited and with an Introduction by Irving Louis Horowitz (New York: Ballantine Books; Oxford University Press, 1963), pp. 525-552. Conclusion of essay. Footnotes 81-83 omitted here.

See also:

Ladner, Joyce, ed. The Death of White Sociology: Essays in Race and Culture. Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1973.

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