The Anthem Companion to C. Wright Mills

Mills was a protean thinker. In a fast-paced career of some twenty years, he wrote on a stunning range of issues—from the sociology of knowledge and methods of the social sciences to social stratification, the concentration of political and economic power, the media and the formation and translation of culture, the politics of the Cold War, and the prospects for economic progress and democratization in developing countries. [NP] This companion responds to his major themes: the elite coordination of political and economic power; its consequences, initially for the US middle classes and subsequently for the Soviet Union, Eastern European, and Latin America; intellectuality, the media, and the constitution and transmission of culture; and the inferences he believed social scientists should draw from these matters—conclusions that he advocated with remarkable tenacity and in a rhetoric that was often pugnacious. [NP] Comprising interpretive, critical, and exploratory essays on Mills’s chief writings as well as his interventions in the political conflicts of his time, the contributors to this volume consider important aspects and implications of his thought that have been largely neglected in the literature on his writings, including questions on which the literature is virtually silent. This is an effort to follow the path of analysis and reflexive critique that Mills himself pursued: the authors attempt to read Mills as he expected to be understood, attending to his intentions, elucidating his positions, and assessing their promise as well as their limits—holding him to his own standards and assessing the extent to which he met them. In this respect, it is conceived in a Millsian spirit.