C. Wright Mills’ analysis of power elite
Lecture Notes: C. Wright Mills/Power Elite
In this course we will examine the assigned readings keeping a critical eye on conflicts of interests and the dominant power relations in our national and global society. In connection to the field of political sociology we will examine the ideas and practices surrounding power, state, political parties, public policies, cultural-ideology, corporate capitalism, neoliberalism, totalitarianism, authoritarianism, democracy, and social change. We must analyze these concepts in connection to their historical context and the ongoing ideological-political conflicts of our time. Historical context is the framework by which we learn how the power relations in the past have developed and/or transformed into the present time. By having this historical knowledge we can critically evaluate the political divisions, ideologies, and interests in maintaining and/or challenging the existing power structures, elite groups, dominant world views, and develop alternatives and explore possibilities imagining and creating an inclusive and diverse egalitarian society.
Wright Mills, in Sociological Imagination explains the processes of critical understanding of social relations and structures as follows:
The sociological imagination enables its possessor to understand the larger historical scene in terms of its meaning for the inner life and the external career of a variety of individuals. It enables him to take into account how individuals, in the welter of their daily experience, often become falsely conscious of their social positions. Within that welter, the framework of modern society is sought, and within that framework the psychologies of a variety of men and women are formulated. By such means the personal uneasiness of individuals is focused upon explicit troubles and the indifference of public is transformed into involvement with public issues… The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society. That is its task and its promise…
No social study that does not come back to the problems of biography, of history and of their intersections within a society has completed its intellectual journey. Whatever the specific problems of the classic social analysts, however limited or however broad the features of social reality they have examined, those who have been imaginatively aware of the promise of their work have consistently asked three sorts of questions:
(1) What is the structure of this particular society as a whole? What are its essential components, and how are they related to one another? How does it differ from other varieties of social order? Within it, what is the meaning of any particular feature for its continuance and for its change?
(2) Where does this society stand in human history? What are the mechanics by which it is changing? What is its place within and its meaning for the development of humanity as a whole? How does any particular feature we are examining affect, and how is it affected by, the historical period in which it moves? And this period – what are its essential features? How does it differ from other periods? What are its characteristic ways of history-making?
(3) What varieties of men and women now prevail in this society and in this period? And what varieties are coming to prevail? In what ways are they selected and formed, liberated and repressed, made sensitive and blunted? What kinds of `human nature’ are revealed in the conduct and character we observe in this society in this period? And what is the meaning for ‘human nature’ of each and every feature of the society we are examining?
Whether the point of interest is a great power state or a minor literary mood, a family, a prison, a creed – these are the kinds of questions the best social analysts have asked. They are the intellectual pivots of classic studies of individuals in society – and they are the questions inevitably raised by any mind possessing the sociological imagination. For that imagination is the capacity to shift from one perspective to another – from the political to the psychological; from examination of a single family to comparative assessment of the national budgets of the world; from the theological school to the military establishment; from considerations of an oil industry to studies of contemporary poetry. It is the capacity to range from the most impersonal and remote transformations to the most intimate features of the human self – and to see the relations between the two. Back of its use there is always the urge to know the social and historical meaning of the individual in the society and in the period in which she has her quality and her being.
