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society to be shaped by what
Wright Mills called a power elite.
This, he emphasized, was not
necessarily an economic elite,
but one that included military,
political, and union leaders too.
Whereas Weber had argued half a
century earlier that rationalization
meant that the business elite made
the decisions, Wright Mills said
that a new military–industrial
ruling class had been created.
He believed that this was a turning
point marking the transition
from the modern age to what
he called a “Fourth Epoch.”
Rationalization, which had been
assumed to produce freedom and
social progress, was increasingly
having the opposite effect.
This was not just a problem for
liberal democracies, which now
faced the prospect of being
powerless to control social change,
but also for the communist states
in which Marxism had proved
equally unable to provide a means
of taking control. At the heart of the
problem, according to Wright Mills,
is the fact that ordinary people
in “mass society” are unaware of
the way in which their lives are
affected by this concentration of
political and social power. They
go about their lives without
realizing how the things that
happen to them are connected
to the wider social context. Each
individual’s troubles, such as
becoming unemployed, or ending
up homeless or in debt, are
perceived as personal and not in
terms of forces of historical change.
As Wright Mills puts it, “They do
not possess the quality of mind
essential to grasp the interplay
of men and society, of biography
and history, of self and world”—
the quality that he calls “the
sociological imagination.”
It was the lack of sociological
imagination that was to blame for
the emergence of the power elite.
In The Sociological Imagination,
published in 1959, Wright Mills
turns his sights from society
to sociology and the social
sciences themselves. Because it
is difficult for the ordinary person
to think of their personal troublesCHARLES WRIGHT MILLS
The collapse of the auto industry
in Detroit brought ruin to the city, but
many workers did not link their poverty
to the actions of a power elite, which
included union leaders.
in terms of larger public issues,
it is up to sociologists to enlighten,
inspire, and instruct them—to
provide essential knowledge
and information.What ought to be?
Wright Mills was highly critical
of academic sociology of the time,
which was, in his opinion, remote
from everyday experience; more
concerned with providing “grand
theory” than becoming involved in
social change. Wright Mills took
the pragmatic view that knowledge
should be useful, and felt that it
was the moral duty of sociologists
to take the lead. It was time, he
said, for intellectuals to leave their
ivory towers and provide people
with the means of changing
society for the better, and
transforming their individual lives
by encouraging public engagement
in political and social issues.
His attack on the social science
establishment called into question
the very notion of what sociology
was about. At that time, social
scientists were striving to be
neutral observers, objectively
describing and analyzing social,Neither the life of an
individual nor the history
of a society can be
understood without
understanding both.
Charles Wright Mills