The Routledge International Handbook of C. Wright Mills Studies by Jon Frauley

Author:Jon Frauley [Frauley, Jon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367861896
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2021-09-23T00:00:00+00:00

Sympathetic critics of Mills have identified several shortcomings in Mills’ analysis. First, it is widely accepted that Mills exaggerated the independent power of the military.3 Second, Marxist critics such as Paul Sweezy faulted Mills for not situating his account of the power elite within a structural analysis of the dynamics of monopoly capitalism (Barrow 2007). Third, though Mills was attentive to new forms of radicalism in a number of countries towards the end of his life, his account of mass politics was relatively weak, especially on the race question in the United States (Hayden 2006, 146–149). Fourth, Mills’ account of the processes by which the power elite arrives at consensus and works to dominate the political process required further development. Nonetheless, it is possible to think that Mills go more right than wrong about the nature of power in America. As G. William Domhoff, the foremost scholar of power structure research, has argued:

Today, Mills looks even better than he did 50 years ago in his characterization of the benefactors of American capitalism as a corporate rich led by the chief executives of large corporations and financial institutions, who by now can clearly be seen as the driving force within the power elite. His analysis also remains right on target as far as the nature of the political directorate, who circulate between corporations, corporate law firms, and government positions in the same way they did 50 years ago (and well before that, of course) (Domhoff 2006, 547–548).

During the 1960s and 1970s a new generation of American scholars worked in the spirit of Mills to develop an empirically and theoretically rich body of power structure research that has specified more clearly the relationship of the power elite to the corporate and financial community and the processes through which ruling class political consensus is reached in the United States. Political scientists and sociologists developed and engaged with radical and non-pluralist theories of the state as a way of better understanding the politics of capitalist democracy in the United States. Political economy, class analysis, and power structure research were central to these views, and its practitioners were mainly though not entirely leftists and radicals. In the background were the struggles associated with the New Left of the 1960s and the economic downturn of the 1970s, and the emergence of radical currents in American social science disciplines that called into question “mainstream” or “conventional” approaches, such as the Caucus for New Political Science as a counter-current within the American Political Science Association. Mills was cited in the first sentence of the Editorial Introduction to the first issue of the new journal Politics and Society, founded in 1970. The Editors stated, “The leading professional social science journals continue to be obsessed with technique at the expense of imagination, significance, and readability…. We object to the depoliticization of the study of politics, to the paucity of critical analysis, to the unnecessary use of a parochial and often pseudo-scientific jargon.”

Drawing on the work of Mills and others, the sociologist G.

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