C. Wright Mills

Also known as Charles Wright Mills

American sociologist (1916–1962)

AI overview

C. Wright Mills was an influential American sociologist in the mid-20th century who developed influential critiques of power, bureaucracy, and social inequality in modern society. His work matters because he shaped how sociologists and the public think about who holds power in America and how institutions affect ordinary people's lives.

AI-generated from the Wikipedia summary — may contain errors.

Person · Open Library

Born: 1916-08-28
Died: 1962-03-20
Works: 45

via Open Library + Wikidata

Music · MusicBrainz

Type: Group
Country: US
Active from: 1928
Active to: 1982

via MusicBrainz · CC0

Listeners · Last.fm

Listeners: 4
Total plays: 6

via Last.fm · C. Wright Mills

Recent publications · Crossref

5 total works indexed

Geant4—a simulation toolkit
· 2003 · cited 20,907x
A global reference for human genetic variation
· 2015 · cited 17,370x
Global burden of 369 diseases and injuries in 204 countries and territories, 1990–2019: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019
· 2020 · cited 15,328x
Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Black Hole Merger
· 2016 · cited 11,419x
Genome engineering using the CRISPR-Cas9 system
· 2013 · cited 10,755x

via Crossref · CC0

Quotes

“To have peace and not war, the drift toward a war economy, as facilitated by the moves and the demands of the sophisticated conservatives, must be stopped; to have peace without slump, the tactics and policies of the practical right must be overcome. The political and economic power of both must be broken. The power of these giants of main drift is both economically and politically anchored; both unions and an independent labor party are needed to struggle effective.”
“The two greatest blinders of the intellectual who today might fight against the main drift are new and fascinating career chances, which often involve opportunities to practice his skill rather freely, and the ideology of liberalism, which tends to expropriate his chance to think straight. The two go together, for the liberal ideology, as now used by intellectuals, acts as a device whereby he can take advantage of the new career chances but retain the illusion that his soul remains his own.”
“If we accept the Greek's definition of the idiot as an altogether private man, then we must conclude that many American citizens are now idiots. And I should not be surprised, although I don't know, if there were some such idiots even in Germany.”
“In a society of employees dominated by the marketing mentality, it is inevitable that a personality market should arise. For in the great shift from manual skills to the art of 'handling', selling and servicing people, personal or even intimate traits of employees are drawn into the sphere of exchange and become commodities in the labor market.”
“The truth about the nature and the power of the elite is not some secret which men of affairs know but will not tell. ... No matter how great their actual power, they tend to be less acutely aware of it than of the resistance of others to its use.”
“Most American men of affairs have learned well the rhetoric of public relations, in some cases even to the point of using it when they are alone, and thus coming to believe it.”

via Wikiquote · CC BY-SA

Wikidata facts

Official website: www.cwrightmills.org
Image: C. Wright Mills.jpg

Show 3 more facts

Commons category: Charles Wright Mills
date of birth: 1916-08-28
date of death: 1962-03-20

Sources (7)

via Wikidata · CC0

~33 min read

Article

Charles Wright Mills (August 28, 1916 – March 20, 1962) was an American sociologist, and a professor of sociology at Columbia University from 1946 until his death in 1962. Mills published widely in both popular and intellectual journals, and is remembered for several books, such as The Power Elite, White Collar: The American Middle Classes, and The Sociological Imagination, which was in 1998 named by the International Sociological Association as the second most important sociological book of the 20th century.

Mills was concerned with the responsibilities of intellectuals in post–World War II society, and he advocated public and political engagement over disinterested observation. One of Mills's biographers, Daniel Geary, writes that Mills's writings had a "particularly significant impact on New Left social movements of the 1960s era." It was Mills who popularized the term "New Left" in the U.S., in a 1960 open letter "Letter to the New Left".