Taking It Big

C. Wright Mills and the Making of Political Intellectuals

Stanley Aronowitz

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780231509503
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

C. Wright Mills (1916–1962) was a pathbreaking intellectual who transformed the independent American Left in the 1940s and 1950s. Often challenging the established ideologies and approaches of fellow leftist thinkers, Mills was central to creating and developing the idea of the "public intellectual" in postwar America and laid the political foundations for the rise of the New Left in the 1960s. Written by Stanley Aronowitz, a leading sociologist and critic of American culture and politics, Taking It Big reconstructs this icon's formation and the new dimension of American political life that followed his work.

Aronowitz revisits Mills's education and its role in shaping his outlook and intellectual restlessness. Mills defined himself as a maverick, and Aronowitz tests this claim (which has been challenged in recent years) against the work and thought of his contemporaries. Aronowitz describes Mills's growing circle of contacts among the New York Intellectuals and his efforts to reenergize the Left by encouraging a fundamentally new theoretical orientation centered on more ambitious critiques of U.S. society. Blurring the rigid boundaries among philosophy, history, and social theory and between traditional orthodoxies and the radical imagination, Mills became one of the most admired and controversial thinkers of his time and was instrumental in inspiring the student and antiwar movements of the 1960s. In this book, Aronowitz not only reclaims this critical thinker's reputation but also emphasizes his ongoing significance to debates on power in American democracy.

1

Mills’s Sociology and Pragmatism

Not surprisingly, given the dominance of pragmatism over wide areas of American philosophy and social thought during the first forty years of the twentieth century, the University of Texas philosophy faculty included several prominent exponents of this perspective. At Texas, Mills studied with David Miller, who wrote an early influential book on George Herbert Mead, and the economist Clarence E. Ayres, a follower of Thorstein Veblen’s institutional approach, whom Mills admired but did not hesitate to differ from on specific points. From these teachers Mills acquired a broad knowledge of the history of philosophy and an appreciation and comprehensive understanding of American pragmatism, particularly the different varieties offered by its most important founder, Charles Saunders Peirce. Mills also studied the works of George Herbert Mead, whose writing on social psychology became extremely influential in American sociology, and of John Dewey, perhaps the dominant voice in American philosophy during the first half of the twentieth century. In choosing a topic for a dissertation there was a strong logic in Mills’s decision to explore the link between pragmatism and the disciplines of philosophy and sociology in relation to the emergence of higher education as the chief site of intellectual knowledge in the twentieth century. Sociology and Pragmatism (the title of the published version of his dissertation) combines Mills’s abiding interest in philosophy as a system of ideas and the ways in which it interacted, influenced, and was influenced by academia and the larger society.

MILLS AS A SOCIOLOGIST OF KNOWLEDGE

The appearance of the English translation of Karl Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia in 1936 introduced to its English-speaking audience a new field of sociological inquiry: the study of the social determinants of knowledge. While the precepts of the sociology of knowledge had already been outlined by the German philosopher Max Scheler; the French ethnologist Émile Durkheim, especially in his Elementary Forms of Religious Life and The Rules of Sociological Method; and the American philosopher John Dewey in numerous writings, Mannheim’s book, translated by Edward Shils and the eminent urban sociologist Louis Wirth, made the deepest impression on sociology. Wirth’s preface, which adroitly outlined the problematic of the sociology of knowledge, provided Mannheim with an invaluable gateway to his English-speaking audience, an advantage few European social theorists enjoyed at the time. Written in the late 1920s, arguably the high point of German Marxism, the book was widely understood as an alternative to Marxism’s theory of ideology and social science. Over the next several decades, Ideology and Utopia and its articulation of a new sociology of knowledge prompted many social theorists, including Robert Merton, Talcott Parsons, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Norbert Elias, Hans Neisser, and Hans Speier, to comment on the issues raised by Mannheim—and almost always critically. Yet there was no doubt that Mannheim had succeeded in striking a new chord in social science and was rattling the cages of both mainstream and Marxist theories.

Mannheim was deeply indebted to the Marxist theory of ideology, in particular by perhaps its most influential twentieth-century exemplar, Georg Lukács’s essay “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat.” Lukács wrote the essay in the early 1920s following the collapse of every revolutionary movement save the Russian Bolsheviks. In the essay, Lukács offers a materialist theory of ideology that diverges from its common usage as “false consciousness” (wrong ideas) or ideas that are the product of manipulation by the forces of social and political power. Lukács’s essay is a masterful discussion of how the commodity form penetrates all corners of the social world, including the production of knowledge and forms of consciousness, and how this leads to the mystification of social relations. Borrowing from Georg Simmel’s concept of reification and Marx’s theory of the commodity fetish, Lukács accounts for the inability of the proletariat to achieve spontaneously revolutionary class consciousness even in the wake of the horrific results of World War I, where twenty million were killed. According to Lukács, in the very logic of commodity production and exchange and the division of labor that separates people from one another, relations among people appeared as relations between things. Abstractions such as “capital” seem remote to ordinary consciousness. One the one hand, workers become tied to “things”—possessions, money, wages, and so on—and lose sight of their own power in the labor process. On the other, the machine or the individual boss becomes their enemy because of their proximity to the process of production. Over the course of commodity production and exchange, bourgeois social relations remain obscure to consciousness; absent a vehicle by which to demystify reified relations, the working class remains enslaved to appearances; this condition marks everyday life. Reified social relations can only be broken by the force of a political organization armed with the revolutionary social theory of historical materialism.

While the proletariat cannot achieve revolutionary class consciousness within the confines of everyday life, its “objective position” as the historic bearer of the struggle to end capitalist exploitation and to create a new society of economic and social equality anoints it with putative class consciousness, a notion reminiscent of Weber’s ideal type. In Lukács’s argument, it is a mistake to equate empirical consciousness with putative consciousness. Under conditions of crisis, the proletariat can break through the commodity fetish and recognize itself as a revolutionary subject. Against the fragmentation of the social world that is brought about by the commodity form as the universal of social being, Lukács invokes the necessity of a dialectical “science of society” to achieve the reunification of consciousness and the social world. Historical materialism transcends partial knowledge by its grasp of the social totality, but the self-conscious effort to overcome the gulf that separates subject and object, social consciousness from social existence, is the work of the revolutionary party.

Lukács’s book History and Class Consciousness, in which “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat” appeared, was published in Germany in 1923 and was widely read and debated by intellectuals of all persuasions. It became influential in philosophical circles, especially in Weimar Germany and Austria, where, despite the profound economic crisis afflicting these countries, revolutionary possibility remained remote. Martin Heidegger was acquainted with the work and referred to it indirectly in his monumental Being and Time. (Some even believe that this book is an attempt to provide an alternative to Lukács’s theory of contemporary everyday life.) And Heidegger’s famous “Letter About Humanism” may be read as a response to Lukács’s argument. Mannheim, who characterizes History and Class Consciousness as a “profoundly important work,” accepted Lukács’s contention that knowledge is influenced by the social conditions within which it is produced and, in everyday life, by the class standpoint adopted, consciously or not, by individuals.

But Mannheim’s debt to Lukács is qualified. He links Lukács’s point of view of the totality to utopian thought, in this case to the utopian thought of the Left. But since the fragmented conditions of modern life are precisely as Lukács described them, utopia is not only impossible by definition (since it literally translates as “nowhere”), but the aspiration to unify knowledge is implausible. Thus, Lukács’s statement that under conditions of contemporary, advanced capitalism only the proletariat and its scientific theory of society, that is, historical materialism, could overcome the one-sidedness of knowledge, including scientific knowledge, is firmly rejected. Mannheim refuses to exempt historical materialism and the proletariat from the general evaluation that class and other standpoints inevitably lead to a one-sided distortion of the truth.

But Mannheim also rejects idealist explanations of the sources of knowledge. The point of view of the sociology of knowledge clearly opposes the tendency to explain changes in ideas “at the level of ideas (immanent intellectual history).” Mannheim continues:

The living forces and actual attitudes which underlie the theoretical ones are by no means merely of an individual nature, i.e., they do not have their origin, in the first place, in the individual’s becoming aware of his interests in the course of his thinking. Rather, they arise out of the collective purposes of a group which underlie the thought of the individual, and in the prescribed outlook of which he merely participates. In this connection, it becomes more clear that a large part of thinking and knowing cannot be correctly understood as long as the connection with existence or with the social implications of human life are not taken into account.¹

For Mannheim, only the intellectuals, who stand outside the prevailing class structure and are, for this reason, “free-floating,” can arrive at genuine scientific knowledge, because the nature of their position allows them to attain the disinterestedness that is the precondition of scientific inquiry. Modern science is grounded in the experimental outlook, which is, by its nature, self-critical and reflexive. Following Weber, Mannheim holds that, at the methodological level, natural science should be the model for social science. Accordingly, “such an experimental outlook, unceasingly sensitive to the dynamic nature of society and to its wholeness, is not likely to be developed by a class occupying a middle position but only by a relatively classless stratum which is not too firmly situated in the social order…. This classless stratum is … the socially unattached intelligentsia.”² As we shall see in chapter 8, after a long sojourn through the social class structure, Mills returns to Mannheim’s insight but in a different form and with a different intent.

Mannheim’s rejection of the possibility of achieving knowledge of the social totality from the standpoint of one of the contending classes in society and his faith in the possibility that science and its practitioners could arrive at truth reflected a position similar to one adopted by Austrian social-democratic theorists such as Max Adler and the German Social Democrats of the Weimar era. Yes, the working class had definite political interests, but they should not be confused with the possibility of a scientific politics based on privileged historical understanding. The knowledge flowing from “standpoint” politics was, however, valid in terms of specific interests, though inevitably ideological.

LANGUAGE AND CULTURE

Before undertaking a detailed examination of Mills’s first sustained intellectual work, his dissertation, A Sociological Account of Pragmatism, we should look into his relation to pragmatism. I begin with a discussion of his first published essays on language and culture, which were written while he was still a graduate student. These essays on the sociology of knowledge not only demonstrate the influence of pragmatism on his thinking but also Mills’s precocious audacity. Mills embraces one of Dewey’s signature concepts: objects, natural and social alike, are transformed by inquiry. That is, knowledge does not “represent” or reflect the object, except retrospectively; the process of inquiry is constituent of the object, where the term “constituent” signifies that the inquiry is not a passive activity but a creative one. The process of knowing means that the objects are “eventual” and only in the formal sense independent of knowledge. Although Dewey is a naturalist, a perspective that accepts the priority of natural objects to knowledge, knowing is activity, not a passive receptacle of objects whose prior existence in form and content is simply “reflected” by the knower. And the truth of any object of knowledge is to be found not in the thing-in-itself but in the consequences of what it means to grasp it.

Mills’s audacity consists chiefly in his ambition to take on the whole of our systematic knowledge of the social world, both the theoretical underpinnings and the methodologies of the social sciences. His early focus on the sociology of knowledge afforded him a range that few other lines of social inquiry can match. This may be the reason that Dewey’s works on logic, beginning in 1903 but especially the late work Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1938), became key for helping Mills research and write these articles. Mills’s articles are not merely talented exposition; they are documents of an original mind, a thinker who is not afraid to subject recognized elders to critical scrutiny. In this sense, Mills’s hubris resembles that of Marx, whose critique of Hegel’s philosophy and the more famous Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts were written when he was twenty-six, the same age Mills was when he submitted his dissertation. Of course, Mills also had the example of Thorstein Veblen, who had never honored sacred cows.

In the last year of his master’s study at the University of Texas, Mills’s first major article, “Language, Logic, and Culture,” was accepted for publication by the American Sociological Review. This essay attempts nothing less than a critique of the main lines of the sociology of knowledge as proposed by Mannheim. Mills’s central argument is that what is missing from Mannheim’s account of the social determinants of knowledge is a consideration of language, which, for Mills, is the vital link between mind and society. His starting point is to criticize the American appropriation of the recently proposed new sociology of knowledge:

Sociologies of knowledge have found elaborate statements in other contexts, but American social scientists have not assimilated or developed theories adequate to carry on historical reconstructions of thought from a cultural standpoint, nor have they attempted systematically to state the implications of such an attempt for methodology and theories of reflection. Despite this lack of postulational framework and empirical hypotheses, assumed and unanalyzed “answers” to certain theoretical questions are operative in the minds of many sociologists. It is the business of the theorist to articulate such assumptions as precise hypotheses and to examine them critically.³

Mills intends to supply such articulation. In contrast to the path set forth by Mannheim and the Marxists, which assumes the adequacy of a historical foundation for the study of the social contexts for the production of knowledge, Mills wants to argue that while this is necessary, it must be joined and not merely “supplemented” by a psychological foundation:

A theory of mind is needed which conceives social factors as intrinsic to mentality…. One chief defect of extant sociologies of knowledge is that they lack understanding and clear-cut formulations of the terms with which they would connect mind and other societal factors. This deficiency is, in turn, rooted in a failure to recognize the psychological problems arising from the acceptance of the general hypothesis…. Strictly speaking, the psychological is not “the personal.” The individual is not the point of departure for contemporary social psychology; the “mental” is not understood apart from definitely social items.⁴

In this regard, even when Marxists and Mannheim alike attempt to address the psychological aspects of knowledge, their efforts are woefully inadequate. Specifically, neither decisively addresses the role of language as the material basis of mind: “Marxists have not translated their connective terms into sound and unambiguous psychological categories…. Mannheim, e.g., covers up his psychological inadequacy with a vague and unanalyzed ‘collective unconscious.’” Mills does not stop at critique. The goal of the article is to offer the necessary psychological categories for understanding the social determinants.⁵

Mills also invokes the work of George Herbert Mead, among the most influential American social psychologists of the twentieth century. A colleague of Dewey’s at Michigan and then at the University of Chicago, Mead was a self-described social behaviorist but sharply rejected the version of behaviorism offered by his contemporary John Watson. In his interest to develop a “scientific psychology,” Watson reduced humans to machines whose inner workings become the subject of experiments modeled after the natural sciences. Watson postulated a human being whose primary internal psychophysiological characteristic is the predisposition for pleasure and pain. Thus external stimuli evoke the fear of hurt or the promise of pleasure. “Society” enters into the mind only in these terms. In contrast, Mead’s psychology is social, because humans are defined as a communicating species in which the capacity for speech takes pride of place. Since language is the chief way in which humans communicate with one another, both expressively, that is, in terms of emotions, and intellectually, in the transmission of ideas, speech is the key interpersonal mediation and the mediation between mind and society. The individual communicates with “society” by internalizing not only a particular other but also by internalizing the “generalized other.” Society therefore enters individual consciousness via an inner dialogue between the subject “I” and the “me” that connotes a subject who is able to take herself as a social object.

Mills argues, in partial disagreement with Mead, that the individual as a social being internalizes not society as a whole but only a segment of it, namely the social networks and institutions that constitute the salient references for social life. In his Principles of Psychology, William James elaborates this theme:

A man’s social self is the recognition which he gets from his mates. We are not only gregarious animals, liking to be in sight of our fellows, but we have an innate propensity to get ourselves noticed, and noticed favorably, by our kind. No more fiendish punishment could be devised, were such a thing physically possible, that one should be turned loose in society and remain absolutely unnoticed by all members thereof…. What may be called club opinion is one of the strongest forces in his life.⁶

What Mills adds to this perspective is the insistence upon language as the embodiment of social relations, including social conflict. Without a close examination of the way discourse functions, the social determinants of knowledge are bound to be overly general and incomplete. Language is a “mediator of human behavior … [and] functions in the organization and control of behavior patterns, these patterns are determinants of the meaning in a language.” According to Mills, if we want to evaluate the relation of the culture within which humans act, we need to examine the interaction between behavior and the process of meaning making through language:

By acquiring the categories of a language, we acquire the structured “ways” of a group, and along with the language, the value-implicates of thos...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction and Overview
• 1. Mills’s Sociology and Pragmatism
• 2. Mills and the New York Intellectuals
• 3. On Mills’s The New Men of Power
• 4. White Collar
• 5. On Social Psychology and Its Historical Contexts: The Origin of Psychology as an Independent Discipline
• 6. The Structure of Power in American Society
• 7. What Is a Political Intellectual?
• 8. Taking It Big
• Afterword: Mills Today
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index