Postmodern Cowboy

C. Wright Mills and a New 21st-century Sociology

Keith Kerr

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317253709
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Soziologie

More than 50 years ago, C. Wright Mills heralded a new age for sociology for the 1960s and beyond. Yet his forward-looking vision also foretold some of the social conditions we associate, more recently, with postmodern society. This intellectual biography of Mills emphasizes early life experiences that shaped Mills's expansive vision of the future, just as Kerr develops, from Mills, tools for confronting current and looming problems. Drawing upon little-known documents, Kerr expands our knowledge about this leading 20th-century sociologist, and shows how forward-looking Millsian scholarship can enhance the endeavors of sociology today.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Perhaps more today than at any other time in the short history of our discipline, sociology needs a radical like C. Wright Mills. His ideas are important, as are the ideas of all radicals. For whether we agree with these ideas or not, they at the very least show us alternate ways out of the traps that control our rational perceptions of social reality and the increasing control of our irrational, willful, emotional responses to these milieus. How appropriate that the opening line to Mills’s most widely read book, The Sociological Imagination, reads: “Nowadays men often feel their lives are a series of traps” ([1959]1967:2).

In light of contemporary cultural shifts, however, the character of C. Wright Mills offers as much promise as the radical ideas that his character produced. Increasingly, American culture has shifted from David Riesman’s ([1950]1961) other-directed character type, to Christopher Lasch’s (1979) narcissistic type, to Stjepan Mestrovic’s (1997) postemotional character type, and now to the postmodern, Disneyesque character-type (Bryman 2004) centered on all-consuming entertainment. From the classroom to the news media, within the family, and politics, the American flocks to those institutions, groups, and individuals that provide instant gratification in the form of entertainment. Be they brand names or celebrities, Americans demand to be entertained by the people and products they consume. This is not to make a value judgment on that shift. It is what it is, and for better or worse, it is the cultural landscape within which the contemporary sociologist must work. Such a trend has been noted by theorists as diverse as Herbert Marcuse ([1964]1991) and his “happy consciousness,” Riesman’s other-directed individual concerned with control of emotional display, Mills’s ([1959]1967) postmodern man as the “Cheerful Robot,” and Jean Baudrillard’s ([1986]1999) postmodern American whose only unifying and conforming aspect is the always present but meaningless smile.

Existing beside this Disneyfication process is a cultural landscape eliciting more and more control over individuals and the environment they inhabit. Increasingly, the American political Right decries the stifling effects of “Big Government” while the Left reacts to what it sees as the stifling influence of “Big Business.” While these seem to be two separate movements within American culture, there is good reason to believe that both the Right and the Left are reacting to the same cultural trend. Mills ([1956]2000) was one of the first to note this, linking both the corporate and political realm under the power elite umbrella. William Domhoff (1983, 1998) has taken this notion further in examining the contemporary structure of the power elite, and recently George Ritzer (1993, 2003) and Anthony Giddens (1979, 1984, 1990) have advanced descriptions of the juggernaut known as modern society. While much has been done to explain increasing rationalized control, more work still needs to be done in examining the existential, emotional effects of individuals living under such systems. This is all to say that cultural aspects of this shift need alarmingly more focus. Arlie Hochschild’s landmark work, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Emotions (1983), drawing on Mills’s social psychology (Gerth and Mills 1953) and his version of a “post-modern” society (Mills [1959]1967), has taken an important step in this direction. Much more needs be done to give the public a better grasp in understanding their personal trials within the context of a quickly transforming social milieu.

The alarming realization at the end of the twentieth century, and now at the start of the twenty-first, is that sociology, despite its initial trajectory and promise at midcentury, is woefully unprepared for such a task. Originating from an array of different sociological perspectives and academic disciplines, sociology’s obituary has been written many times over the last several decades. Mills was one of the first, launching a polemical attack on sociology in The Sociological Imagination; Alvin Gouldner pondered sociology’s demise in The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology (1971); Alan Wolfe lamented the development of a “sociology without society” in Whose Keeper? Social Science and Moral Obligation (1989); the postmodern Left within sociology has made popular the idea that sociology is dead (Rosenau 1992), seemingly collateral damage in the war on truth. Even those outside of sociology have recognized the crisis within the discipline. Historian John H. Summers has argued that the discipline has “degenerated into a kind of narcissism that accompanies plummeting prestige…. [T]he end-of-sociology literature [has] supplied evidence for the main allegation against the field, that it ha[s] retreated into parochialism” (Summers 2003).

Instead of the narrowly focused, often atheoretical statistical studies written to a handful of specialists (now commonplace within the discipline), Summers argues, if sociology is to rescue itself it must turn back to the rare examples supplied by Alexis de Tocqueville, David Riesman, Christopher Lasch, and Robert Bellah. As Summers writes of these authors’ studies, “[they] commend themselves to us today because they solicit our attention as members of the commonwealth…. What sort of people are Americans? No question could be more romantic to a ‘sociology without society.’ In these days of worldwide confusion and distress, however, no question could possibly be more urgent.” He succinctly summarizes this now dying breed of sociologist: “They make us part of something bigger than ourselves” (Summers 2003:online source).

It is in this landscape that C. Wright Mills, famous for his proclamation “Take it big!” (Mills and Mills 2000), still holds the promise to propel the discipline of sociology out of its hidden and forgotten backroom of academia. A small group of sociologists, recognizing the urgent crisis within the discipline, have recently turned to Mills as a means to revive what is hoped not to be an already deceased discipline. Reacting against the splintering of the American Sociological Association into forty-four-and-counting specialized sections, Bernard Phillips and the Sociological Imagination Group, utilizing Mills as an access point, are hoping to bring the discipline back into a common dialogue, and to “promote a social science that intimately links theory and evidence, follows Gouldner’s call for a ‘reflexive sociology,’ and integrates knowledge across our many specialized fields so that we can address the full complexity of human behavior” (Phillips 2005:mail).

In “taking it big” Phillips’s project recognizes Mills’s promise of a holistically integrated and meaning-centered sociology that seeks to break through the bureaucratic paralysis that has turned the Enlightenment dream into a nightmare. Mills offers a compelling and dynamic picture of contemporary society that speaks to the growing concerns of both the political Left and political Right in describing both the structural landscape and the existential dilemmas existing alongside it. More than that, however, Mills offers a now unique approach within the social sciences in utilizing sociology as a tool to help the “common man,” the politician and the scientist alike, to negotiate solutions to the radical postmodernity that we now confront. Mills, despite lamenting methodological “fetishism” ([1959]1967:224), offered a methodology of his own—a radical methodology housed in pragmatic approaches utilizing scientific methodology, linking this to culture and the inherent personal meaning that is housed within this arena ([1959]1967). But perhaps just as important in today’s Disneyfied, postmodern landscape is Mills’s character—both professional and personal (see Horowitz 1983, the only published full-length Mills biography). Both paint a tantalizing and entertaining picture that can be consumed as an emotional commodity, both informing and capturing the attention of today’s post-other-directed social character type.

While this last statement may be shocking and irreverent to pure academics, the fact of the matter is that academia and intellectuals cannot be separated from the larger cultural context of the societies and cultures in which they operate. As will be discussed in greater detail in the final chapter, a bureaucratized science has attempted to control and eliminate these subjective “contaminates.” While it is easy to fall into the trap of believing that academics and intellectuals stand as detached objective observers of social reality, such observers also stand as affected subjective agents of the very mechanisms they attempt to understand. Further, any findings that they produce must be relayed to the general public, also embedded in cultural environments. Therefore, it would seem evident that relays of information should be made in ways that are most conducive to capturing the attention and informing the public in a manner that is culturally aware of the audience it is communicating with and in a manner that is aware of the importance of subjective understanding. Mills, perhaps because he was one of the first English-speaking intellectuals to translate Max Weber¹ (1946), recognized very early the importance of meaningful experience (despite sociology’s infatuation with Weber’s “value-free” proclamation, he also wrote that understanding subjective states of individuals was just as important).

Mills was working as early as the 1950s to develop a methodological and written form of “sociological poetry” that he hoped would capture not only the structure of society but also the inherent subjective meaning of experience for those individuals making up that structure (Mills and Mills 2000). Mills recognized what Texas A&M professor Stjepan Mestrovic wrote: “To wait for some magical, pure moment of objectivity is to preclude the possibility of meaningful discourse” (1996:10).

This line of reasoning is obviously not new. It was C. Wright Mills’s critique in the first half of The Sociological Imagination, wherein he attacked Talcott Parsons and sociology in general for ignoring the cultural divide that he felt existed between the general public and the sociologist as technician—a divide that he ultimately argues was one of subjective meaning. And despite the continuing success of The Sociological Imagination and the continuing popularity of Mills, sociology and academia seem to have taken little advice from the book or the man, stuck instead in a nostalgic, backward-looking Millsian scholarship that fails to project Mills into our new era.

Perhaps even more problematic, at the opening of the twenty-first century we are witnessing the results of an isolated academic community detached from the general public. Nearly a hundred years after the Scopes trials, we are seeing the reintroduction of Creationism into American classrooms and a retreat of evolutionary teachings. Talking heads such as Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Jon Stewart, and Al Franken are increasingly looked to as experts on all manner of social science subjects. One need simply take a trip to the local bookstore, library, or Internet to see the wide range of nonacademic celebrities standing in as experts in science and social science subjects. Part of the blame is likely due to the self-marginalized place, bureaucratic arrangement, and segregated space of academia. Russell Jacoby has previously explored this trend in depth with his convincing book The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe (1987), wherein he decries the loss of the public intellectual. Interestingly, he names Mills as one of the last of that group. Jacoby argues, in part, that we have seen not a loss of the intellectual but simply a loss of intellectualism that the general public is attracted to, much less can understand. Today’s intellectual, he argues, is spatially isolated in the college institution and has little communication with those not occupying the same space. Not only are the intellectuals, and specifically sociologists, spatially isolated (and largely isolated from each other, as seen in the plethora of divergent specializations rampant in the field), but their communications from the university nether regions are culturally isolated as well. Perhaps it is true that the general public is much more intelligent than academics think, recognizing the “objective treatises” issued from the Academy for what they sometimes really are: archaic and subjective power statements that have lost their power and meaning in contemporary times and thus are things to ignore.

C. Wright Mills, very conscious of this emerging development, understood that how things are communicated is just as important, and oftentimes is the same thing as what is communicated. In turning this insight into action, Mills responded with a series of “pamphlets” that generated a large readership outside of the university (1958, 1960, 1962). It was his hope that public sociology, the one that he was pioneering, could provide the “common man” with a set of “tools” to understand the problems facing each of us in the then-emerging postmodern culture and the existential dilemmas that he rightly saw as inseparable from this landscape. In that regard, and as will be explicated later, Mills was in line with the works and concerns of both Thorstein Veblen and David Riesman.

As will be explored throughout the following pages, Mills’s relevance continues today for a multitude of reasons: for one, and as is rarely recognized, he predates many recent developments in the social sciences from intellectuals as diverse as Ritzer, Giddens, and Baudrillard. Second, and as I have previously discussed in “The Intersection of Neglected Ideas: Durkheim, Mead and the Postmodernists” (Kerr 2008), Mills offers an anchor point from which diverse and seemingly contradictory statements from competing camps of sociology (that is, modernist and postmodernist) can be understood in the context of each other, including Veblen, Weber, William James, Baudrillard, and Riesman—just to mention a few. Finally, Mills’s biography, inseparable from his academic work, offers a vehicle to turn academic into celebrity, and thus turn intellectual into public intellectual. In short, an examination of Mills’s work and eccentric life offers an opportunity and roadmap to repackage the communiqués from the isolated classrooms and offices of the university into a viable commodity that has a greater chance to be consumed in today’s Disneyfied, entertainment, cultural landscape. In short, Mills as legend provides a vehicle for nonsociologists into the world of sociology, providing sociology with a holistic methodology to begin to solve the mounting and pressing problems faced at the start of the twenty-first century.

The following pages will take many twists and turns, examining here and there aspects of Mills’s biography, his relationships with family and friends, his eccentric behaviors, and the mythlike legend that he has now become; it will take a journey into the world of postmodernity as Mills saw it. Along the way, a wide range of other important theorists will make appearances in their intellectual (if not real) relationships with Mills’s ideas. In line with sociology as Mills practiced it, and in contradiction to the specialized and splintered discipline that sociology has become, the following pages will draw on psychoanalysis, sociology, literature, and philosophy in an exploration of the relationship between Mills the man, Mills the legend, and Mills the intellectual.

One should hesitate to go into too much detail in an introduction, summarizing exactly what is to follow. Foreshadowing (as I have attempted to do here) is productive. Intro summarizations are not. Summarizations seem to preclude the ability of the reader to engage the text critically and draw out arguments and conclusions that the author may not have explicitly or even consciously recognized. Summarizations tell the reader how and what it is he or she should understand by offering preformed and easily digested (shall we say McDonaldized?) arguments. For better or worse, I prefer to avoid summarizing my work, and instead hope to engage the reader in the text as it progresses.

Note

1.  Hans Gerth and Mills coedited the Weber translation. Gerth, a native German speaker, appears to have been the primary translator, and Mills was in charge of the arrangement and formulation of the English text.

CHAPTER 2

C. Wright Mills: An American Utopian

Horowitz’s Incomplete Biography

Undoubtedly, C. Wright Mills is one of the best-known American sociologists of the twentieth century. From his exploration into what he saw as a power elite at the helm of American decision-making to his methodological statements in The Sociological Imagination ([1959]1967), Mills’s intellectual impact is still felt within the discipline. The fact that he died at the early age of forty-five makes this all the more impressive. Perhaps just as important to his continuing legacy, however, is the persistent image of a larger-than-life embodiment: the rebel from Texas who, with a zeal and passion conspicuously missing in the archaic and dry academic arena, set out to remake the discipline through an all-out attack on power elites, be they in the public or within sociology’s own ranks.

Bernard Phillips, a former undergraduate in Mills’s Introduction to Sociology course at Columbia University, tells a story highlighting Mills’s propensity for challenging authority. His story revolves around an encounter between Mills and the then Columbia University president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, soon to be the president of the United States. While Eisenhower and Mills shared similar concerns, Eisenhower warning the American public of the dangers posed by the “Military-Industrial Complex” and Mills expressing very similar concerns regarding the growing power elite, Eisenhower during his time at Columbia was far from trusted by those on the Left such as Mills. During the Red Scare sweeping the United States, Eisenhower served on a commission that concluded communists should be barred from teaching in the classroom, and he also supported the dismissal of a Left-leaning member of the Teachers College at Columbia (Columbia University 2007).

Perhaps this is part of the motivation behind Mills’s actions toward Eisenhower. Regardless, the story goes that Eisenhower, unannounced, walked into Mills’s undergraduate lecture one afternoon, taking a seat near the back. Recognizing the former Allied commander and soon-to-be president of the United States sitting in his classroom, Mills stopped midsentence in lecture to launch into a diatribe on how one could mount a violent revolution against the United States government, using the college classroom as the initial cell to command the operations. Mills continued along this radical line, all the while Eisenhower growing more and more angry, until Eisenhower abruptly rose from his seat and stormed out the back of the lecture hall. Mills, once again in midsentence, stopped the lecture and returned to his original topic (Phillips 2006:personal conversation).

Yet another story told of Mills while at Columbia revolves around his casual dress. Amid America’s midcentury conservative attire, Mills was fond of wearing his “riding gear” while at Columbia (riding goggles, boots, gloves, and at times, a coonskin hat). Concerned about his unprofessional dress, several faculty members approached Mills. Mills, in quintessential fashion, cursed at them and threw them out of his office. Several hours later, after a meeting with the faculty members, the department chair arrived at Mills’s office, telling Mills, “If you are to continue working here, you will—starting tomorrow—show up in a suit and tie.” The following day, and atop his BMW motorcycle, Mills arrived to his first lecture wearing a suit and tie, but no shirt.

Undoubtedly, Mills was an eccentric before the 1960s made eccentricity a norm (how much of that eccentricity remains or is even allowed within society or the Academy is questionable). Even today, decades after his death, stories of Mills’s outrageous behavior are passed down to incoming generations of sociology students almost as a form of urban legend. Any truth to these stories may forever be lost. Mills, like an early postmodern caricature, reveled in these outrageous stories and falsehoods, refusing to dismiss any untruthfulness in them. To the c...