Introduction

The purpose of this site is to introduce students to the social thought of C. Wright Mills.  The site consists of excerpts on a variety of topics from many of Mills' books .  There are two very remarkable things about the sociology of C. Wright Mills that I want to briefly note.  First, he is one of the few sociologists of the 20th century to write within the classical tradition of sociology.  His vision is a holistic view of entire socio-cultural systems.  His sociology has been profoundly influenced by Max Weber, Karl Marx, and other 19th century theorists.  Consequently his writings remain quite relevant and useful today in our efforts to understand social reality--of what is going on out there.  Secondly, aside from being a sociological genius, Mills is a very gifted writer.  Enjoy his insights, buy his books, spread the word. 
 
 

On "human nature":

"It is true, as psychoanalysts continually point out, that people do often have 'the increasing sense of being moved by obscure forces within themselves which they are unable to define.'  But it is not true, as Ernest Jones asserted, that 'man's chief enemy and danger is his own unruly nature and the dark forces pent up within himself.'  On the contrary:  'Man's chief danger' today lies in the unruly forces of contemporary society itself, with its alienating methods of production, its enveloping techniques of political domination, its international anarchy--in a word, its pervasive transformations of the very 'nature' of man and the conditions and aims of his life"  (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 13).

"Historical transformations carry meanings not only for individual ways of life, but for the very character--the limits and possibilities of the human being.  As the history-making unit, the dynamic nation-state is also the unit within which the variety of men and women are selected and formed, liberated and repressed--it is the man-making unit.  That is one reason why struggles between nations and between blocs of nations are also struggles over the types of human beings that will eventually prevail in the Middle East, in India, in China, in the United State; that is why culture and politics are now so intimately related; and that is why there is such need and such demand for the sociological imagination"  (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 158).

"For we cannot adequately understand 'man' as an isolated biological creature, as a bundle of reflexes or a set of instincts, as an 'intelligible field' or a system in and of itself.  Whatever else he may be, man is a social and an historical actor who must be understood, if at all, in close and intricate interplay with social and historical structures"  (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 158).

"Within the broad limits of the physiology of the sense organs, our very perception of the physical world, the colors we discriminate, the smells we become aware of, the noises we hear, are socially patterned and socially circumscribed.  The motivations of men, and even the varying extents to which various types of men are typically aware of them, are to be understood in terms of the vocabularies of motive that prevail in a society and of social changes and confusions among such vocabularies"  (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 162).

On social life:

"Nowadays men often feel that their private lives are a series of traps.  They sense that within their everyday worlds, they cannot overcome their troubles, and in this feeling, they are often quite correct:  What ordinary men are directly aware of and what they try to do are bounded by the private orbits in which they live; their visions and their powers are limited to the close-up scenes of job, family, neighborhood; in other milieux, they move vicariously and remain spectators.  And the more aware they become, however vaguely, of ambitions and of threats which transcend their immediate locales, the more trapped they seem to feel" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 3).

"What they need, and what they feel they need, is a quality of mind that will help them to use information and to develop reason in order to achieve lucid summations of what is going on in the world and of what may be happening within themselves.  It is this quality, I am going to contend, that journalists and scholars, artists and publics, scientists and editors are coming to expect of what may be called the sociological imagination" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p.3).

On social change:

"What we experience in various and specific milieux, I have noted, is often caused by structural changes.  Accordingly, to understand the changes of many personal milieux we are required to look beyond them.  And the number and variety of such structural changes increase as the institutions within which we live become more embracing and more intricately connected with one another.  To be aware of the idea of social structure and to use it with sensibility is to be capable of tracing such linkages among a great variety of milieux.  To be able to do that is to possess the sociological imagination"  (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, pp.10-11).

"We can examine trends in an effort to answer the question 'where are we going?'--and that is what social scientists are often trying to do.  In doing so, we are trying to study history rather than to retreat into it, to pay attention to contemporary trends without being 'merely journalistic,' to gauge the future of these trends without being merely prophetic.  All this is hard to do.  We must remember that we are dealing with historical materials; that they do change very rapidly; that there are countertrends.  And that we have always to balance the immediacy of the knife-edge present with the generality needed to bring out the meaning of specific trends for the period as a whole.  But above all, the social scientist is trying to see the several major trends together--structurally, rather than as happening in a scatter of milieux, adding up to nothing new, in fact not adding up at all.  This is the aim that lends to the study of trends its relevance to the understanding of a period, and which demands full and adroit use of the materials of history"  (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, pp. 153-154).

On the Making of History:

"During most of human history, historical change has not been visible to the people who were involved in it, or even to those enacting it.  Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, for example, endured for some four hundred generations with but slight changes in their basic structure. That is six and a half times as long as the entire Christian era, which has only prevailed some sixty generations; it is about eighty times as long as the five generations of the United States' existence. But now the tempo of change is so rapid, and the means of observation so accessible, that the interplay of event and decision seems often to be quite historically visible, if we will only look carefully and from an adequate vantage point" (The Power Elite, 1956, pp. 20-21).

"As the circle of those who decide is narrowed, as the means of decision are centralized and the consequences of decision become enormous, then the course of great events often rests upon the decisions of determinable circles" (The Power Elite, 1956, p. 21).

"There is nothing in 'the nature of history' in our epoch that rules out the pivotal function of small groups of decision-makers. On the contrary, the structure of the present is such as to make this not only a reasonable, but a rather compelling, view (The Power Elite, 1956, p. 27).

"There is nothing in 'the psychology of man,' or in the social manner by which men are shaped and selected for and by the command posts of modern society, that makes unreasonable the view that they do confront choices and that the choices they make--or their failure to confront them--are history-making in their consequences" (The Power Elite, 1956, p. 27).

"Accordingly, political men now have every reason to hold the American power elite accountable for a decisive range of the historical events that make up the history of the present" (The Power Elite, 1956, p. 27).

"The view that all is blind drift is largely a fatalist projection of one's own feeling of impotence and perhaps, if one has ever been active politically in a principled way, a salve of one's guilt. The view that all of history is due to the conspiracy of an easily located set of villains, or of heroes, is also a hurried projection from the difficult effort to understand how shifts in the structure of society open opportunities to various elites and how various elites take advantage or fail to take advantage of them. To accept either view--of all history as conspiracy or of all history as drift--is to relax the effort to understand the facts of power and the ways of the powerful" (The Power Elite, 1956, p. 27).

"To say that a historical event is caused by fate is to say that it is the summary and unintended result of innumerable decisions of innumerable men. These men are not socially compact enough to be identifiable, and such decisions as each of them makes are not in themselves consequential enough for the result to have been foreseen. Each decision that each man makes is one among many, and the results of each decision are minute. All these decisions--coinciding, colliding, coalescing--add up to the blind result: the historical event, which, as it were, is autonomous. There is no link between any one man's intention and the summary result of the innumerable intentions. Thus, in the classic model of the capitalist market, innumerable entrepreneurs and innumerable consumers by ten thousand decisions per minute shape and reshape, in the longer run, the structure of the economy. And in like manner, the causes of such historical events as war are not under human control. Events are beyond explicit human decision. . .
"This sociological conception of fate, in brief, has to do with events in history that are beyond the control of any circles or groups of men (1) compact enough to be identifiable, (2) powerful enough to decide with consequence, and (3) in a position to foresee the consequences and so to be held accountable for historical events. . .
 

"Fate is a feature of specific kinds of social structure; the extent to which the mechanics of fate are the mechanics of history-making is itself a historical problem. How large the role of fate may be, in contrast with the role of explicit decision, depends first of all upon the scope and concentration of the means of power that are available at any given time in any given society" (The Causes of World War III, 1958, p. 21).

"Events that are beyond human decisions do happen; social arrangements do change without benefit of explicit decision. But in so far as such decisions are made--and in so far as they could be but are not made--the problem of who is involved in making them--or in not making them--is the basic problem of power. It is also the problem of history making, and so of the causes of war" (The Causes of World War III, 1958, p. 22).

"In those societies in which the means of power are rudimentary and decentralized, history is fate. The innumerable actions of innumberable men modify their local milieus, and thus gradually modify the structure of society as a whole. These modifications--the course of history--go on behind men's backs. History is drift, although in total 'men make it'" (The Causes of World War III, 1958, p. 22).

"But in those societies in which the means of power are enormous in scope and centralized in form a few men may be so placed within the historical structure that by their decisions about the use of these means they modify the structural conditions under which most men live. Nowadays such elites make history 'under circumstances not chosen altogether by themselves', yet compared with other men, and with other periods of human history, these circumstances do indeed seem less overwhelming" (The Causes of World War III, 1958, p. 22).

"I am contending that 'men are free to make history' and that some men are now much freer than others to do so, for such freedom requires access to the means of decision and of power by which history can now be made. To assume that men are equally free to make history is to assume that they are equal in power. But power is a hierarchy; the shape of that hierarchy is itself subject to historical change, and at any given moment of history it opens to different men different opportunities to exercise their wills in the making of history. What to powerless men is an overwhelming event to men of power is a decision to be made or an abdication to commit. It is a challenge and any opportunity, a struggle, a fear, a hope. In our time if men do not make history, they tend increasingly to become the utensils of history-makers and the mere objects of history-making. But those who do have access to the new means of power, and yet define their situation as one of fate--do they not stand now in objective default?" (The Causes of World War III, 1958, pp. 22-23).

"We should never forget that no nation-state is a homogeneous entity, that none is in itself a history-making agent. 'It' does not possess decision or will or interest or honour or fight. 'Nation' refers to a people occupying a more or less defined territory and organized under the authority of a state or, with some chance of success, claiming such an autonomous organization. The 'state', a dominating apparatus, refers to an organization that effectively monopolizes the legitimate means of violence and administration over a defined territory. 'Legitimate' means: more or less generally acquiesced in by publics and masses, for reasons in which they believe. In the case of the nation-state these reasons are the symbols and ideologies of nationalism. 'Nation' and 'state', I think, must be used mainly as adjectives referring to national spokesmen, power elites, and policy makers. People who are not among such men form the underlying population, which is part of the historical context but which is not itself among the history-makers today" (The Causes of World War III, 1958, p. 53).

"International events are increasingly the result of the decisions and the lack of decisions of men who act in the name of these nations and with the means of action made available by their economic, military, and political institutions. The international centralization of decision and the internal development of the superstates, we have seen, mean that history-making is less a matter of some overwhelming fate than of the decisions and the defaults of two power elites" (The Causes of World War III, 1958, p. 54).

"What 'practical men of affairs' do not face up to is the fact that 'politics' today has to do with the willful making of history. The enlargement and the centralization of the means of history-making signify that, for better or for worse, power elites are no longer in a situation in which their will and reason need be overwhelmed by 'impersonal forces beyond their control'. A politics of responsibility is now much more possible than in a society with less far-reaching and less centralized means of power. The present fact is otherwise: A politics of semi-organized irresponsibility prevails. But that fact ought not to blind us to the political possibilities opened up by this great structural change: It is now sociologically realistic, morally fair, and politically imperative to make demands upon men of power and to hold them responsible for specific courses of events" (The Causes of World War III, 1958, p. 100).

 "'But if I don't do it,' some scientists feel, 'other will. So what's the difference?' This is less an argument than the mannerism of the irresponsible. It is based upon a conception of yourself as an altogether private man, upon the acceptance of your own impotence, upon the idea that the act in question, whatever it be, is a part of fate and so not subject to your decision. My answers to this mannerism are: If you do not do it, you at least are not responsible for its being done. If you refuse to do it out loud, others may quietly refrain from doing it, and those who still do it may then do it only with hesitation and guilt. To refuse to do it is to begin the practice of a professional code, and perhaps the creation of that code as a historical force. To refuse to do it is an act affirming yourself as a moral centre of responsible decision; it is an act which recognizes that you as a scientist are now a public man--whether you want to be or not; it is the act of a man who rejects 'fate', for it reveals the resolution of one human being to take at least his own fate into his own hands" (The Causes of World War III, 1958, p. 170).
 
 

On Intensification:

"The immense productivity of mass-production technique and the increased application of technologic rationality are the first open secrets of modern occupational change: fewer men turn out more things in less time. . . . This industrial revolution seems to be permanent, seems to go on through war and boom and slump; thus a decline in production results in a more than proportional decline in employment; and an increase in production results in a less than proportional increase in employment" (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. 66-67).

"The key to the power of both [the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.] is technological development. The 'materialism' of the Soviet Union is no more important a spiritual fact than the 'materialism' of the West--especially of the U.S.A., in which religion itself is now a quite secular activity. In both, the means of production are so arranged that, in the name of efficiency, work is alienated; in both, as well, the means of consumption are culturally exploitive. In neither is there significant craftsmanship in work or significant leisure in the non-working life. In both, men at leisure and at work are subjected to impersonal bureaucracies. This trend is no Bolshevik invention; it is part of the main line of Western, and especially of American, industrial and technical development" (The Causes of World War III, 1958, p. 26).

"The industrialization of the world is the master trend of our time; perhaps it is not inevitable, but it is strong enough as a demand and appealing enough as a promise to set the key terms of the world-wide competition between the two dominant systems of economic, military and political power" (The Causes of World War III, 1958, p. 74).

"Backward economies can be 'modernized' more or less on their own, but this seems to require dictatorial regimes which will sweat out of a generation or two the primary accumulation of capital goods needed. Backward economies can also be modernized, perhaps more slowly, without dictatorial regimes, but this seems to require that they be greatly and intelligently helped by industrially advanced nations. There do not seem to be other alternatives" (The Causes of World War III, 1958, p. 75).

On Agriculture:

The rural middle class has been slowly subjected to a polarization, which, if continued, will destroy the traditional character of farming, splitting it into subsistence cultivators, wage-workers, and sharecroppers on the one hand, and big commercial farmers and rural corporations on the other (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. 19).

Back of this drift to larger scale and increasing concentration is the machine, which has made farming a highly capitalized business (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. 19).

Farming is not yet rationalized, but the rural world of the small entrepreneur is already gone. The industrial revolution, only now getting under way on the farm, already has determined, in Griswold's words, that 'a self-sufficient farm in our time is more likely to be a haunt of illiteracy and malnutrition than a well-spring of democracy.' The industrial revolution tends to draw the family farm into its orbit, or leave it stranded in an archaic subsistence economy (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. 20).

In making its terms with corporate business, farm entrepreneurship is in part becoming more like business management, and in part meeting its problems with the help and support of political power. All interests have come to look to government, but the independent farmer has, in some respects, succeeded more than others in turning the federal establishment into a public means for his private economic ends (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, 40).

The world of the farmer, especially in its upper third, is now intricately related to the world of big government, forming with it a combination of private and public enterprise wherein private gains are insured and propped by public funds. The independent farmer has become politically dependent; he no longer belongs to a world of straightforward economic fact (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, 40).

Centralization has brought consolidated farming and farm chains, run like corporate units by central management. . . . Industrial and financial interests that have invested in farm properties are active agents for rational methods of production and management. They have the money to buy the machines and employ the engineers. Even where they do not invest, own, or manage directly, they take over processing and marketing. . . . Thus the farmer must deal with the business interests closing in on the processing and the distributing of his product (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, 40-41).

In the rhetoric of many farm spokesmen, farming as a business is disguised as farming as a way of life. . . . Alongside the small independent farmer, a new breed of men might come onto the land, men who never were owners and do not expect to be, men who, like factory employees, manage and work the big machines. Then farming would take its place, not as the center of a social world as formerly, but as one national industry among other intricate, rationalized departments of production (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, 44).

In the meantime, farming is less a morally ascendant way of life than an industry; appreciation of the family farm as a special virtue producing unit in a world of free men is today but a nostalgic mood among deluded metropolitan people. Moreover, it is an ideological veil for larger business layouts whose economic ally and ultimate victim the politically dependent farmer may well become (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, 44).
 
 

On Elite Theory:

"As the channels of communication become more and more monopolized, and party machines and economic pressures, based on vested shams, continue to monopolize the chances of effective political organization, the opportunities to act and to communicate politically are minimized. The political intellectual is, increasingly, an employee living off the communication machineries which are based on the very opposite of what he would like to stand for"  (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. 159).

"Relations between men in charge of the administrative branches of government and men who run the expanded corporations and unions are often close. Their collaboration may occur while each is an official in his respective hierarchy, or by means of personal shifting of positions; the labor leader accepts a government job or becomes the personnel man of a corporation; the big-business official becomes a dollar-a-year man; the government expert accepts a position with the corporation his agency is attempting to regulate. Just how close the resemblance between governmental and business officials may be is shown by the ease and frequency with which men pass form one hierarchy to another. While such changes may seem mere incidents in an individual career, the meaning of such interpenetration of managerial elite goes beyond this, modifying the meaning of the upper brackets and the objective functions of the several big organizations" (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. 83).

"The power elite is composed of men whose positions enable them to transcend the ordinary environments of ordinary men and women; they are in positions to make decisions having major consequences. Whether they do or do not make such decisions is less important that the fact that they do occupy such pivotal positions: their failure to act, their failure to make decisions, is itself an act that is often of greater consequences than the decisions they do make" (The Power Elite, 1956, p. 4).

"For they are in command of the major hierarchies and organizations of modern society. They rule the big corporations. They run the machinery of the state and claim its prerogatives. They run the military establishment. They occupy the strategic command posts of the social structure, in which are now centered the effective means of the power and the wealth and the celebrity which they enjoy" (The Power Elite, 1956, pp. 3-4).

"The power elite are not solitary rulers. Advisers and consultants, spokesmen and opinion-makers are often the captains of their higher thought and decision. Immediately below the elite are the professional politicians of the middle levels of power, in the Congress and in the pressure groups, as well as among the new and old upper classes of town and city and region" (The Power Elite, 1956, p. 4).

"Behind such men and behind the events of history, linking the two, are the major institutions of modern society. These hierarchies of state and corporation and army constituted the means of power; as such they are now of a consequence not before equaled in human history--and at their summits, there are now those command posts of modern society which offer us the sociological key to an understanding of the role of the higher circles in America" (The Power Elite, 1956, p. 5).

"Within American society, major national power now resides in the economic, the political, and the military domains. Other institutions seem off to the side of modern history, and, on occasion, duly subordinated to these" (The Power Elite, 1956, p. 6).

"Within each of the big three, the typical institutional unit has become enlarged, has become administrative, and, in the power of its decisions, has become centralized. Behind these developments there is a fabulous technology, for as institutions, they have incorporated this technology and guide it, even as it shapes and paces their developments" (The Power Elite, 1956, p. 7).

"The economy--once a great scatter of small productive units in autonomous balance--has become dominated by two or three hundred giant corporations, administratively and politically interrelated, which together hold the keys to economic decisions" (The Power Elite, 1956, p. 7).

"The political order, once a decentralized set of several dozen states with a weak spinal cord, has become a centralized, executive establishment which has taken up into itself many powers previously scattered, and now enters into each and every cranny of the social structure" (The Power Elite, 1956, p. 7).

"The military order, once a slim establishment in a context of distrust fed by state militia, has become the largest and most expensive feature of government, and, although well versed in smiling public relations, now has all the grim and clumsy efficiency of a sprawling bureaucratic domain" (The Power Elite, 1956, p. 7).

"In each of these institutional areas, the means of power at the disposal of decision makers have increased enormously; their central executive powers have been enhanced: within each of them modern administrative routines have been elaborated and tightened up" (The Power Elite, 1956, p. 7).

"As each of these domains becomes enlarged and centralized, the consequences of its activities become greater, and its traffic with the others increases. The decisions of a handful of corporations bear upon military and political as well as upon economic developments around the world. The decisions of the military establishment rest upon and grievously affect political life as well as the very level of economic activity. The decisions made within the political domain determine economic activities and military programs. There is no longer, on the one hand, an economy, and, on the other hand, a political order containing a military establishment unimportant to politics and to money-making. There is a political economy linked, in a thousand ways, with military institutions and decisions. On each side of the world-split running through central Europe and around the Asiatic rimlands, there is an ever-increasing interlocking of economic, military, and political structures. If there is government intervention in the corporate economy, so is there corporate intervention in the governmental process. In the structural sense, this triangle of power is the source of the interlocking directorate that is most important for the historical structure of the present" (The Power Elite, 1956, pp. 7-8).

"The fact of the interlocking is clearly revealed at each of the points of crisis of modern capitalist society--slump, war, and boom. In each, men of decision are led to an awareness of the interdependence of the major institutional orders" (The Power Elite, 1956, p. 8).

"But the elite are not simply those who have the most, for they could not 'have the most' were it not for their positions in the great institutions. For such institutions are the necessary bases of power, of wealth, and of prestige, and at the same time, the chief means of exercising power, of acquiring wealth, and of cashing in the higher claims for prestige" (The Power Elite, 1956, p. 9).

"By the powerful we mean, of course, those who are able to realize their will, even if others resist it. No one, accordingly, can be truly powerful unless he has access to the command of major institutions, for it is over these institutional means of power that the truly powerful are, in the first instance, powerful. Higher politicians and key officials of government command such institutional power; so do admirals and generals, and so do the major owners and executives of the larger corporations" (The Power Elite, 1956, p. 9).

"The modern corporation is the prime source of wealth, but, in latter-day capitalism, the political apparatus also opens and closes many avenues to wealth. The amount as well as the source of income, the power over consumer's goods as well as over productive capital, are determined by positions within the political economy" (The Power Elite, 1956, p. 10).

"Great prestige increasingly follows the major institutional units of the social structure. It is obvious that prestige depends, often quite decisively, upon access to the publicity machines that are now a central and normal feature of all the big institutions of modern America (The Power Elite, 1956, p. 10).

"Moreover, one feature of these hierarchies of corporation, state, and military establishment is that their top positions are increasingly interchangeable" (The Power Elite, 1956, p. 10).

"Like wealth and power, prestige tends to be cumulative: the more of it you have, the more you can get. These values also tend to be translatable into one another: the wealthy find it easier than the poor to gain power; those with status find it easier than those without it to control opportunities for wealth" (The Power Elite, 1956, p. 10).

"To be celebrated, to be wealthy, to have power requires access to major institutions, for the institutional positions men occupy determine in large part their chances to have and to hold these valued experiences" (The Power Elite, 1956, p. 11).

"That American society has never passed through a feudal epoch is of decisive importance to the nature of the American elite, as well as to American society as a historic whole. For it means that no nobility or aristocracy, established before the capitalist era, has stood in tense opposition to the higher bourgeoisie. It means that this bourgeoisie has monopolized not only wealth but prestige and power as well" (The Power Elite, 1956, p. 12).

"The elite who occupy the command posts may be seen as the possessors of power and wealth and celebrity; they may be seen as members of the upper stratum of a capitalistic society. They may also be defined in terms of the psychological and moral criteria, as certain kinds of selected individuals. So defined, the elite, quite simply, are people of superior character and energy" (The Power Elite, 1956, p. 13).

"They come readily to define themselves as inherently worthy of what they possess; they come to believe themselves 'naturally' elite; and, in fact, to imagine their possessions and their privileges as natural extensions of their own elite selves. In this sense, the idea of the elite as composed of men and women having a finer moral character is an ideology of the elite as a privileged ruling stratum, and this is true whether the ideology is elite-made or made up for it by others" (The Power Elite, 1956, p. 14).

"The moral conception of the elite, however, is not always merely an ideology of the overprivileged or a counter-ideology of the underprivileged. It is often a fact: having controlled experiences and select privileges, many individuals of the upper stratum do come in due course to approximate the types of character they claim to embody. Even when we give up--as we must--the idea that the elite man or woman is born with an elite character, we need not dismiss the idea that their experiences and trainings develop in them characters of a specific type" (The Power Elite, 1956, p. 14).

"Yet, in so far as the elite flourishes as a social class or as a set of men at the command posts, it will select and form certain types of personality, and reject others. The kind of moral and psychological beings men become is in large part determined by the values they experience and the institutional roles they are allowed and expected to play" (The Power Elite, 1956, p. 15).

"If there is any one key to the psychological idea of the elite, it is that they combine in their persons an awareness of impersonal decision-making with intimate sensibilities shared with one another. To understand the elite as a social class we must examine a whole series of smaller face-to-face milieux, the most obvious of which, historically, has been the upper-class family, but the most important of which today are the proper secondary school and the metropolitan club" (The Power Elite, 1956, p. 15).

"To say that there are obvious gradations of power and of opportunities to decide within modern society is not to say that the powerful are united, that they fully know what they do, or that they are consciously joined in conspiracy. Such issues are best faced if we concern ourselves, in the first instance, more with the structural position of the high and mighty, and with the consequences of their decisions, than with the extent of the awareness or the purity of their motives" (The Power Elite, 1956, pp. 18-19).

"To understand the power elite we must attend to three major keys: I.. . . .the psychology of the several elites in their respective milieux. In so far as the power elite is composed of men of similar origin and education, in so far as their careers and their styles of life are similar, there are psychological and social bases for their unity, resting upon the fact that they are of similar social type and leading to the fact of their easy intermingling. . .
II. Behind such psychological and social unity as we may find, are the structure and mechanics of those institutional hierarchies over which the political directorate, the corporate rich, and the high military now preside. The greater the scale of these bureaucratic domains, the greater the scope of their respective elite's power. . .
III. The unity of the power elite, however, does not rest solely on psychological similarity and social intermingling, nor entirely on the structural coincidences of commanding positions and interests. At times it is the unity of a more explicit co-ordination" (The Power Elite, 1956, p. 19).

"To say that these higher circles are increasingly co-ordinated, that this is one basis of their unity, and that at times--as during the wars--such co-ordination is quite decisive, is not to say that the co-ordination is total or continuous, or even that it is very surefooted. Much less is it to say that willful co-ordination is the sole or the major basis of their unity, or that the power elite has emerged as the realization of a plan. But it is to say that as the institutional mechanics of our time have opened up avenues to men pursuing their several interests, many of them have come to see that these several interests could be realized more easily if they worked together, in informal as well as in more formal ways, and accordingly they have done so" (The Power Elite, 1956, p. 20).

"It is not my thesis that for all epochs of human history and in all nations, a creative minority, a ruling class, an omnipotent elite shape all historical events. Such statements, upon careful examination, usually turn out to be mere tautologies, and even when they are not, they are so entirely general as to be useless in the attempt to understand the history of the present (The Power Elite, 1956, p. 20).

"The degree of foresight and control of those who are involved in decisions that count may also vary. The idea of the power elite does not mean that the estimations and calculated risks upon which decisions are made are not often wrong and that the consequences are sometimes, indeed often, not those intended. Often those who make decisions are trapped by their own inadequacies and blinded by their own errors" (1956, pp. 21-22).

"The American elite is neither omnipotent nor impotent" (The Power Elite, 1956, p. 26).

"It is fashionable, just now, to suppose that there is no power elite, as it was fashionable in the 'thirties to suppose a set of ruling-class villains to be the source of all social injustice and public malaise. I should be as far from supposing that some simple and unilateral ruling class could be firmly located as the prime mover of American society, as I should be from supposing that all historical change in America today is merely impersonal drift" (The Power Elite, 1956, p. 27).

"What I am asserting is that in this particular epoch a conjunction of historical circumstances has led to the rise of an elite of power; that the men of the circles composing this elite, severally and collectively, now make such key decisions as are made; and that, given the enlargement and the centralization of the means of power now available, the decisions that they make and fail to make carry more consequences for more people than has ever been the case in the world history of mankind" (The Power Elite, 1956, p. 28).

"I am also asserting that there has developed on the middle levels of power, a semi-organized stalemate, and that on the bottom level there has come into being a mass-like society which has little resemblance to the image of a society in which voluntary associations and classic publics hold the keys to power. The top of the American system of power is much more unified and much more powerful, the bottom is much more fragmented, and in truth, impotent, than is generally supposed by those who are distracted by the middling units of power which neither express such will as exists at the bottom nor determine the decisions at the top" (The Power Elite, 1956, pp. 28-29).

"The History of modern society may most readily be understood as the story of the enlargement and the centralization of the means of power. In the feudal societies, these means are decentralized; in the modern age they have become centralized. The rise of industrial society has involved the development and centralization of the means of economic production, as peasants and artisans are replaced by private corporations and government industries. The rise of the nation-state has involved similar developments in the means of violence and political administration, as kings control nobles and self-equipped knights are replaced by standing armies and military machines" (The Causes of World War III, 1958, p. 24).

"In the capitalistic societies the enlargement and the coordination of the means of power have occurred gradually and many cultural traditions have restrained and shaped them" (The Causes of World War III, 1958, p. 25).

"The power of decisions is now seated in military, political, and economic institutions. Other institutions are increasingly shaped and used by these big three. By them the push and pull of fabulous technology is now guided, even as it paces and shapes their own development. As each of the big three has assumed its modern shape, its effects upon the other two have become greater and the traffic among the three has increased. The U.S. power system is no longer composed of a self-contained economy and a self-contained political order, loosely incorporating local militia unimportant to politics and to money-making. This system is now a political economy intricately linked with a military order central to politics and crucial to money-making. The triangle of power formed by these three orders is now a structural fact, and it is the key to any understanding of the higher circles in America today. For as each of these domains has coincided with the other, as decisions in each have become broader, the leading men of each--the high military, the corporation executives, the political directorate--have tended to come together, to form the power elite of America" (The Causes of World War III, 1958, p. 29).

"Business and government have become more closely and explicitly connected; neither can now be seen clearly as a distinct world. Under American conditions the growth of executive government does not mean merely the 'enlargement of government' as some kind of autonomous bureaucracy; it means the ascendancy of the corporation men into political eminence" (The Causes of World War III, 1958, p. 30).

"The economy--once a scatter of small productive units in somewhat autonomous balance --has become internally dominated by a few hundred corporations, administratively and politically interrelated, which together hold the keys to economic decision. This economy is at once a permanent war economy and a private corporation economy. Its most important relations to the state now rest on the coincidence between military and corporate interests, as defined by generals and businessmen and accepted by politicians and public" (The Causes of World War III, 1958, p. 30).

"The unity of this elite rests in part upon the similar psychology of its several members, but behind this kind of unity there lie those institutional hierarchies over which the political directorate, the corporate rich, and the grand military now preside. How each of these hierarchies is shaped and what relations it has with the others determine in large part the relations of their rulers. The unity of the elite is not simple reflection of the unity of institutions, but men and institutions are always related. That is why we must understand the elite today in connection with such institutional trends as the development of a permanent war establishment alongside a privately incorporated economy, inside a virtual political vacuum. For the men at the top have been selected and formed by such institutional trends" (The Causes of World War III, 1958, p. 31).

"Their unity, however, does not rest solely upon psychological similarity nor even upon the structural blending of commanding positions and common interests. At times it is a more explicit co-ordination. Such co-ordination is neither total nor continuous; often it is not very sure-footed. The power elite has not emerged as the realization of any plot. Yet we must remember that institutional trends may be defined as opportunities by those who occupy the command posts. Once such opportunities are recognized, men may avail themselves of them. Certain types of men from each of these three areas, more farsighted than others, actively promoted the liaison even before it took its truly modern shape. Now more have come to see that their several interests can more easily be realized if they work together, in informal as well as in formal ways, and accordingly they have done so" (The Causes of World War III, 1958, p. 32).

"The idea of the power elite is, of course, an interpretation. It enables us to make sense of major institutional trends, of the social similarities and psychological affinities of the men at the top, and of such explicit co-ordination as we may observe among them. But it is also based upon what has been happening on the middle and lower levels of power" (The Causes of World War III, 1958, p. 32).

"Whatever else it is [the United States], surely this is evident:  it is a society in which functionally rational bureaucracies are increasingly used in human affairs and in history-making decisions.  Not all periods are alike in the degree to which historical changes within them are independent of the willful control, go on behind all men's backs.  Ours seems to be a period in which key decisions or their lack by bureaucratically instituted elites are increasingly sources of historical change.  Moreover, it is a period and a society in which the enlargement and the centralization of the means of control, of power, now include quite widely the use of social science for whatever ends those in control of these means may assign to it"  (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, pp. 115-116).

"From the individual's standpoint, much that happens seems the result of manipulation, of management, of blind drift; authority is often not explicit; those with power often feel no need to make it explicit and justify it.  That is one reason why ordinary men, when they are in trouble or when they sense that they are up against issues, cannot get clear targets for thought and action; they cannot determine what it is that imperils the values they vaguely discern as theirs" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, pp. 169-170).

"Freedom is not merely the chance to do as one pleases; neither is it merely the opportunity to choose between set alternatives. Freedom is, first of all, the chance to formulate the available choices, to argue over them--and then, the opportunity to choose. That is why freedom cannot exist without an enlarged role of human reason in human affairs"  (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 176).

"Men are free to make history, but some men are much freer than others.  Such freedom requires access to the means of decisions and of power by which history may now be made.  It is not always so made; in the following, I am speaking only of the contemporary period in which the means of history-making power have become so enlarged and so centralized.  It is with reference to this period that I am contending that if men do not make history, they tend increasingly to become the utensils of history-makers and also the mere objects of history-making"  (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 181).

"But consider now, the major clue to our condition:  Is it not, in a word, the enormous enlargement and the decisive centralization of all the means of power and decision, which is to say--all the means of history-making?  In modern industrial society, the facilities of economic production are developed and centralized--as peasants and artisans are replaced by private corporations and government industries.  In the modern nation-state, the means of violence and of political administration undergo similar development--as kings control nobles, and self-equipped knights are replaced by standing armies and now by fearful military machines" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, pp. 182-183).

On middle levels of power:

"Families and churches and schools adapt to modern life; governments and armies and corporations shape it; and, as they do so, they turn these lesser institutions into means for their ends. Religious institutions provide chaplains to the armed forces where they are used as a means of increasing the effectiveness of its morale to kill. Schools select and train men for their jobs in corporations and their specialized tasks in the armed forces. The extended family has, of course, long been broken up by the industrial revolution, and now the son and the father are removed from the family, by compulsion if need be, whenever the army of the state sends out the call. And the symbols of all these lesser institutions are used to legitimate the power and the decisions of the big three (The Power Elite, 1956, p. 6).

"I am also asserting that there has developed on the middle levels of power, a semi-organized stalemate, and that on the bottom level there has come into being a mass-like society which has little resemblance to the image of a society in which voluntary associations and classic publics hold the keys to power. The top of the American system of power is much more unified and much more powerful, the bottom is much more fragmented, and in truth, impotent, than is generally supposed by those who are distracted by the middling units of power which neither express such will as exists at the bottom nor determine the decisions at the top" (The Power Elite, 1956, pp. 28-29).

"The balance and the compromise in American society--the 'countervailing powers' and the numerous associations, the 'veto groups' and the 'vested interests'--must now be seen as having mainly to do with the middle levels of power. It is about these middle levels that political journalists and scholars of politics are most likely to write if only because, being middle-class themselves, they are closer to them. These levels provide the noisy content of most political news and gossip. . ." (The Causes of World War III, 1958, p. 33).

"Most of the competing interests that make up the clang and clash of American politics are strictly concerned with their slice of the existing pie. Labour unions, for example, certainly have no international policies of an independent sort, other than those that given unions adopt for the strict economic protection of their members. Neither do farm organizations. The actions of such middle-level powers may indeed have consequences for top-level policy; certainly at times they hamper or facilitate these policies. But they are not truly concerned with them, which means, for one thing, that such influence as they do have often tends to be quite irresponsible" (The Causes of World War III, 1958, p. 34).

"Politics is not a forum in which the big decisions of national and international life are debated. Such debate is not carried on by nationally responsible parties representing and clarifying alternative policies. There are no such parties in the United State. More and more, fundamental issues never come to any point of decision before the congress, much less the electorate in party campaigns" (The Causes of World War III, 1958, p. 35).

"Free and independent organizations do not politically connect the lower and middle levels of society with the top levels of decision.  Such organizations are not a decisive feature of American life today. As more people are drawn into the political realm, their associations become mass in scale and the power of the individual becomes dependent upon them; to the extent the associations are effective they have become larger, and to that extent also they have become less accessible to the influence of the individual. This is a central fact about associations in any mass society; it is of most consequence for political parties and for trade unions" (The Causes of World War III, 1958, p. 35).

"The idea that this society is a balance of powers requires us to assume that the units in balance are of more or less equal power and that they are truly independent of one another. These assumptions have rested, it seems clear, upon the historical importance of a large and independent middle class. . . This old, independent middle class has of course declined. Moreover, it has become politically as well as economically dependent upon the state, most notable in the case of the subsidized farmer" (The Causes of World War III, 1958, pp. 36-37).

"The new middle class of white-collar employees is certainly not the political pivot of any balancing society. It is in no way politically united. Its trade unions, such as they are, often serve merely to incorporate it as a hanger-on of the labour interest. For a considerable period the old middle class was an independent base of power; the new middle class cannot be. Once political freedom and economic security were anchored in small and independent properties; they were not anchored in the worlds of the white-collar job. Once scattered property holders were economically linked by more or less free markets; the jobs of the new middle class are now integrated by corporate authority. Economically the white-collar classes are in the same condition as wage workers; politically they are in a worse condition, for they are not as organized. They are no vanguard of historic change; they are at best a rearguard of the Welfare State" (The Causes of World War III, 1958, p. 36).

"The agrarian revolt of the nineties, the small-business revolt that has been more or less continuous since the eighties, the labour revolt of the thirties--each of these has failed as an independent movement which could 'countervail' the powers that be. But each has succeeded, in varying degrees, as an interest vested in the expanded corporation and state; each has succeeded as a parochial interest seated in particular districts, in local divisions of the two parties, and in Congress. What they have become, in short, are established elements of the middle levels of balancing power, in which we may now observe all those strata and interests which in the course of American history have been defeated in their bids for top power, or have never made such bids" (The Causes of World War III, 1958, pp. 36-37).

"U.S. society is characterized by the increasing integration of real, and of potential, democratic forces into the expanded apparatus of the state. Much of what was once called 'the invisible government' is now part of the quite visible government. The 'governmentalization of the lobby' occurs in both the legislative and executive domains, as well as between them. Bureaucratic administration replaces electoral policies; the maneuvering of cliques replaces the open clash of parties. Corporation men move into the political directorate, and the decline of Congressional politicians to the middle levels of power is accelerated. The legislative function often becomes merely a balancing of sovereign localities and political interests. A higher civil service that is a politically neutral, but politically relevant, depository of brain power and executive skill is virtually absent. Behind the increased official secrecy great decisions are made without benefit of public or even of Congressional debate" (The Causes of World War III, 1958, p. 37).

"In the U.S.S.R. and in modern totalitarianism in general the integration of autonomous forces is explicit; in the formal democracies it is much less so, and it is by no means a completed process. Yet it is well under way. Leaders of cliques, pressure groups, and associations manoeuvre within and between the organs of the democratic state and become a central part of that state. They discipline those whom they represent; their chief desire is to maintain their organizations, even if this requires them to lose sight of their ends in the effort to secure themselves as means, even if it results in their loss of independent action. They ensnare one another; such history as they make is history going on behind men's backs, including their own. The middle level of power in America is no moving balance; it is a semi-organized stalemate" (The Causes of World War III, 1958, p. 37).

On the Masses:

"The powers of ordinary men are circumscribed by the everyday worlds in which they live, yet even in these rounds of job, family, and neighborhood they often seem driven by forces they can neither understand nor govern. 'Great changes' are beyond their control, but affect their conduct and outlook none the less. The very framework of modern society confines them to projects not their own, but from every side, such changes press upon the men and women of the mass society, who accordingly feel that they are without purpose in an epoch in which they are without power" (The Power Elite, 1956, p. 3).

"The Rise of the power elite and the relegation of formal democratic machinery to the middle levels of power are paralleled by the transformation of publics in America into a mass society. In a society of publics, discussion is the ascendant means of communication. The mass media, if they exist, simply enlarge and animate this discussion, linking one face-to-face public with the discussions of another. In a mass society the dominant type of communication is the formal media; publics become mere markets for those media. The 'public' of a radio programme consists of all those exposed to it" (The Causes of World War III, 1958, p. 38).

"Such images of democracy are still used as working justifications of power in America. Surely we must all now recognize such descriptions as more fairy tale than useful approximation. The issues that now shape man's fate are neither raised nor decided by any public at large. The idea of a society that is at bottom composed of publics and run by publics is not a matter of fact; it is the proclamation of an ideal and, as well, the assertion of a legitimation masquerading as fact.

I. As the political order is enlarged and centralized it becomes less political and more bureaucratic, less the locale of a struggle than an object to be managed.
II. The old middle-classes--once an independent source of democratic strength--are transformed into a set of white-collar men who duly make their declarations of dependence.
III. Mass communications do not link and feed discussion circles; they convert them into mere media markets. They do not truly communicate; they trivialize and they distract.
IV. Communities decline; the metropolitan segregation of men and women into narrow routines and milieus causes them to lose any sense of integrity as a public that might have structural relevance for the history of their society.
V. Voluntary associations, open to individuals and small groups and connecting them with centres of power, no longer are dominant features of the social structure of the United States" (The Causes of World War III, 1958, pp. 39-40).

"Such trends--and others like them--are well known; but they are not usually seen all together as a coinciding set of forces. When they are so viewed, does it not become clear that the American people are now far less a political public than a politically indifferent--although sometimes politically entertainable--mass society?" (1958, p. 40).

"Publics, like free associations, can be deliberately and suddenly smashed, or they can more slowly wither away. But whether smashed in a week or withered in a generation, the demise of the public must be seen in connection with the rise of centralized organizations, with all their new means of power, including those of the mass media of distraction" (The Causes of World War III, 1958, p. 40).

"Today we cannot merely assume that in the last resort men must always be governed by their own consent. For among the means of power that now prevail is the power to manage and manipulate the consent of men. We do not know the limits of such power and we hope it does have limits, but these considerations do not remove the fact that much power today is successfully employed without the sanction of the reason or the conscience of the obedient" (The Causes of World War III, 1958, p. 41).

On the Welfare State:

 "Increasingly, class and status situations have been removed from free market forces and the persistence of tradition, and been subject to more formal rules. A government management of the class structure has become a major means of alleviating inequalities and insuring the risks of those in lower-income classes" (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, pp. 298-299)..

"Not so much free labor markets as the power of pressure groups now shape the class positions and privileges of various strata in the United States. Hours and wages, vacations, income security through periods of sickness, accidents, unemployment, and old age--these are now subject to many intentional pressures, and, along with tax policies, transfer payments, tariffs, subsidies, price ceilings, wage freezes, et cetera, make up the content of 'class fights' in the objective meaning of the phrase" (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. 299).

"The 'Welfare State' attempts to manage class chances without modifying basic class structure; in its several meaning and types, it favors economic policies designed to redistribute life-risks and life chances in favor of those in the more exposed class situations, who have the power or threaten to accumulate the power, to do something about their case" (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. 299).

"Labor union, farm bloc, and trade association dominate the political scene of the Welfare State as well as of the permanent war economy; contests within and between these blocs increasingly determine the position of various groups. The state, as a descriptive fact, is at the balanced intersection of such pressures, and increasingly the privileges and securities of various occupational strata depend upon the bold means of organized power (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. 299).

On legitimation:

"Over the last hundred years, the United States has been transformed from a nation of small capitalists into a nation of hired employees; but the ideology suitable for the nation of small capitalists persists, as if that small-propertied world were still a going concern. It has become the grab-bag of defenders and apologists, and so little is it challenged that in the minds of many it seems the very latest model of reality"  (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. 34).

"Religion has become a willing spiritual means and a psychiatric aide of the nation-state. Nationalism is today the world's idolatrous religion. Moreover, as nations are more and more obviously dealers in violence governed by expediency, more and more do religious leaders bless their calculations for disaster and their expedient lies" (The Causes of World War III, 1958, p. 152).

"Total war ought indeed to be difficult for the Christian conscience to confront, but the current Christian way out makes it easy; war is defended morally and Christians fall easily into line--as they are led to justify it--in each nation in terms of Christian faith itself. Men of religious congregations do evil. Ministers of god make them feel good about doing it. Rather than guide them in the moral cultivation of their consciences, ministers, with moral nimbleness, blunt that conscience, covering it up with peace of mind" (The Causes of World War III, 1958, p. 152).

"Now, what Parsons and other grand theorists call 'value-orientations' and 'normative structure' has mainly to do with master symbols of legitimation.  This is, indeed, a useful and important subject.  The relations of such symbols to the structure of institutions are among the most important problems of social science.  Such symbols, however, do not form some autonomous realm within a society; their social relevance lies in their use to justify or to oppose the arrangement of power and the positions within this arrangement of the powerful.  Their psychological relevance lies in the fact that they become the basis for adherence to the structure of power or for opposing it"  (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 37).

'Governments' do not necessarily, as Emerson would have it, 'have their origin in the moral identity of men.'  To believe that government does is to confuse its legitimations with its causes.  Just as often, or even more often, such moral identities as men of some society may have rest on the fact that institutional rulers successfully monopolize, and even impose, their master symbols  (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 37).

"We cannot assume today that men must in the last resort be governed by their own consent.  Among the means of power that now prevail is the power to manage and to manipulate the consent of men.  That we do not know the limits of such power--and that we hope it does have limits--does not remove the fact that such power today is successfully employed without the sanction of the reason or the conscience of the obedient"  (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, pp.40-41).

"Intellectual 'conviction' and moral 'belief' are not necessary, in either the rulers or the ruled, for a structure of power to persist and even flourish.  So far as the role of ideologies is concerned, the frequent absence of engaging legitimation and the prevalence of mass apathy are surely two of the central facts about the Western societies today" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 41).

"Politics, no matter how important, is only one sphere in the social order, which by no means needs to be tied together by political loyalties. It may even be that political indifference should be taken as an expected psychological fact about a society so dominated by such individuated, pecuniary standards and activities as the United States. This is a bureaucratized society of privatized men, and it may very well go along in this condition for a long time to come" (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. 350).

"The decline of the old middle classes does not mean that the old U.S. framework of capitalist democracy is broken. but it does mean that the old legitimations of that system no longer move men, and that the institutions under which we live, the framework of our existence, are without enthusiasm. Again, this does not mean that we are in a situation without norms, a situation of anomy, although it is fairly clear that ours is an era of wide moral distress. But moral or ideological consensus is not the only basis for a social order. A network of expediences and conventions, in a framework of power not entirely or firmly legitimated, can hold together a society with high material standards of comfort" (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. 350).

"Still, it must be recognized that this is not the idea of democracy (based upon the old middle classes) we have known;  that there is a struggle over men's minds even if there is no struggle in them; that our bureaucratized society has its own contradictions and crises, in which the payoffs that have kept the United States going ahead my become much harder to organize and deliver" (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. 351)

On militarism:

"The equipment in combat readiness on both sides is already devastating. The development of this equipment is cumulative: One 'ultimate weapon' follows another in geometric progression, and the case for the acceleration in both war camps is quite adequate for the end in view. Never before has there been an arms race of this sort--a scientific arms race, with a series of ultimate weapons, dominated by the strategy of obliteration. At every turn of this 'competition', each side becomes more edgy and the chances become greater that accidents of character or of technology, that the U.S. radar man in Canada or his Russian counterpart in Siberia will trigger the sudden ending" (The Causes of World War III, 1958, pp. 55-56).

"The history of our time is not a matter of fate. Decisions --and ideas--do count in what is going to happen. In so far as this is so, I think we may now, in summary, assert the following:

"I. The immediate cause of World War III is the military preparation of it. The nature of the arms race as such it is not and cannot reasonably be considered a cause of peace. Given the new weaponry and the strategic impasse, it cannot be considered a means of any nations defence, for the distinction between attack and defence is now meaningless" (The Causes of World War III, 1958, p. 85).

"II. The immediate causes of the arms race are the official definitions of world reality clung to by the elites of the U.S.A. and of the U.S.S.R. These nationalist definitions and ideologies now serve as the mask behind which elite irresponsibility and incompetence are hidden; they are traps for any attempt to reason seriously and adequately about war as a political issue, and about peace as the moral keystone of a human programme" (The Causes of World War III, 1958, pp. 85-86).

"III. The official theory of war--the military metaphysic--is itself among the causes of the thrust toward war. The less adequate one's definitions of reality and the less apt one's programme for changing it, the more complex does the scene of action appear. "Complexity' is not inherent in any phenomena; it is relative to the conceptions with which we approach reality. It is the task of those who want peace to identify causes and to clarify them to the point of action. It is the inadequate definition of world reality and the lack of any imaginative programme for peace that make the international scene appear now so complex and hopeless to the American elite, that make perilous those piecemeal reactions which constitute much of U.S. official action and lack of action since the decision to obliterate Hiroshima" (The Causes of World War III, 1958, p. 86).

"IV. It is the continual preparation for war that the power elite now finds the major basis for the furthering of the several and the coinciding interests of its members" (The Causes of World War III, 1958, p. 86).

"V. For the politicians, the military metaphysic provides a cover under which they can abdicate the perils of innovative leadership. . .it hides the political vacuum in which they now irresponsibly commit their political defaults (The Causes of World War III, 1958, pp. 86-87).

"VI. For the corporation executives, the military metaphysic often coincides with their interest in a stable and planned flow of profit; it enables them to have their risks underwritten by public money; it enables them reasonably to expect that they can exploit for private profit, now and later, the risky research developments paid for by public money. It is, in brief, a mask of the subsidized capitalism from which they extract profit and upon which their power is based (The Causes of World War III, 1958, p. 87).

"VII. In the West, especially in the United States, there is fear of economic slump should the preparations for war cease of even be slackened off. Corporate interests are being served by the continual design and production of weapons which are obsolete before their completion. Behind these economic motives and interests there is the world confrontation of the capitalist economy and the collectivist economy of the Communist bloc. Increasingly these two political economies compete as models for the industrialization of a world that is largely pre-industrial (The Causes of World War III, 1958, p. 87).

"VIII. The monolithic assumptions of the military metaphysic and the thrust toward war which follows from it are due not alone to the military ascendancy or to the private incorporation of the economy and its capitalist mechanics. These, I believe, are causes; but they are able to operate as causes largely because of civilian hesitations and political vacillation. Military and corporate elites have been able to come together and share higher decisions, as well as to make them separately, because of the fact of the political vacuum (The Causes of World War III, 1958, pp. 87-88).

"IX. Economic and military causes of war are allowed to operate also because of the political apathy of publics and the moral insensibility of masses in both Communist and capitalist worlds, and by the political inactivity and abdication of leading intellectual circles of these worlds" (The Causes of World War III, 1958, p. 88).

"X. The same kind of role is being played by leading intellectual, scientific, and religious circles. Most cultural workmen are fighting a cold war in which they echo and elaborate the confusions of officialdoms. They neither raise demands on the elites for alternative policies, nor set forth such alternatives before publics and masses" (The Causes of World War III, 1958, pp. 88-89).

"XI. The thrust toward World War III is not a plot on the part of the elite, either that of the U.S.A. or that of the U.S.S.R." (The Causes of World War III, 1958, p. 89).
 
 

On White Collar:

"As marketable activities, occupations change (1) with shifts in the skills required, as technology and rationalization are unevenly applied across the economy; (2) with the enlargement and intensification of marketing operations in both the commodity and capital markets; and (3) with shifts in the organization of the division of work, as expanded organizations require more co-ordination, management, and recording. The mechanics involved within and between these three trends have led to the numerical expansion of white-collar employees" (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, pp. 69-70).

"The white-collar people slipped quietly into modern society. Whatever history they have had is a history without events; whatever common interests they have do not lead to unity; whatever future they have will not be of their own making. If they aspire at all it is to a middle course, at a time when no middle course is available, and hence to an illusory course in an imaginary society. Internally, they are split, fragmented; externally, they are dependent on larger forces. Even if they gained the will to act, their actions, being unorganized, would be less a movement than a tangle of unconnected contests. As a group, they do not threaten anyone; as individuals, they do not practice an independent way of life"  (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. ix).

"Yet it is to this white-collar world that one must look for much that is characteristic of twentieth-century existence. By their rise to numerical importance, the white-collar people have upset the nineteenth-century expectation that society would be divided between entrepreneurs and wage workers. By their mass way of life, they have transformed the tang and feel of the American experience. They carry, in a most revealing way, many of those psychological themes that characterize our epoch, and, in one way or another, every theory of the main drift has had to take account of them"  (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. ix).

"In the established professions, the doctor, lawyer, engineer, once was free and named on his own shingle; in the new white-collar world, the salaried specialists of the clinic, the junior partners in the law factory, the captive engineers of the corporation have begun to challenge free professional leadership"  (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. x).

"The nineteenth-century farmer and businessman were generally thought to be stalwart individuals--their own men, men who could quickly grow to be almost as big as anyone else. The twentieth-century white-collar man has never been independent as the farmer used to be, nor as hopeful of the main chance as the businessman. He is always somebody's man, the corporation's, the government's, the army's; and he is seen as the man who does not rise"  (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. xii).

"The decline of the free entrepreneur and the rise of the dependent employee on the American scene has paralleled the decline of the independent individual and the rise of the little man in the American mind"  (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. xii).

"By examining white-collar life, it is possible to learn something about what is becoming more typically 'American" than the frontier character probably ever was. What must be grasped is the picture of society as a great salesroom, an enormous file, an incorporated brain, a new universe of management and manipulation. By understanding these diverse white-collar worlds, one can also understand better the shape and meaning of modern society as a whole, as well as the simple hopes and complex anxieties that grip all the people who are sweating it out in the middle of the twentieth century" (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. xv).

"When white-collar people get jobs, they sell not only their time and energy but their personalities as well. They sell by the week or month their smiles and their kindly gestures, and they must practice the prompt repression of resentment and aggression.  For these intimate traits are of commercial relevance and required for the more efficient and profitable distribution of goods and services. Here are the new little Machiavellians, practicing their personable crafts for hire and for the profit of others, according to rules laid down by those above them"  (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. xvii).

"As the general educational level rises, the level of education required or advisable for many white-collar jobs falls. . . In fact, the educated intelligence has become penalized in routinized work, where the search is for those who are less easily bored and hence more cheerfully efficient. . .Education in short, comes to be viewed as a sort of frustrating trap"  (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. 247).

"The rationalization of office and store undermines the special skills based on experience and education. It makes the employee easy to replace by shortening the training he needs; it weakens not only his bargaining power but his prestige. It opens white-collar positions to people with less education, thus destroying the educational prestige of white-collar work, for there is no inherent prestige to the nature of any work. . . In so far as white-collar workers base their claims for external prestige and their own self-esteem upon educated skills, they open themselves to a precarious psychological life"  (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, pp. 247-248).

"Every basis on which the prestige claims of the bulk of the white-collar employees have historically rested has been declining in firmness and stability: the rationalization and down-grading of the work operations themselves and hence the lessening of importance of education and experience in acquiring white-collar skills; the leveling down of white-collar and the raising of wage-workers incomes, so that the differences between them are decidedly less than they once were; the increased size of the white-collar labor market, as more people from lower ranks receive high-school educations, so that any monopoly of formal training adequate to these jobs is no longer possible; the decline in the proportion of people of immigrant origin and the consequent narrowing of nativity differences between white-collar and wage-worker; the increased participation of white-collar people, along with wage-workers, in unemployment; and the increased economic and public power of wage-workers because of their union strength, as compared with that of white-collar workers" (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. 249).

"All these tendencies for white-collar occupations to sink in prestige rest upon the numerical enlargement of the white-collar strata and the increase in prestige which the wage-workers have enjoyed. If everybody belongs to the fraternity, nobody gets any prestige from belonging. As white-collar strata have expanded they have included more offspring of wage-worker origin; moreover, in so far as their prestige has rested upon their sharing the authority of those in charge of the enterprise, that authority has itself lost much of its prestige, having been successfully challenged at many points by unionized wage-workers"  (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. 249).

"Although trends should not be confused with accomplished facts, it is clear that many trends point to a 'status proletarianization of white-collar strata" (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. 249).

On Education:

"As the general educational level rises, the level of education required or advisable for many white-collar jobs falls. . . In fact, the educated intelligence has become penalized in routinized work, where the search is for those who are less easily bored and hence more cheerfully efficient. . .Education in short, comes to be viewed as a sort of frustrating trap"  (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. 247).

"The American belief in the value of universal education has been a salient feature of democratic ideology; in fact, since the Jacksonian era, education for all has often been virtually identified with the operation of a truly democratic society (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. 265).

"The massive rise in enrollment has strengthened the feeling of status equality, especially in those smaller cities where all the children, regardless of social or occupational rank, are likely to attend the same high school. It has aided immensely in Americanizing the immigrant. And it has spread and generally strengthened old middle-class attitudes and values, manners and skills. Yet in spite of this reinforcing of old middle-class mores, mass education has also been one of the major social mechanisms of the rise of the new middle-class occupations, for these occupations require those skills that have been provided by the educational system" (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, pp. 265-266).

"In performing these functions, especially the last, American education has shifted toward a more explicit vocational emphasis, functioning as a link in occupational mobility between generations. High schools, as well as colleges and universities, have been reshaped for the personnel needs of business and government. In their desire for serviceable practicality, the schools have adapted themselves to changing demands, and the public has seemed glad to have its children trained for the available jobs" (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. 266).

"The most fundamental question to ask of any educational system is what kinds of product do its administrators expect to turn out? And for what kind of society? In the nineteenth century, the answer was 'the good citizen' in a 'democratic republic.' In the middle of the twentieth century, it is 'the successful man' in a 'society of specialists with secure jobs.'" (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. 266).

"The aim of college men today, especially in elite colleges, is a forward-looking job in a large corporation. Such a job involves training not only in vocational skills, but also in social mannerism" (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. 267).

"Although the middle-class monopoly on high-school education has been broken, equality of educational opportunity has not been reached; many young people are unable to complete their secondary school education because of economic restrictions" (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. 267).

"The educational system is most appropriately seen as another medium, a parochial one with an assured public of younger age groups. In their most liberal endeavors, the political content of educational institutions is often unimaginative and serves to lay the basis for the successful diversion by other mass media, for the trivialization, fragmentation, and confusion of politics as a sphere of life. With their ideological dead-matter and intricately boring citizenship course, the schools cannot compete with popular culture and its dazzling idols. And when, realizing this, they imitate such popular culture and its manner of presentation, they too merely trivialize their subject, without making it much less dull" (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, pp. 338-339).

"The mass educated are perhaps the most politically uninterested, for they have been exposed to politics in civics-book detail. They have been dulled by being stuffed with the conventional idols of U.S. politics" (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. 339).

On Administrators:

"As the means of administration are enlarged and centralized, there are more managers in every sphere of modern society, and the managerial type of man becomes more important in the total social structure"  (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. 77).

"These new men at the top, products of a hundred-year shift in the upper brackets, operate within the new bureaucracies, which select them for their positions and then shape their characters. Their role within these bureaucracies, and the role of the bureaucracies within the social structure, set the scope and pace for the managerial demiurge" (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. 77).

"The managerial demiurge means more than an increased proportion of people who work and live by the rules of business, government, and labor bureaucracy; it means that, at the top, society becomes an uneasy interlocking of private and public hierarchies, and at the bottom, more and more areas become objects of management and manipulation"  (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. 77).

"Seen from close to the top, management is the ethos of the higher circle: concentrate power, but enlarge your staff. Down the line, make them feel a part of what you are a part. Set up a school for managers and manage what managers learn; open a channel of two-way communication: commands go down, information comes up. Keep a firm grip but don't boss them, boss their experience; don't let them learn what you don't tell them. Between decision and execution, between command and obedience, let there be reflex. Be calm, judicious, rational; groom your personality and control your appearance; make business a profession. Develop yourself. Write a memo; hold a conference with men like you. And in all this be yourself and be human: nod gravely to the girls in the office; say hello to the men; and always listen carefully to the ones above. . ." (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. 81).

"Modern observers without first-hand or sensitive experience in bureaucracies tend, first, to infer types of bureaucrats from the ideal-type definition of bureaucracy, rather than to examine the various executive adaptations to the enlarged enterprise and centralized bureau; and, second, to assume that big businesses are strictly bureaucratic in form. Such business are, in fact, usually mixtures, especially as regards personnel, of bureaucratic, patrimonial, and entrepreneurial forms of organizations. This means, in brief, that 'politics' (as well as administration) is very much at work in selecting and forming types of managers"  (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, pp. 91-91).

"The managerial demiurge has come to contain three trends which increasingly give it meaning and shape. As it spreads ((I), its higher functions, as well as those lower in the hierarchy, are rationalized; as this occurs (II), the enterprise and the bureau become fetishes, and (III), the forms of power that are wielded all up and down the line, shift from explicit authority to manipulation"  (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. 106).
 
 

On the Mass Media:

In so far as universals can be found in life and character in America, they are due less to any common tutelage of the soil than to the leveling influences of urban civilization, and above all, to the standardization of the big technology and of the media of mass communication (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, xiv).

"If the consciousness of men does not determine their existence, neither does their material existence determine their consciousness. Between consciousness and existence stand communications, which influence such consciousness as men have of their existence. Men do 'enter into definite, necessary relations which are independent of their will,' but communications enter to slant the meanings of these relations for those variously involved in them. The forms of political consciousness may, in the end, be relative to the means of production, but, in the beginning, they are relative to the contents of the communications media" (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. 333).

"In Marx's day there was no radio, no movies, no television; there was only printed matter. . .It was easier to overlook the role of mass media or to underplay it, when they were not so persuasive in effect . . ." (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. 333).

"The forms and contents of political consciousness, or their absence, cannot be understood without reference to the world created and sustained by these media. The deprivations and insecurities arising form structural positions and historic changes are not likely to be politically symbolized if these media do not take them up in appropriate contexts, and thus lend generalized, communicable meaning to them. Class-consciousness or its absence, for example, involves not merely the individual's experience in and of some objective class-situation, but the communications to which he is exposed. What he comes to believe about the whole range of issues is in some way a function of his experienced situation, plus his first-hand contact with other people, plus his exposure to mass media. And it is often the latter which gives him his standard of reality, his standard of experience" (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. 334).

"The contents of the mass media are now a sort of common denominator of American experience, feeling, belief, and aspiration. They extend across the diversified material and social environments, and, reaching lower into the age hierarchy, are received long before the age of consent, without explicit awareness. Contents of the mass media seep into our images of self, becoming that which is taken for granted, so imperceptibly and so surely that to modify them drastically, over a generation or two, would be to change profoundly modern man's experience and character" (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. 334).

"The explicit political content of the mass media is, after all, a very small portion of their managed time and space. This badly handled content must compete with a whole machinery of amusement, within a marketing context of distrust. The most skilled media men and the highest paid talent are devoted to the glamorous worlds of sports and leisure. These competing worlds, which in their modern scale are only 30 years old, divert attention from politics by providing a set of continuing interests in mythical figures and fast-moving stereotypes" (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. 336).

"In the expanded world of mechanically vivified communication the individual becomes the spectator of everything but the human witness of nothing. Having no plain targets of revolt, men feel no moral springs of revolt. The cold manner enters their souls and they are made private and blase. In virtually all realms of life, facts now outrun sensibility. Emptied of their human meanings, these facts are readily got used to. In official man there is no more human shock; in his unofficial follower there is little sense of moral issue. Within the unopposed supremacy of impersonal, calculated technique, there is no human place to draw the line and give the emphatic no" (The Causes of World War III, 1958, p. 83).

On Manipulation:

"Coercion, in the last resort, is the "final" form of power, but of course we are by no means constantly at the last resort. Authority (power that is justified by the beliefs of the voluntarily obedient) and manipulation (power that is wielded unbeknownst to the powerless) must also be considered, along with coercion. In fact, whenever we think about power, the three types must be sorted out" (The Causes of World War III, 1958, p. 41).

"In modern society, coercion, monopolized by the democratic state, is rarely needed in any continuous way. But those who hold power have often come to exercise it in hidden ways: they have moved and they are moving from authority to manipulation. Not only the great bureaucratic structures of modern society, themselves means of manipulation as well as authority, but also the means of mass communication are involved in the shift. The managerial demiurge extends to opinion and emotion and even to the mood and atmosphere of given acts"  (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. 110).

"Under the system of explicit authority, in the round, solid nineteenth century, the victim knew he was being victimized, the misery and discontent of the powerless were explicit. In the amorphous twentieth-century world, where manipulation replaces authority, the victim does not recognize his status. The formal aim, implemented by the latest psychological equipment, is to have men internalize what the managerial cadres would have them do, without their knowing their own motives, but nevertheless having them. Many whips are inside men, who do not know how they got there, or indeed that they are there"  (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. 110).

"In the movement from authority to manipulation, power shifts from the visible to the invisible, from the known to the anonymous. And with rising material standards, exploitation becomes less material and more psychological" (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. 110).

"No longer can the problem of power be set forth as the simple one of changing the processes of coercion into those of consent. The engineering of consent to authority has moved into the realm of manipulation where the powerful are anonymous. Impersonal manipulation is more insidious than coercion precisely because it is hidden; one cannot locate the enemy and declare war upon him. Targets for aggression are unavailable, and certainty is taken from men"  (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. 110)

"In a world dominated by a vast system of abstractions, managers may become cold with principle and do what local and immediate masters of men could never do. Their social insulation results in deadened feelings in the face of the impoverishment of life in the lower orders and its stultification in the upper circles. We do not mean merely that there are managers of bureaucracies and of communication agencies who scheme (although, in fact, there are, and their explicit ideology is one of manipulation); but more, we mean that the social control of the system is such that irresponsibility is organized into it"  (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, pp. 110-111).

"If white-collar people are not free to control their working actions they, in time, habitually submit to the orders of others and, in so far as they try to act freely, do so in other spheres. If they do not learn from their work or develop themselves in doing it, in time, they cease trying to do so, often having no interest in self-development even in other areas. If there is a split between their work and play, and their work and culture, they admit that split as a common-sense fact of existence. If their way of earning a living does not infuse their mode of living, they try to build their real life outside their work. Work becomes a sacrifice of time, necessary to building a life outside of it"  (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. 228).

"The economic motives for work are now its only firm rationale. Work now has no other legitimating symbols, although certainly other gratifications and discontents are associated with it. The division of labor and the routinization of many job areas are reducing work to a commodity, of which money has become the only common denominator. To the worker who cannot receive technical gratifications from his work, its market value is all there is to it. . . .The sharp focus upon money is part and parcel of the lack of intrinsic meaning that work has come to have" (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. 230).

"It is the status conferred on the exercise of given skills and on given income levels that is often the prime source of gratification or humiliation. The psychological effect of a detailed division of labor depends upon whether on not the worker has been downgraded, and upon whether or not his associates have also been downgraded. Pride in skill is relative to the skills he has exercised in the past and to the skills others exercise, and thus to the evaluation of his skills by other people whose opinions count. In like manner, the amount of money he receives may be seen by the employee and by others as the best gauge of his worth. This may be all the more true when relations are increasingly 'objectified' and do not require intimate knowledge. For then there my be anxiety to keep secret the amount of money earned, and even to suggest that one earn more" (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, pp. 231-232).

"Twenty years ago, H. Dubreuil, a foreign observer of U.S. industry, could write that Taylor's 'insufficiency' shows up when he comes to approach 'the inner forces contained in the worker's soul. . . ' That is no longer true. The new (social) scientific management begins precisely where Taylor left off or was incomplete; students of 'human relations in industry' have studied not lighting and clean toilets, but social cliques and good morale. For in so far as human factors are involved in efficient and untroubled production, the managerial demiurge must bring them under control. So, in factory and in office, the world to be managed increasingly includes the social setting, the human affairs, and the personality of man as worker" (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. 233).

"Management effort to create job enthusiasm reflects the unhappy unwillingness of employees to work spontaneously at their routinized tasks; it indicates recognition of the lack of spontaneous will to work for the ulterior ends available; it also indicates that it is more difficult to have happy employees when the chances to climb the skill and social hierarchies are slim. These are underlying reasons why the Protestant ethic, a work compulsion, is replaced by the conscious efforts of Personnel Departments to create morale"  (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, pp. 233-234).

"The need to develop new justifications, and the fact that increased power has not yet been publicly justified, give rise to a groping for more telling symbols of justification among the more sophisticated business spokesmen, who have felt themselves to be a small island in a politically hostile sea of property less employees. Studies of 'human relations in industry' are an ideological part of this groping. The managers are interested in such studies because of the hope of lowering production costs, of easing tensions inside their plants, of finding new symbols to justify the concentrated power they exercise in modern society"  (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. 234).

"The over-all formula of advice that the new ideology of 'human relations in business' contains runs to this effect: to make the worker happy, efficient, and co-operative, you must make the managers intelligent, rational, knowledgeable. It is the perspective of a managerial elite, disguised in the pseudo-objective language of engineers. It is advice to the personnel manager to relax his authoritative manner and widen his manipulative grip over the employees by understanding them better and countering their informal solidarities against management and exploiting these solidarities for smoother and less troublesome managerial efficiency" (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. 235).

"Current managerial attempts to create job enthusiasm, to paraphrase Marx's comment on Proudhon, are attempts to conquer work alienation within the bounds of work alienation. In the meantime, whatever satisfaction alienated men gain from work occurs within the framework of alienation; whatever satisfaction they gain from life occurs outside the boundaries of work; work and life are sharply split" (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. 235).

"As the work sphere declines in meaning and gives no inner direction and rhythm to life, so have community and kinship circles declined as ways of 'fixing man into society.' " (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. 237).

"In pre-capitalist societies, power was known and personal. The individual could see who was powerful, and he could understand the means of his power. His responses, of obedience and fear, were explicit and concrete; and if he was in revolt, the targets of that revolt were also explicit and concrete. . . .In an impersonalized and more anonymous system of control, explicit responses are not so possible: anxiety is likely to replace fear; insecurity to replace worry. The problem is who really has power, for often the tangled and hidden system seems a complex yet organized irresponsibility. When power is delegated from a distant center, the one immediately over the individual is not so different from the individual himself; he does not decide either, he too is part of the network by means of which individuals are controlled. Targets for revolt, given the will to revolt, are not readily available. Symbols in terms of which to challenge power are not available--in fact, there are no explicit symbols of authority to challenge" (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. 349).

"As political power has been centralized, the issues professionalized and compromised by the two-party state, a sort of impersonal manipulation has replaced authority. For authority, there is a need of justifications in order to secure loyalties; for manipulation, there is exercise of power without explicit justifications, for decisions are hidden. Manipulation, as we have suggested, arises when there is a centralization of power that is not publicly justified and those who have it don't believe they could justify it. Manipulation feeds upon and is fed by mass indifference. For in the narrowed range of assertion and counter-assertion no target of demand, no symbols or principles are argued over and debated in public. . . And so insecurity and striving are not attached to political symbols but are drained off by the distractions of amusement, the frenzied search for commodities, or turned in upon the self as busy little frustrations. There is no organized effort to develop common consciousness of common interests, and men feel distanced from events without the power to order them" (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, pp. 349-350).

"By virtue of their increased and centralized power, political institutions become more objectively important to the course of American history, but because of mass alienation, less and less of subjective interest to the population at large. On the one hand, politics is bureaucratized, and on the other, there is mass indifference. These are the decisive aspects of U.S. politics today. Because of them, political expression is banalized, political theory is barren administrative detail, history is made behind men's backs. Such is the political situation in which the new middle class enact their passive role" (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. 350).

On Consumerism:

"When demands balanced supplies the salesman as a means of distribution merely provided information. But when the pressure from the producer to sell became much greater than the capacity of the consumer to buy, the role of the salesman shifted into high gear. In the twentieth century, as surpluses piled up, the need has been for distribution to national markets; and with the spread of national advertising, coextensive sales organizations have been needed to cash in on its effects" (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. 162).

"As competition for restricted markets builds up, and buyers' markets become more frequent, the pressure mounts in the salesman's immediate domain. Psychologists bend their minds to improving the techniques of persuading people to commercial decisions. Before high-pressure salesmanship, emphasis was upon the salesmen's knowledge of the product, a sales knowledge grounded in apprenticeship; after it, the focus is upon hypnotizing the prospect, an art provided by psychology" (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. 165).

"The salesmen link up one unit of business society with another; salesmanship is coextensive with the cash nexus of the modern world. It is not only a marketing device, it is a pervasive apparatus of persuasion that sets a people's style of life. For all types of marketing- entrepreneurs and white-collar salespeople, in and out of stores, on the roads and in the air, are only the concentration points in the cadre of salesmanship. So deeply have they infiltrated, so potent is their influence, that they may be seen as a sort of official personnel of an all-pervasive atmosphere. That is why we cannot understand salesmanship by studying only salesmen. The American premium, we learn in Babbit, is not upon 'selling anything in particular for or to anybody in particular, but pure selling.' Now, salesmanship has become an abstracted value, a science, an ideology and a style of life for a society that has turned itself into a fabulous salesroom and become the biggest bazaar in the world" (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, pp. 165-166).

"Do you think the family is important to society? But the Big Bazaar feeds, clothes, amuses; it replaces families, in every respect but the single one of biological reproduction. From womb to grave, it watches over you, supplying the necessities and creating the unmet need. . . . Do you think factories are something to know about? But the Bazaar is a factory: it has taken unto itself the several phases of the economic circuit, and now contains them all. And it is also a factory of smiles and visions, of faces and dreams of life, surrounding people with the commodities for which they live, holding out to them the goals for which they struggle. What factory is geared so deep and direct with what people want and what they are becoming? Measured by space or measured by money, it is the greatest emporium in the world: it is a world--dedicated to commodities, run  by committees and paced by floor-walkers"  (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. 167).

"'Success' in America has been a widespread fact, an engaging image, a driving motive, and a way of life. In the middle of the twentieth century, it has become less widespread as fact, more confused as image, often dubious as motive, and soured as a way of life" (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. 259).
 
 

On the Division of Labor:

"The centralization of planful reflection and the consequent expropriation of individual rationality parallel the rationalization of the white-collar hierarchy as a whole. What a single individual used to do is now broken up into functions of decision and research, direction and checking up, each performed by a separate group of individuals. Many executive functions are thus becoming less autonomous and permitting less initiative. The centralization of reflection entails for many the deprivation of initiative: for them, decision becomes the application of fixed rules. Yet these developments do not necessarily mean that the top men have less intellectual tasks to perform; they mean rather, as Henri de Man has observed, that the less intellectual tasks are broken up and transferred down the hierarchy to the semi-skilled white-collar employees, while the managerial top becomes even more intellectualized, and the unit of its intellectuality becomes a set of specialized staffs. The more those down the line are deprived of intellectual content in their work, the more those on top need to be intellectualized, or at least the more dependent they become upon the intellectually skilled" (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, pp. 140-141).

"If in this process some professionals are forced down the line, more of those who take on the new subaltern intellectual tasks come from lower down the social scale. For the centralization of professional skills and the industrialization of many intellectual functions have not narrowed the full professional stratum so much as proliferated the semi-professions and the quasi-intellectual, and between these and the fully professional, created a more marked separation. So great has the expansion been that children of the wage-worker and the clerk are often raised into semi-professional status, while top men of the professional world merge with business and become professional entrepreneurs of the managerial demiurge"  (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. 141).

"Yet we are still only in the beginning of the office-machine age. Only when the machinery and the social organization of the office are fully integrated in terms of maximum efficiency per dollar spent will that age be full blown"  (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. 195).

"As machines spread, they began to prompt newer divisions of labor to add to those they had originally merely implemented. The new machines, especially the more complex and costly ones, require central control of offices previously scattered throughout the enterprise. This centralization, which prompts more new divisions of labor, is again facilitated by each new depression, through the urge to cut costs, and each new war, through the increased volume of office work. The present extent of office centralization has not been precisely measured, although the tendency has been clear enough since the early 'twenties: by then machines and social organization had begun to interact, and that is the true mark of the 'era of scientific management in the office.' That era is still in its late infancy, but it is clearly the model of the future"  (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. 195).

"Machines and centralization go together in company after company: and together they increase output and lower unit costs. They also open the way to the full range of factory organization and techniques: work can be simplified and specialized; work standards for each operation can be set up and applied to individual workers. . . .Any work that is measurable can be standardized, and often broken down into simple operations. Then it can proceed at a standard pace, which 'scientific investigation has determined can be performed by a first class worker in a stated time.' The very computation of such standards prompts new splitting of more complex tasks and increased specialization. For specialization and control from the top, along with standards, interact"  (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. 196).

"Cost reduction proceeds by eliminating some work and simplifying the rest. To do this, a functional breakdown of job operations is made, and a functional breakdown of human abilities; then the two breakdowns are mated in a new, simplified set of routinized tasks. Along with this, machines are introduced for all possible features of the work process that cost factors allow. then the effects of these factory-like procedures upon the office workers are rationalized and compulsory rest periods set up to relieve fatigue"  (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, pp. 196-197).

The process is extended even to the worker's life before he enters the office. Crack office men have known for some time that training for rationalization must start in the schools: 'The office manager should contact local schools, explain his requirements and solicit school aid in training students of commercial subjects to meet office requirements. School courses can easily be designed to qualify graduates for the work requirement in our offices' (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. 197).

As office machinery is introduced, the number of routine jobs is increased and consequently the proportion of 'positions requiring initiative' is decreased. 'Mechanization is resulting in a much clearer distinction between the managing staff and the operating staff,' observed the War Manpower Commission. 'Finger dexterity is often more important than creative thinking. Promotions consequently become relatively rare. . . Some large office managers actually prefer to hire girls who are content to remain simply clerks, who will attempt to rise no higher than their initial level' (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, pp. 205-206).

"Mechanized and standardized work, the decline of any chance for the employee to see and understand the whole operation, the loss of any chance, save for a very few, for private contact with those in authority--these form the model of the future. At present, status complications inside office and store are still often quite important in the psychology of the employee; but, in the main drift, technical and economic factors and the authoritative line-up will gain ascendancy over such status factors as now interfere with the rationalization of the white-collar hierarchy"  (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. 212).

"As tool becomes machine, man is estranged from the intellectual potentialities and aspects of work; and each individual is routinized in the name of increased and cheaper unit productivity. The whole unit and meaning of time is modified; man's 'life-time,' wrote Marx, is transformed into 'working-time.' In tying down individuals to particular tasks and jobs, the division of labor 'lays the foundation of that all-engrossing system of specializing and sorting men, the development in a man of one single faculty at the expense of all other faculties, which caused A. Ferguson, the master of Adam Smith, to exclaim: 'We make a nation of Helots, and have no free citizens' (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. 226).

"The introduction of office machinery and sales devices has been mechanizing the office and the salesroom, the two big locales of white-collar work. Since the 'twenties it has increased the division of white-collar labor, recomposed personnel, and lowered skill levels. Routine operations in minutely subdivided organizations have replaced the bustling interest of work in well-known groups. Even on managerial and professional levels, the growth of rational bureaucracies has made work more like factory production. The managerial demiurge is constantly furthering all these trends: mechanization, more minute division of labor, the use of less skilled and less expensive workers" (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, pp. 226-227).

"In its early stages, a new division of labor may specialize men in such a way as to increase their levels of skill; but later, especially when whole operations are split and mechanized, such division develops certain faculties at the expense of others and narrows all of them. And as it comes more fully under mechanization and centralized management, it levels men off again as automatons. Then there are a few specialists and a mass of automatons; both integrated by the authority which makes them interdependent and keeps each in his own routine. Thus, in the division of labor, the open development and free exercise of skills are managed and closed" (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. 227).

On Bureaucratization:

"The organizational reason for the expansion of the white-collar occupations is the rise of big business and big government and the consequent trend of modern social structure, the steady growth of bureaucracy. In every branch of the economy, as firms merge and corporations become dominant, free entrepreneurs become employees, and the calculations of accountants, statisticians, bookkeeper, and clerk in these corporations replace the free 'movement of prices' as the co-ordinating agent of the economic system" (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, pp. 68-69).

"The rise of thousands of big and little bureaucracies and the elaborate specialization of the system as a whole create the need for many men and women to plan, co-ordinate, and administer new routines for others. In moving from smaller to larger and more elaborate units of economic activity, increased proportions of employees are drawn into co-ordinating and managing. Managerial and professional employees and office workers of varied sorts--floorwalkers, foremen, office managers--are needed; people to whom subordinates report, and who in turn report to superiors, are links in chains of power and obedience, co-ordinating and supervising other occupational experiences, functions and skills"  (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. 69).

"As the worlds of business undergo these changes, the increased tasks of government on all fronts draw still more people into occupations that regulate and service property and men" (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. 69).

"Bureaucratization in the United States is by no means total; its spread is partial and segmental, and the individual is caught up in several structures at once. Yet, over-all, the loose-jointed integration of liberal society is being replaced, especially in its war phases, by the more managed integration of a corporate-like society"  (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, pp. 77-78).

"As each of these domains becomes enlarged and centralized, the consequences of its activities become greater, and its traffic with the others increases. The decisions of a handful of corporations bear upon military and political as well as upon economic developments around the world. The decisions of the military establishment rest upon and grievously affect political life as well as the very level of economic activity. The decisions made within the political domain determine economic activities and military programs. There is no longer, on the one hand, an economy, and, on the other hand, a political order containing a military establishment unimportant to politics and to money-making. There is a political economy linked, in a thousand ways, with military institutions and decisions. On each side of the world-split running through central Europe and around the Asiatic rimlands, there is an ever-increasing interlocking of economic, military, and political structures. If there is government intervention in the corporate economy, so is there corporate intervention in the governmental process. In the structural sense, this triangle of power is the source of the interlocking directorate that is most important for the historical structure of the present" (The Power Elite, 1956, pp. 7-9).

"From the most superficial examination of the history of western society we learn that the power of decision-makers is first of all limited by the level of technique, by the means of power and violence and organization that prevail in a given society. In this connection we also learn that there is a fairly straight line running upward through the history of the West; that the means of oppression and exploitation, of violence and destruction, as well as the means of production and reconstruction, have been progressively enlarged and increasingly centralized" (The Power Elite, 1956, p. 23).

"As the institutional means of power and the means of communications that tie them together have become steadily more efficient, those now in command of them have come into command of instruments of rule quite unsurpassed in the history of mankind. And we are not yet at the climax of their development. We can no longer lean upon or take soft comfort from the historical ups and downs of ruling groups of previous epochs. In that sense, Hegel is correct: we learn from history that we cannot learn from it" (The Power Elite, 1956, p. 23).

"And that is why we may define the power elite in terms of the means of power--as those who occupy the command posts. The major questions about the American elite today--its composition, it unity, its power--must now be faced with due attention to the awesome means of power available to them. Caesar could do less with Rome than Napoleon with France; Napoleon less with France than Lenin with Russia; and Lenin less with Russia than Hitler with Germany. But what was Caesar's power at it peak compared with the power of the changing inner circle of Soviet Russia or of America's temporary administrations? The men of either circle can cause great cities to be wiped out in a single night; and in a few weeks turn continents into thermonuclear wastelands" (The Power Elite, 1956, p. 23).

"That the facilities of power are enormously enlarged and decisively centralized means that the decisions of small groups are now more consequential" (The Power Elite, 1956, p. 23).

On Rationalization:

"U.S. science has not developed a firm scientific tradition in the European manner. Here science has been virtually identified with its technological products, its engineering developments, its techniques; and it has recently become subjected to the corporate technique of the assembly line. It is in the use of science, in the know-how of development projects, in the mass-production exploitation of its legacy, that the U.S. has excelled. This kind of industrial and military science stands in contrast to the classic, academic tradition in which individual scientific investigators or small groups are part of an uncoordinated cultural tradition. In brief, the U.S. has built a Science Machine: a corporate organization and rationalization of the process of technological development and to some extent--I believe unknown--of scientific discovery itself" (The Causes of World War III, 1958, p. 161).

"The forces that shape these milieux do not originate within them, nor are they controllable by those sunk in them.  Moreover, these milieux are themselves increasingly rationalized.  Families as well as factories, leisure as well as work, neighborhoods as well as states--they to become parts of a functionally rational totality--or they are subject to uncontrolled and irrational forces"  (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 169).

"Given these effects of the ascendant trend of rationalization, the individual 'does the best he can.'  He gears his aspirations and his work to the situation he is in, and from which he can find no way out.  In due course, he does not seek a way out:  he adapts.  That part of his life which is left over from work, he uses to play, to consume, 'to have fun.'  Yet this sphere of consumption is also being rationalized.  Alienated from production, from work, he is also alienated from consumption, from genuine leisure.  This adaptation of the individual and its effects upon his milieux and self results not only in the loss of his chance, and in due course, of his capacity and will to reason; it also affects his chances and his capacity to act as a free man.  Indeed, neither the value of freedom nor of reason, it would seem, are known to him"  (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 170).

"The rational organization is thus an alienating organization:  the guiding principles of conduct and reflection, and in due course of emotion as well, are not seated in the individual conscience of the Reformation man, or in the independent reason of the Cartesian man.  The guiding principles, in fact, are alien to and in contradiction with all that has been historically understood as individuality.  It is not too much to say that in the extreme development the chance to reason of most men is destroyed, as rationality increases and its locus, its control, is moved from the individual to the big-scale organization.  There is then rationality without reason.  Such rationality is not commensurate with freedom but the destroyer of it"  (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 170).

"It will no longer do merely to assume, as a metaphysic of human nature, that down deep in man-as-man there is an urge for freedom and a will to reason.  Now we must ask:  What in man's nature, what in the human condition today, what in each of the varieties of social structure makes for the ascendancy of the cheerful robot?  And what stands against it?"  (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 171).

In so far as universals can be found in life and character in America, they are due less to any common tutelage of the soil than to the leveling influences of urban civilization, and above all, to the standardization of the big technology and of the media of mass communication (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, xiv)

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, rationality was identified with freedom. The ideas of Freud about the individual, and of Marx about society, were strengthened by the assumption of the coincidence of freedom and rationality. Now rationality seems to have taken on a new form, to have its seat not in individual men, but in social institutions which by their bureaucratic planning and mathematical foresight usurp both freedom and rationality from the little individual men caught in them. The calculating hierarchies of department store and industrial corporation, of rationalized office and government bureau, lay out the gray ways of work and stereotype the permitted initiatives. And in all this bureaucratic usurpation of freedom and of rationality, the white-collar people are the interchangeable parts of the big chains of authority that bind the society together (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, xvii).

On the "Irrationality Factor":

"In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, rationality was identified with freedom. The ideas of Freud about the individual, and of Marx about society, were strengthened by the assumption of the coincidence of freedom and rationality. Now rationality seems to have taken on a new form, to have its seat not in individual men, but in social institutions which by their bureaucratic planning and mathematical foresight usurp both freedom and rationality from the little individual men caught in them. The calculating hierarchies of department store and industrial corporation, of rationalized office and government bureau, lay out the gray ways of work and stereotype the permitted initiatives. And in all this bureaucratic usurpation of freedom and of rationality, the white-collar people are the interchangeable parts of the big chains of authority that bind the society together"  (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. xvii).

"In no sphere of twentieth-century society has the shift from the old to the new middle-class condition been so apparent, and its ramifications so wide and deep, as in the professions. Most professionals are now salaried employees; much professional work has become divided and standardized and fitted into the new hierarchical organizations of educated skill and service; intensive and narrow specialization has replaced self-cultivation and wide knowledge; assistants and sub-professionals perform routine, although often intricate, tasks, while successful professional men become more and more the managerial type. So decisive have such shifts been, in some areas, that it is as if rationality itself has been expropriated from the individual and been located, as a new form of brain power, in the ingenious bureaucracy itself" (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. 112).

"In America and in Russia--in differing ways but often with frightening convergence--we now witness the rise of the cheerful robot, the technological idiot, the crackpot realist. All these types embody a common ethos: rationality without reason" (The Causes of World War III, 1958, p. 175).

"Science, it turns out, is not a technological Second Coming.  That its techniques and its rationality are given a central place in a society does not mean that men live reasonably and without myth, fraud, and superstition.  Universal education may lead to technological idiocy and nationalist provinciality--rather than to the informed and independent intelligence.  The mass distribution of historic culture may not lift the level of cultural sensibility, but rather, merely banalize it--and compete mightily with the chance for creative innovation.  A high level of bureaucratic rationality and of technology does not mean a high level of either individual or social intelligence.  From the first you cannot infer the second"  (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, 168).

For social, technological, or bureaucratic rationality is not merely a grand summation of the individual will and capacity to reason.  The very chance to acquire that will and that capacity seems in fact often to be decreased by it"  (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, pp. 168-169).

"Rationally organized social arrangements are not necessarily a means of increased freedom--for the individual or for the society.  In fact, often they are a means of tyranny and manipulation, a means of expropriating the very chance to reason, the very capacity to act as a free man"  (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 169).

"The increasing rationalization of society, the contradiction between such rationality and reason, the collapse of the assumed coincidence of reason and freedom--these developments lie back of the rise into view of the man who is 'with' rationality but without reason, who is increasingly self-rationalized and also increasingly uneasy.  It is in terms of this type of man that the contemporary problem of freedom is best stated"  (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 169).

"In our time, must we not face the possibility that the human mind as a social fact might be deteriorating in quality and cultural level, and yet not many would notice it because of the overwhelming accumulation of technological gadgets?  Is not that one meaning of rationality without reason?  Of human alienation?  Of the absence of any free role for reason in human affairs?  The accumulation of gadgets hides these meanings:  Those who use these devices do not understand them; those who invent them do not understand much else.  That is why we may not, without great ambiguity, use technological abundance as the index of human quality and cultural progress"  (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 175).

"U.S. science has not developed a firm scientific tradition in the European manner. Here science has been virtually identified with its technological products, its engineering developments, its techniques; and it has recently become subjected to the corporate technique of the assembly line. It is in the use of science, in the know-how of development projects, in the mass-production exploitation of its legacy, that the U.S. has excelled. This kind of industrial and military science stands in contrast to the classic, academic tradition in which individual scientific investigators or small groups are part of an uncoordinated cultural tradition. In brief, the U.S. has built a Science Machine: a corporate organization and rationalization of the process of technological development and to some extent--I believe unknown--of scientific discovery itself" (The Causes of World War III, 1958, p. 161).

"The forces that shape these milieux do not originate within them, nor are they controllable by those sunk in them.  Moreover, these milieux are themselves increasingly rationalized.  Families as well as factories, leisure as well as work, neighborhoods as well as states--they to become parts of a functionally rational totality--or they are subject to uncontrolled and irrational forces"  (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 169).

"Given these effects of the ascendant trend of rationalization, the individual 'does the best he can.'  He gears his aspirations and his work to the situation he is in, and from which he can find no way out.  In due course, he does not seek a way out: he adapts.  That part of his life which is left over from work, he uses to play, to consume, 'to have fun.'  Yet this sphere of consumption is also being rationalized.  Alienated from production, from work, he is also alienated from consumption, from genuine leisure.  This adaptation of the individual and its effects upon his milieux and self results not only in the loss of his chance, and in due course, of his capacity and will to reason; it also affects his chances and his capacity to act as a free man.  Indeed, neither the value of freedom nor of reason, it would seem, are known to him"  (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 170).

"The rational organization is thus an alienating organization:  the guiding principles of conduct and reflection, and in due course of emotion as well, are not seated in the individual conscience of the Reformation man, or in the independent reason of the Cartesian man.  The guiding principles, in fact, are alien to and in contradiction with all that has been historically understood as individuality.  It is not too much to say that in the extreme development the chance to reason of most men is destroyed, as rationality increases and its locus, its control, is moved from the individual to the big-scale organization.  There is then rationality without reason.  Such rationality is not commensurate with freedom but the destroyer of it"  (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 170).

"It will no longer do merely to assume, as a metaphysic of human nature, that down deep in man-as-man there is an urge for freedom and a will to reason.  Now we must ask:  What in man's nature, what in the human condition today, what in each of the varieties of social structure makes for the ascendancy of the cheerful robot?  And what stands against it?"  (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 171).
 
 

On moral insensibility:

"The issues of war and peace cannot be melted down into a naive psychology of 'peace through better understanding among peoples'. It is not the aggression of people in general but their mass indifference that is the point of their true political and psychological relevance to the thrust toward war. It is neither the 'psychology of peoples' nor raw 'human nature' that is relevant; it is the moral insensibility of people who are selected, molded, and honoured in the mass society" (The Causes of World War III, 1958, p. 81).

"In this new society there has come about a situation in which many who have lost faith in prevailing loyalties have not acquired new ones, and so they pay no attention to politics of any kind. They are not radical, not liberal, not conservative, not reactionary. They are inactionary. They are out of it. If we accept the Greek definition of the idiot as an altogether private man, then we must conclude that many American and Soviet citizens are now idiots. This spiritual condition--and I choose the phrase with care--is the key to many contemporary problems as well as to much political bewilderment. Intellectual 'conviction' and moral 'belief' are not necessary, in either the ruled or the rulers, for a ruling power to persist and even to flourish. The prevalence of mass indifference is surely one of the major political facts about the Western societies today" (The Causes of World War III, 1958, pp. 81-82).

"As it concerns the thrust toward war this indifference is best seen as moral insensibility: the mute acceptance--or even unawareness--of moral atrocity; the lack of indignation when confronted with moral horror; the turning of this atrocity and this horror into morally approved conventions of feeling. By moral insensibility, in short, I mean the incapacity for moral reaction to event and to character, to high decision and to the drift of human circumstance" (The Causes of World War III, 1958, p. 82).

"In the expanded world of mechanically vivified communication the individual becomes the spectator of everything but the human witness of nothing. Having no plain targets of revolt, men feel no moral springs of revolt. The cold manner enters their souls and they are made private and blase. In virtually all realms of life, facts now outrun sensibility. Emptied of their human meanings, these facts are readily got used to. In official man there is no more human shock; in his unofficial follower there is little sense of moral issue. Within the unopposed supremacy of impersonal, calculated technique, there is no human place to draw the line and give the emphatic no" (The Causes of World War III, 1958, p. 83).

"This lack of response I am trying to sum up by the phrase 'moral insensibility', and I am suggesting that the level of moral sensibility, as part of public and of private life, has sunk out of sight. It is not the number of victims or the degree of cruelty that is distinctive; it is the fact that the acts committed and the acts that nobody protests are split from the consciousness of men in an uncanny, even a schizophrenic, manner. The atrocities of our time are done by men as 'functions' of a social machine--men possessed by an abstracted view that hides from them the human beings who are their victims and, as well, their own humanity. They are inhuman acts because they are impersonal. They are not sadistic but merely businesslike; they are not aggressive but merely efficient; they are not emotional at all but technically clean-cut" (The Causes of World War III, 1958, pp. 83-84).

We must, I think, assume that in the event of this war, statesmen will order the use of every weapon they think useful to 'destroy the enemy', and that masses of men will accept it. For today if men are acting in the name of 'their nation', they do not know moral limits but only expedient calculations. Is not that obvious from the history of the last twenty years? Is not that the meaning of the word 'barbarism' as applied to our times, and of the single most absolute and fetishized of our values: that of The Nation itself? Among the higher circles of all leading nations, the force of moral restraint is merely one factor, rather a negligible one, to be considered among expedient calculations of 'morale', psychological warfare, and what is curiously still called 'public opinion' (The Causes of World War III, 1958, p. 84).

On Alienation:

"In the literature of vocational guidance, personality often actually replaces skill as a requirement: a personable appearance is emphasized as being more important in success and advancement than experience or skill or intelligence"  (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. 186).

"Elaborate institutional set-ups thus rationally attempt to prepare people for the personality market and sustain them in their attempt to compete on it successfully. And from the areas of salesmanship proper, the requirements of the personality market have diffused as a style of life. What began as the public and commercial relations of business have become deeply personal: there is a public-relations aspect to private relations of all sorts, including even relations with the self. The new ways are diffused by charm and success schools and by best-seller literature. The sales personality, built and maintained for operation on the personality market, has become a dominating type, a pervasive model for imitation for masses of people, in and out of selling. The literature of self-improvement has generalized the traits and tactics of salesmanship for the population at large. In this literature all men can be leaders. The poor and the unsuccessful simply do not exist, except by an untoward act of their own will"  (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. 187).

"The personality market, the most decisive effect and symptom of the great salesroom, underlies the all-pervasive distrust and self-alienation so characteristic of metropolitan people. Without common values and mutual trust, the cash nexus that links one man to another in transient contact has been made subtle in a dozen ways and made to bite deeper into all areas of life and relations. People are required by the salesman ethic and convention to pretend interest in others in order to manipulate them. In the course of time, and as this ethic spreads, it is got on to. Still, it is conformed to as part of one's job and one's style of life, but now with a winking eye, for one knows that manipulation is inherent in every human contact. Men are estranged from one another as each secretly tries to make an instrument of the other, and in time a full circle is made: one makes an instrument of himself, and is estranged from It also"  (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, pp. 187-188).

"The entire shift from the rural world of the small entrepreneur to the urban society of the dependent employee has instituted the property conditions of alienation from product and processes of work. Of course, dependent occupations vary to the extent of initiative they allow and invite, and many self-employed enterprisers are neither as independent nor as enterprising as commonly supposed. Nevertheless, in almost any job, the employee sells a degree of his independence; his working life is within the domain of others; the level of his skills that are used and the areas in which he may exercise independent decisions are subject to management by others" (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. 224).

"Probably at least ten or twelve million people worked during the 'thirties at tasks below the skill level of which they were easily capable; and, as school attendance increases and more jobs are routinized, the number of people who must work below their capacities will increase" (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, pp. 224-225).

"There is considerable truth in the statement that those who find free expression of self in their work are those who securely own the property with which they work, or those whose freedom does not entail the ownership of property" (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. 225).

"The objective alienation of man from the product and the process of work is entailed by the legal framework of modern capitalism and the modern division of labor. The worker does not own the product or the tools of his production. In the labor contract he sells his time, energy, and skill into the power of others. To understand self-alienation we need not accept the metaphysical view that man's self is most crucially expressed in work-activity. In all work involving the personality market, as we have seen, one's personality and personal traits become part of the means of production. In this sense a person instrumentalizes and externalizes intimate features of his person and disposition. In certain white-collar areas, the rise of personality markets has carried self and social alienation to explicit extremes" (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. 225).

"The detailed division of labor means, of course, that the individual does not carry through the whole process of work to its final product; but it also means that under many modern conditions the process itself is invisible to him. The product as the goal of his work is legally and psychologically detached from him, and this detachment cuts the nerve of meaning which work might otherwise gain from its technical processes"  (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, pp. 225-226).

"Even on the professional levels of white-collar work, not to speak of wage-work and the lower white-collar tasks, the chance to develop and use individual rationality is often destroyed by the centralization of decision and the formal rationality that bureaucracy entails. The expropriation which modern work organization has carried through thus goes far beyond the expropriation of ownership; rationality itself has been expropriated from work and any total view and understanding of its process. No longer free to plan his work, much less to modify the plan to which he is subordinated, the individual is to a great extent managed and manipulated in his work"  (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. 226)

"The world market, of which Marx spoke as the alien power over men, has in many areas been replaced by the bureaucratized enterprise. Not the market as such but centralized administrative decisions determine when men work and how fast. Yet the more and harder men work, the more they build up that which dominates their work as an alien force, the commodity; so also, the more and harder the white-collar man works, the more he builds up the enterprise outside himself, which is, as we have seen, duly made a fetish and thus indirectly justified. The enterprise is not the institutional shadow of great men, as perhaps it seemed under the old captain of industry; nor is it the instrument through which men realize themselves in work, as in small-scale production. The enterprise is an impersonal and alien Name, and the more that is placed in it, the less is placed in man (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, 226).

"The alienating conditions of modern work now include the salaried employees as well as the wage-workers. There are few, if any, features of wage-work (except heavy toil--which is decreasingly a factor in wage-work) that do not also characterized at least some white-collar work. For here, too, the human traits of the individual, from his physique to his psychic disposition, become units in the functionally rational calculation of managers. None of the features of work as craftsmanship is prevalent in office and salesroom, and, in addition, some features of white-collar work, such as the personality market, go well beyond the alienating conditions of wage-work"  (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. 227).

"For the historical destruction of craftsmanship and of the old office does not enter the consciousness of the modern wage-worker or white-collar employee; much less is their absence felt by him as a crisis, as it might have been if, in the course of the last generation, his father or mother had been in the craft conditions--but statistically speaking, they have not been. It is a slow historical fact, long gone by in any dramatic consequence and not of psychological relevance to the present generation. Only the psychological imagination of the historian makes it possible to write of such comparisons as if they were of psychological import. The craft life would be immediately available as a fact of their consciousness only if in the lifetime of the modern employees they had experienced a shift from the one condition to the other, which they have not; or if they had grasped it as an ideal meaning of work, which they have not" (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. 228).

"But if the work white-collar people do is not connected with its resultant product, and if there is no intrinsic connection between work and the rest of their life, then they must accept their work as meaningless in itself, perform it with more or less disgruntlement, and seek meanings elsewhere" (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. 228).

On Freedom and Democracy:

"But the centralization of property has shifted the basis of economic security from property ownership to job holding; the power inherent in huge properties has jeopardized the old balance which gave political freedom. Now unlimited freedom to do as one wishes with one's property is at the same time freedom to do what one wishes to the freedom and security of thousands of dependent employees" (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. 58).

"For the employees, freedom and security, both political and economic, can no longer rest upon individual independence in the old sense. To be free and to be secure is to have an effective control over that upon which one is dependent: the job within the centralized enterprise" (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. 58-59).

"Politics, no matter how important, is only one sphere in the social order, which by no means needs to be tied together by political loyalties. It may even be that political indifference should be taken as an expected psychological fact about a society so dominated by such individuated, pecuniary standards and activities as the United States. This is a bureaucratized society of privatized men, and it may very well go along in this condition for a long time to come" (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. 350).

"The decline of the old middle classes does not mean that the old U.S. framework of capitalist democracy is broken. But it does mean that the old legitimations of that system no longer move men, and that the institutions under which we live, the framework of our existence, are without enthusiasm. Again, this does not mean that we are in a situation without norms, a situation of anomy, although it is fairly clear that ours is an era of wide moral distress. But moral or ideological consensus is not the only basis for a social order. A network of expediences and conventions, in a framework of power not entirely or firmly legitimated, can hold together a society with high material standards of comfort" (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. 350).

"Still, it must be recognized that this is not the idea of democracy (based upon the old middle classes) we have known; that there is a struggle over men's minds even if there is no struggle in them; that our bureaucratized society has its own contradictions and crises, in which the payoffs that have kept the United States going ahead my become much harder to organize and deliver" (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. 351).

"By democracy I mean a system of power in which those who are vitally affected by such decisions as are made--and as could be made but are not--have an effective voice in these decisions and defaults. The political structure of a modern democratic state, I suggest, requires at least these six conditions:

I. It requires not only that such a public as is projected by democratic theorists exist, but that it be the very forum within which a politics of real issues is enacted.

II. It requires nationally responsible parties which debate openly and clearly the issues which the nation, and indeed the world, now so rigidly confront.

III. It requires a senior civil service firmly linked to the world of knowledge and sensibility and composed of skilled men who, in their careers and in their aspirations, are truly independent of any private--that is to say, corporation--interests.

IV. It requires an intelligentsia, inside as well as outside the universities, who carry on the big discourse of the Western world, and whose work is relevant to and influential among parties and movements and publics. It requires, in brief, truly independent minds which are directly relevant to powerful decisions.

V. It requires that there be media of genuine communication which are open to such men and with the aid of which they can translate the private troubles of individuals into public issues, and public issues and events into their meanings for the private life. This conditions, as well as III and IV, are necessary if leaders are to be held responsible to publics and if there is to be an end of the divorce of the power and the intellect, an end to the higher and irresponsible ignorance, an end to the isolation of the intellect from public life.

VI. And democracy certainly requires, as a fact of power, that there be free associations linking families and smaller communities and publics on the one hand with the state, the military establishment, the corporation on the other. Unless such associations exist, there are no vehicles for reasoned opinion, no instruments for the rational exertion of public will" (The Causes of World War III, 1958, pp. 121-123).

"Such democratic formations are not now ascendant in the power structure of the United States, and accordingly the men of decision are not men selected and formed by careers within such associations and by their performances before such publics. Accordingly, publics that do discuss issues have at most only a faint and restraining voice in the making of history, and so in the making of war or peace. To pretend that this is not so is to lose the chance to understand what is happening and why it is happening. Every step to gain these formations, these six conditions of democracy, inside the U.S. is a step toward breaking the grip of the power elite that is now set toward World War III, and a step toward making possible alternative definitions of reality and alternative policies for action" (The Causes of World War III, 1958, p. 123).

"I do not believe that these six conditions can be brought about so long as the private corporation remains as dominant and as irresponsible as it is in national and international decisions; I do not believe that they can be brought about so long as the ascendancy of the military in personnel and in ethos, is as dominant and as politically irresponsible as it is; and certainly they cannot be brought about without filling the political vacuum that is now the key fact of U.S. politics" (The Causes of World War III, 1958, p. 123).

"Above all, the privately incorporated economy must be made over into a publicly responsible economy. I am aware of the magnitude of this task, but either we take democracy seriously or we do not. This corporate economy, as it is now constituted, is an undemocratic growth within the formal democracy of the United States" (The Causes of World War III, 1958, pp. 123-124).

"Democracy requires that those who bear the consequences of decisions have enough knowledge to hold decision-makers accountable. If men hope that contemporary America is to be a democratic society, they must look to the intellectual community for knowledge about those decisions that are now shaping human destiny. Men must depend upon knowledge provided by this community, for by their own private experience they can know only a small portion of the social world, only a few of the decisions that now affect them" (The Causes of World War III, 1958, p. 173).
 
 

On Intellectuals:

"Yet all significant problems of contemporary man and society bear upon the issues of war and peace, and the solution to any significant problem in some part rests upon their outcome. I do not believe that these issues are now as dreadfully complicated as everyone so readily tends to assume. But regardless of that, is it not precisely the task of the intellectual, the scholar, the student, to confront complications? To sort out insistent issues in such a way as to open them up for the work of reason--and so for action at strategic points of intervention? Is it not our task continually to make the new beginning?" (The Causes of World War III, 1958, p. 15).

"The epoch in which we stand is pivotal; the tradition of classic social analysis is clear. We must respond to events; we must define orienting policies. Should we fail to do so we stand in default of our intellectual and of our public duties; we abdicate such role as reason may have in human affairs. And this we should be unwilling to do. (The Causes of World War III, 1958, p. 15).

"Intellectuals deal with ideas--with recollections of the past, definitions of the present, and images of possible futures. By intellectuals I mean scientists and artists, ministers and scholars; I mean those who represent the human intellect; those who are part of the great discourse of reason and inquiry, of sensibility and imagination that in the West began in Jerusalem and Athens and Rome, and that has been going on intermittently ever since. They are the organized memory of mankind, and such cultural apparatus as it has they create and they maintain. If they write, paint, speak, if they create and distribute images and ideas, their work is publicly relevant. In so far as it is attended to, it focuses the views of men; and it distracts attention from that which it ignores. It justifies ideas of authority or it criticizes them" (The Causes of World War III, 1958, p. 129).

"What scientist can claim to be part of the legacy of science and yet remain a hired technician of the military machine?
What man of god can claim to partake of the Holy Spirit, to know the life of Jesus, to grasp the meaning of the Sunday phrase 'the brotherhood of man'--and yet sanction the insensibility, the immorality, the spiritual irresponsibility of the Caesars of our time?
What Western scholar can claim to be part of the big discourse of reason and yet retreat to formal trivialities and exact nonsense, in a world in which reason and freedom are being held in contempt, being smashed, being allowed to fade out of the human condition?
The answer to all these questions, if we remain generous in our conception of 'cultural workmen', is quite plain: Very many scientists, very many preachers, very many intellectuals, are in default" (The Causes of World War III, 1958, p. 130).

"Western intellectuals should remember with humility, even with shame, that the first significant crack in the cold-war front was not made by those who enjoy the formal freedom of the Western democracies, but by men who run the risk of being shot, imprisoned, driven to become nervous caricatures of human beings. The first significant cracks in the intellectual cold war came in the Communist world, after the death of Stalin. They were made not only by politicians but by professors, not only by factory workers but by writers, not only by the established but by students" (The Causes of World War III, 1958, pp. 132-133).

"Every time intellectuals have the chance to speak yet do not speak, they join the forces that train men not to be able to think and imagine and feel in morally and politically adequate ways. When they do not demand that the secrecy that makes elite decisions absolute and unchallengeable be removed, they too are part of the passive conspiracy to kill off public scrutiny. When they do not speak, when they do not demand, when they do not think and feel and act as intellectuals--and so as public men--they too contribute to the moral paralysis, the intellectual rigidity, that now grip both leaders and led around the world" (The Causes of World War III, 1958, p. 134).

"'But if I don't do it,' some scientists feel, 'others will.  So what's the difference?' This is less an argument than the mannerism of the irresponsible. It is based upon a conception of yourself as an altogether private man, upon the acceptance of your own impotence, upon the idea that the act in question, whatever it be, is a part of fate and so not subject to your decision. My answers to this mannerism are: If you do not do it, you at least are not responsible for its being done. If you refuse to do it out loud, others may quietly refrain from doing it, and those who still do it may then do it only with hesitation and guilt. To refuse to do it is to begin the practice of a professional code, and perhaps the creation of that code as a historical force. To refuse to do it is an act affirming yourself as a moral centre of responsible decision; it is an act which recognizes that you as a scientist are now a public man--whether you want to be or not; it is the act of a man who rejects 'fate', for it reveals the resolution of one human being to take at least his own fate into his own hands" (The Causes of World War III, 1958, p. 170).

 "Democracy requires that those who bear the consequences of decisions have enough knowledge to hold decision-makers accountable. If men hope that contemporary America is to be a democratic society, they must look to the intellectual community for knowledge about those decisions that are now shaping human destiny. Men must depend upon knowledge provided by this community, for by their own private experience they can know only a small portion of the social world, only a few of the decisions that now affect them" (The Causes of World War III, 1958, p. 173).

"Yet leading intellectual circles in America as elsewhere have not provided true images of the elite as men in irresponsible command of unprecedented means of power. Instead, they have invented images of a scatter of reasonable men, overwhelmed by events and doing their best in a difficult situation. by its softening of the political will, the conservative mood of the intellectuals, out of which these images have arisen, enables men to accept public depravity without any private sense of outrage and to give up the central goal of Western humanism, so strongly felt in nineteenth-century American experience: the audacious control by reason of man's fate" (The Causes of World War III, 1958, p. 173).

On Professors:

"The specialization that is required for successful operation as a college professor is often deadening to the mind that would grasp for higher culture in the modern world. There now is, as Whitehead has indicated, a celibacy of the intellect. Often the only 'generalization' the professor permits himself is the textbook he writes in the field of his work. Such serious thought as he engages in is thought within one specialty, one groove; the remainder of life is treated superficially"  (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, pp. 130-131).

"The professor of social science, for example, is not very likely to have as balanced an intellect as a top-flight journalist, and it is usually considered poor taste, inside the academies, to write a book outside of one's own field"  (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. 131).

"The professionalization of knowledge has thus narrowed the grasp of the individual professor; the means of his success further this trend; and in the social studies and humanities, the attempt to imitate exact science narrows the mind to microscopic fields of inquiry, rather than expanding it to embrace man and society as a whole"  (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. 131).

"After he is established in a college, it is unlikely that the professor's milieu and resources are the kind that will facilitate, much less create, independence of mind. He is a member of a petty hierarchy, almost completely closed in by its middle-class environment and its segregation of intellectual from social life. In such a hierarchy, mediocrity makes its own rules and sets its own image of success. And the path of ascent is as likely to be administrative duty as creative work"  (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. 131).

"Increasingly both business and the professions are being rationally organized, so that the 'science of business' arises in the schools even as do courses in 'business practice' for doctors and lawyers. Both businessmen and professionals strive for rationality of the social machineries in which they work, and are honored if they achieve it. Both strive to become looked upon as experts and to be so judged, within a narrowed area of specific competence. Both are masters of abstracted human relations, whether as in business they see a customer, or in the professions a client or case"  (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, pp. 137-138).

"The main trend is for the bureaucratic organization of businessmen and of professionals to turn both into bureaucrats, professionalized occupants of specified offices and specialized tasks"  (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. 138).

"Although the large universities are still relatively free places in which to work, the trends that limit independence of intellect are not absent there.  The professor is, after all, an employee, subject to what this fact involves, and institutional factors select men and have some influence upon how, when, and upon what they will work. Yet the deepest problem of freedom for teachers is not the occasional ousting of a professor, but a vague general fear--sometimes called 'discretion' and 'good judgement'--which leads to self-intimidation and finally becomes so habitual that the scholar is unaware of it. The real restraints are not so much external prohibitions as manipulative control of the insurgent by the agreements of academic gentlemen. Such control is, of course, furthered by Hatch Acts, by political and business attacks upon professors, by the restraints necessarily involved in Army programs for colleges, and by the setting up of committees by trade associations, which attempt to standardize the content and effects of teaching in given disciplines. Research in social science is increasingly dependent upon funds from foundations, which are notably averse to scholars who develop unpopular, 'unconstructive,' theses"  (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, pp. 151-152).

"The political failure of nerve [on the part of intellectuals] thus has a personal counterpart in the development of a tragic sense of life, which may be experienced as a personal discovery and a personal burden, but is also a reflection of objective circumstances. It arises from the fact that at the fountainheads of public decision there are powerful men who do not themselves suffer the violent results of their own decisions. In a world of big organizations the lines between powerful decisions and grass-roots democratic controls become blurred and tenuous, and seemingly irresponsible actions by individuals at the top are encouraged. The need for action prompts them to take decisions into their own hands, while the fact that they act as parts of large corporations or other organizations blurs the identification of personal responsibility. Their public views and political actions are, in this objective meaning of the world, irresponsible: the social corollary of their irresponsibility is the fact that others are dependent upon them and must suffer the consequence of their ignorance and mistakes, their self-deceptions and biased motives. The sense of tragedy in the intellectual who watches this scene is a personal reaction to the politics and economics of collective irresponsibility" (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. 158).

On Social Sciences:

Moreover, it is a period and a society in which the enlargement and the centralization of the means of control, of power, now include quite widely the use of social science for whatever ends those in control of these means may assign to it"  (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, pp. 115-116).

"To come to an orderly understanding of men and societies requires a set of viewpoints that are simple enough to make understanding possible, yet comprehensive enough to permit us to include in our views the range and depth of the human variety.  The struggle for such viewpoints if the first and continuing struggle of social science"  (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 133).

"As each social science advances, its interaction with the others has been intensified. . .They may of course specialize in one institutional order, but in so far as they grasp what is essential to it, they will also come to understand its place within the total social structure, and hence its relations with other institutional domains.  For in considerable part, it is becoming clear, its every reality consists of these relations"  (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 139).

"To state and to solve any one of the significant problems of our period requires a selection of materials, conceptions, and methods from more than any one of these several disciplines.  A social scientist need not 'master the field' in order to be familiar enough with its materials and perspectives to use them in clarifying the problems that concern him.  It is in terms of such topical 'problems,' rather than in accordance with academic boundaries, that specialization ought to occur"  (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 142).

"Every social science--or better, every well-considered social study--requires an historical scope of conception and a full use of historical materials"  (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 145).

"All sociology worthy of the name is 'historical sociology.'  It is, in Paul Sweezy's excellent phrase, an attempt to write 'the present as history.'"  (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 146).

"I believe that what may be called classic social analysis is a definable and usable set of traditions; that its essential feature is the concern with historical social structures; and that its problems are of direct relevance to urgent public issues and insistent human troubles.  I also believe that there are now great obstacles in the way of this tradition's continuing--both within the social sciences and in their academic and political settings--but that nevertheless the qualities of mind that constitute it are becoming a common denominator of our general cultural life and that, however vaguely and in however a confusing variety of disguises, they are coming to be felt as a need"  (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 21).

"It is out of the classic work, moreover, that most of the ideas being used on the sub-historical and on the trans-historical levels of work have in fact arisen.  What really fruitful idea, what conception of man and society and of their relations, has resulted from abstracted empiricism or grand theory?  So far as ideas are concerned, both of these schools are parasites living off the classic social science tradition"  (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 125).

"Classic social science, in brief, neither 'builds up' from microscopic study nor 'deduces down' from conceptual elaboration.  Its practitioners try to build and to deduce at the same time, in the same process of study, and to do so by means of adequate formulation and re-formulation of problems and their adequate solutions"  (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 128).

"The classic focus, in short, is on substantive problems.  The character of these problems limits and suggests the methods and the conceptions that are used and how they are used.  Controversy over different views of 'methodology' and 'theory' is properly carried on in close and continuous relation with substantive problems"  (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 128).

"No problem can be adequately formulated unless the values involved and the apparent threat to them are stated.  These values and their imperilment constitute the terms of the problem itself.  The values that have been the thread of classic social analysis, I believe, are freedom and reason; the forces that imperil them today seem at times to be co-extensive with the major trends of contemporary society, if not to constitute the characterizing features of the contemporary period.  The leading problems of the social studies today have this in common:  They concern conditions and tendencies that seem to imperil these two values and the consequences of that imperilment for the nature of man and the making of history"  (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, pp. 129-130).

"Social research is advanced by ideas; it is only disciplined by fact"  (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 71).

"Studies are also used--by social scientists and by other people--in ideological ways.  In fact the ideological relevance of social science is inherent in its very existence as social fact.  Every society holds images of its own nature--in particular, images and slogans that justify its system of power and the ways of the powerful.  The images and ideas produced by social scientists may or may not be consistent with these prevailing images, but they always carry implications for them.  In so far as these implications become known, they usually come to be argued over--and used:
     By justifying the arrangement of power and the ascendancy of the powerful, images and ideas transform power into authority.
     By criticizing or debunking prevailing arrangements and rulers, they strip them of authority.
     By distracting attention from issues of power and authority they distract attention from the structural realities of the society itself"  (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 80).

"Values are involved in the selection of the problems we study; values are also involved in certain of the key conceptions we use in our formulation of these problems, and values affect the course of their solution.  So far as conceptions are concerned, the aim ought to be to use as many 'value-neutral' terms as possible and to become aware of and to make explicit the value implications that remain.  So far as problems are concerned, the aim ought to be, again, to be clear about the values in terms of which they are selected, and then to avoid as best one can evaluative bias in their solution, no matter where that solution takes one and no matter what its moral or political implications may be"  (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 78).

"In a book the writer is often trying to persuade others of the result of his thinking; in a classroom the teacher ought to be trying to show others how one man thinks--and at the same time reveal what a fine feeling he gets when he does it well.  The teacher ought then, it seems to me, to make very explicit the assumptions, the facts, the methods, the judgments.  He ought not to hold back anything, but ought to take it very slowly and at all times repeatedly make clear the full range of moral alternatives before he gives his own choice"  (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 79).

"That democracy in the United States is so largely formal does not mean that we can dodge the conclusion that if reason is to play any free part in a democratic making of history, one of its chief carriers must surely be the social sciences"  (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 191).

"The educational and political role of social science in a democracy is to help cultivate and sustain publics and individuals that are able to develop, to live with, and to act upon adequate definitions of personal and social realities"  (The Sociological Imagination, 1959,  p. 192).

"Nowadays social research is often of direct service to army generals and social workers, corporation managers and prison wardens.  Such bureaucratic use has been increasing; no doubt it will continue to increase"  (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 80).

"The morale projected by the 'human relations' experts is the morale of men who are alienated but who have conformed to managed or conventional expectations of 'morale.'  Assuming that the existing framework of industry is unalterable and that the aims of the managers are the aims of everyone, the experts of 'human relations' do not examine the authoritarian structure of modern industry and the role of the worker in it.  They define the problem of morale in very limited terms, and by their techniques seek to reveal to their managerial clients how they can improve employee morale within the existing framework of power.  Their endeavor is manipulation.  They would allow the employee to 'blow off steam' without changing the structure within which he is to live out his working life. . . .In a word, the human relations experts have extended the general tendency for modern society to be rationalized in an intelligent way and in the service of a managerial elite"  (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, pp. 94-95).

"Their [social scientist's] positions change--from the academic to the bureaucratic; their publics change--from movements of reformers to circles of decision-makers; and their problems change--from those of their own choice to those of their new clients.  The scholars themselves tend to become less intellectually insurgent and more administratively practical.  Generally accepting the status quo, they tend to formulate problems out of the troubles and issues that administrators believe they face.  They study, as we have seen, workers who are restless and without morale, and managers who 'do not understand' the art of managing human relations.  They also diligently serve the commercial and corporate ends of the communications and advertising industries"  (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 96).

"I want to make it clear in order to reveal the meaning of the bureaucratic ethos.  Its use has mainly been in and for non-democratic areas of society--a military establishment, a corporation, an advertising agency, an administrative division of government.  It is in and for such bureaucratic organizations that many social scientists have been invited to work, and the problems with which they there concern themselves are the kinds of problems that concern the more efficient members of such administrative machines"  (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, pp. 114-115).

"Theory serves, in a variety of ways, as ideological justification of authority.  Research for bureaucratic ends serves to make authority more effective and more efficient by providing information of use to authoritative planners"  (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 117).

"In the intellectual condition of the social sciences today, there is so much to do by way of initial 'structuring' (let the word stand for the kind of work I am describing) that much 'empirical research' is bound to be thin and uninteresting.  Much of it, in fact, is a formal exercise for beginning students, and sometimes a useful pursuit for those who are not able to handle the more difficult substantive problems of social science. There is no more virtue in empirical inquiry as such than in reading as such. The purpose of empirical inquiry is to settle disagreements and doubts about facts, and thus to make arguments more fruitful by basing all sides more substantively.  Facts discipline reason; but reason is the advance guard in any field of learning" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 205).

On Sociological Imagination:

"The first lesson of modern sociology is that the individual cannot understand his own experience or gauge his own fate without locating himself within the trends of his epoch and the life-chances of all the individuals of his social layer " (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. xx).

"No matter what people believe, class structure as an economic arrangement influences their life chances according to their positions in it. If they do not grasp the causes of their conduct this does not mean that the social analyst must ignore or deny them" (White Collar: The American Middle Classes, 1951, p. 294).

"Nowadays men often feel that their private lives are a series of traps.  They sense that within their everyday worlds, they cannot overcome their troubles, and in this feeling, they are often quite correct:  What ordinary men are directly aware of and what they try to do are bounded by the private orbits in which they live; their visions and their powers are limited to the close-up scenes of job, family, neighborhood; in other milieux, they move vicariously and remain spectators.  And the more aware they become, however vaguely, of ambitions and of threats which transcend their immediate locales, the more trapped they seem to feel" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 3).

"What they need, and what they feel they need, is a quality of mind that will help them to use information and to develop reason in order to achieve lucid summations of what is going on in the world and of what may be happening within themselves.  It is this quality, I am going to contend, that journalists and scholars, artists and publics, scientists and editors are coming to expect of what may be called the sociological imagination" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p.3).

"The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society.  That is its task and its promise.  To recognize this task and this promise is the mark of the classic social analyst.  It is characteristic of Herbert Spencer--turgid, polysyllabic, comprehensive; of E. A. Ross--graceful, muckraking, upright; of Auguste Comte and Emile Durkheim; of the intricate and subtle Karl Mannheim.  It is the quality of all the is intellectually excellent in Karl Marx; it is the clue to Thorstein Veblen's brilliant and ironic insight . . . no less than of the profundity and clarity of Max Weber"  (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 6).

"Whatever the specific problems of the classic social analysts, however limited or however broad the features of social reality they have examined, those who have been imaginatively aware of the promise of their work have consistently asked three sorts of questions:
(1) What is the structure of this particular society as a whole?  What are its essential components, and how are they related to one another?  How does it differ from other varieties of social order?  Within it, what is the meaning of any particular feature for its continuance and for its change?
(2)  Where does this society stand in human history?  What are the mechanics by which it is changing?  What is its place within and its meaning for the development of humanity as a whole?  How does any particular feature we are examining affect, and how is it affected by, the historical period in which it moves?  And this period--what are its essential features?  How does it differ from other periods?  What are its characteristic ways of history making?
(3)  What varieties of men and women now prevail in this society and in this period?  And what varieties are coming to prevail?  In what ways are they selected and formed, liberated and repressed, made sensitive and blunted?  What kinds of 'human nature' are revealed in the conduct and character we observe in this society in this period?  And what is the meaning for 'human nature' of each and every feature of the society we are examining"  (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, pp. 6-7).

"Consider marriage.  Inside a marriage a man and a woman may experience personal troubles, but when the divorce rate during the first four years of marriage is 250 out of every 1,000 attempts, this is an indication of a structural issue having to do with the institutions of marriage and the family and other institutions that bear upon them"  (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 9).

"In so far as an economy is so arranged that slumps occur, the problem of unemployment becomes incapable of personal solution.  In so far as war is inherent in the nation-state system and in the uneven industrialization of the world, the ordinary individual in his restricted milieu will be powerless--with or without psychiatric aid--to solve the troubles this system or lack of system imposes upon him.  In so far as the family as an institution turns women into darling little slaves and men into their chief providers and unweaned dependents, the problem of a satisfactory marriage remains incapable of purely private solution.  In so far as the overdeveloped megalopolis and the overdeveloped automobile are built-in features of the overdeveloped society, the issues of urban living will not be solved by personal ingenuity and private wealth"  (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 10).

"To study these problems, to realize the human variety, requires that our work be continuously and closely related to the level of historical reality--and to the meanings of this reality for individual men and women.  Our aim is to define this reality and to discern these meanings . . . It requires that we seek a fully comparative understanding of the social structures that have appeared and do now exist in world history.  It requires that smaller-scale milieux be selected and studied in terms of larger-scale historical structures.  It requires that we avoid the arbitrary specialization of academic departments, that we specialize our work variously according to topic, and above all according to problem, and that in doing so we draw upon the perspectives and ideas, the materials and the methods of any and all suitable studies of man as an historical actor" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 134).

"The role of reason I have been outlining neither means nor requires that one hit the pavement, take the next plane to the scene of the current crisis, run for Congress, buy a newspaper plant, go among the poor, set up a soap box.  Such actions are often admirable, and I can readily imagine occasions when I should personally find it impossible not to want to do them myself.  But for the social scientist to take them to be his normal activities is merely to abdicate his role, and to display by his action a disbelief in the promise of social science and in the role of reason in human affairs.  This role requires only that the social scientist get on with the work of social science and that he avoid furthering the bureaucratization of reason and of discourse" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 192).

"If there are any ways out of the crises of our period by means of intellect, is it not up to the social scientist to state them?  What we represent--although this is not always apparent--is man become aware of mankind.  It is on the level of human awareness that virtually all solutions to the great problems must now lie" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 193).

"If we take the simple democratic view that what men are interested in is all that concerns us, then we are accepting the values that have been inculcated, often accidentally and often deliberately by vested interests.  These values are often the only ones men have had any chance to develop.  They are unconsciously acquired habits rather than choices.

"If we take the dogmatic view that what is to men's interests, whether they are interested in it or not, is all that need concern us morally, then we run the risk of violating democratic values.  We may become manipulators or coercers, or both, rather than persuaders within a society in which men are trying to reason together and in which the value of reason is held in high esteem.

"What I am suggesting is that by addressing ourselves to issues and to troubles, and formulating them as problems of social science, we stand the best chance, I believe the only chance, to make reason democratically relevant to human affairs in a free society, and so realize the classic values that underlie the promise of our studies" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 194).

"Imagination is often successfully invited by putting together hitherto isolated items, by finding unsuspected connections" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 201).

"The sociological imagination, I remind you, in considerable part consists of the capacity to shift from one perspective to another, and in the process to build up an adequate view of a total society and of its components. It is this imagination, of course, that sets off the social scientist from the mere technician. Adequate technicians can be trained in a few years. The sociological imagination can also be cultivated; certainly it seldom occurs without a great deal of often routine work. Yet there is an unexpected quality about it, perhaps because its essence is the combination of ideas that no one expected were combinable--say, a mess of ideas from German philosophy and British economics. There is a playfulness of mind back of such combining as well as a truly fierce drive to make sense of the world, which the technician as such usually lacks" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 211).

"Since one can be trained only in what is already known, training sometimes incapacitates one from learning new ways; it makes one rebel against what is bound to be at first loose and even sloppy. But you must cling to such vague images and notions, if they are yours, and you must work them out. For it is in such forms that original ideas, if any, almost always first appear" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 212).

"There are definite ways, I believe, of stimulating the sociological imagination:

(1) On the most concrete level, the re-arranging of the file, as I have already said, is one way to invite imagination" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 212).

"(2) An attitutde of playfulness toward the phrases and words with which various issues are defined often loosens up the imagination. Look up synonyms for each of your key terms in dictionaries and in technical books, in order to know the full range of their connotations" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 212).

"(3) Many of the general notions you come upon, as you think about them, will be cast into types. A new classification is the usual beginning of fruitful developments (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 213).

"(4) Often you get the best insights by considering extremes--by thinking of the opposite of that with which you are directly concerned. If you think about despair, then also think about elation; if you study the miser, then also the spendthrift. The hardest thing in the world is to study one object; when you try to contrast objects, you get a better grip on the materials and you can then sort out the dimensions in terms of which the comparisons are made" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, pp. 213-14).

"The idea is to use a variety of viewpoints: you will, for instance, ask yourself how would a political scientist whom you have recently read approach this, and how would that experimental psychologist, or this historian? You try to think in terms of a variety of viewpoints and in this way to let your mind become a moving prism catching light from as many angles as possible. In this connection, the writing of dialogues is often very useful" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 214).

"(5) The fact that, for the sake of simplicity, in cross-classification, you first work in terms of yes-or-no, encourages you to think of extreme opposites. That is generally good, for qualitative analysis cannot of course provide you with frequencies of magnitudes. Its techniques and its end is to give you the range of types" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 214).

"(6) Whatever the problem with which you are concerned, you will find it helpful to try to get a comparative grip on the materials. The search for comparable cases, either in one civilization and historical period or in several, gives you leads. You would never think of describing an institution in twentieth-century America without trying to bear in mind similar institutions in other types of structures and periods. That is so even if you do not make explicit comparisons" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 215).

"In time you will come almost automatically to orient your reflections historically. One reason for doing so is that often what you are examining is limited in number: to get a comparative grip on it, you have to place it inside an historical frame. To put it another way, the contrasting-type approach often requires the examination of historical materials. This sometimes results in points useful for a trend analysis, or it leads to a typology of phases" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 215).

"Some knowledge of world history is indispensable to the sociologist; without such knowledge, no matter what else he knows, he is simply crippled" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 215).

"(7) There is finally, a point which has more to do with the craft of putting a book together than with the release of the imagination. Yet those two are often one: how you go about arranging materials for presentation always affects the content of your work (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 216).

"A topic is a subject, like 'the careers of corporation executives' or 'the increased power of military officials' or 'the decline of society matrons.' Usually most of what you have to say about a topic can readily be put into one chapter or a section of a chapter. But the order in which all your topics are arranged often brings you into the realm of themes.

"A theme is an idea, usually of some signal trend, some master conception, or a key distinction, like rationality and reason, for example. In working out the construction of a book, when you come to realize the two or three, or, as the case may be, the six or seven themes, then you will know that you are on top of the job. You will recognize these themes because they keep insisting upon being dragged into all sorts of topics and perhaps you will feel that they are mere repetitions. And sometimes that is all they are! Certainly very often they will be found in the more clotted and confused, the more badly written, sections of your manuscript.

"What you must do is sort them out and state them in a general way as clearly and briefly as you can. Then, quite systematically, you must cross-classify them with the full range of your topics. This means that you will ask of each topic: Just how is it affected by each of these themes? And again: Just what is the meaning, if any, for each of these themes on each of the topics?" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 216).

"Sometimes, by the way, you may find that a book does not really have any themes. It is just a string of topics, surrounded , of course, by methodological introductions to methodology, and theoretical introductions to theory. These are indeed quite indispensable to the writing of books by men without ideas. And so is lack of intelligibility" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 217).

On Intellectual Craftsmanship:

"To the individual social scientist who feels himself a part of the classic tradition, social science is the practice of a craft.  A man at work on problems of substance, he is among those who are quickly made impatient and weary by elaborate discussions of method-and-theory-in-general; so much of it interrupts his proper studies" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 195).

"It is best to begin, I think, by reminding you, the beginning student, that the most admirable thinkers within the scholarly community you have chose to join do not split their work from their lives.  They seem to take both too seriously to allow such dissociation, and they want to use each for the enrichment of the other" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 195).

"Scholarship is a choice of how to live as well as a choice of career; whether he knows it or not, the intellectual workman forms his own self as he works toward the perfection of his craft; to realize his own potentialities, and any opportunities that come his way, he constructs a character which has as its core the qualities of a good workman" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 196).

"What this means is that you must learn to use your life experience in your intellectual work: continually to examine and interpret it.  In this sense craftsmanship is the center of yourself and you are personally involved in every intellectual product upon which you may work" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 196).

"To say that you can 'have experience,' means, for one thing, that your past plays into and affects your present, and that it defines your capacity for future experience. As a social scientist, you have to control this rather elaborate interplay, to capture what you experience and sort it out; only in this way can you hope to use it to guide and test your reflection, and in the process shape yourself as an intellectual craftsman" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 196).

"But how can you do this? One answer is: you must keep a file, which is, I suppose, a sociologist's way of saying: keep a journal. Many creative writers keep journals; the sociologist's need for systematic reflection demands it" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 196).

"By keeping an adequate file and thus developing self-reflective habits, you learn how to keep your inner world awake. Whenever you feel strongly about events or ideas you must try not to let them pass from your mind, but instead to formulate them for your files and in so doing draw out their implications, show yourself how foolish these feelings or ideas are, or how they might be articulated into productive shape. The file also helps you build on the habit of writing. You cannot 'keep your hand in' if you do not write something at least every week. In developing the file, you can experiment as a writer and thus, as they say, develop your powers of expression. To maintain a file is to engage in the controlled experience" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 197).

"All this involves the taking of notes. You will have to acquire the habit of taking a large volume of notes from any worth-while book you read--although, I have to say, you may get better work out of yourself when you read really bad books. The first step in translating experience, either of other men's writing, or of your own life, into the intellectual sphere, is to give it form. Merely to name an item of experience often invites you to explain it; the mere taking of a note from a book is often a prod to reflections. At the same time, of course, the taking of a note is a great aid in comprehending what you are reading" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 199).

"I do not know the full social conditions of the best intellectual workmanship, but certainly surrounding oneself by a circle of people who will listen and talk--and at times they have to be imaginary characters--is one of them. At any rate I try to surround myself with all the relevant environment--social and intellectual--that I think might lead me into thinking well along the lines of my work" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 201).

"You do not really have to study a topic you are working on; for as I have said, once you are into it, it is everywhere. You are sensible to its themes; you see and hear them everywhere in your experience, especially, it always seems to me, in apparently unrelated areas. Even the mass media, especially bad movies and cheap novels and picture magazines and night radio, are disclosed in fresh importance to you" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 211).

"I know you will agree that you should present your work in as clear and simple language as your subject and your thought about it permit. But as you may have noticed, a turgid and polysyllabic prose does seem to prevail in the social sciences. I suppose those who use it believe they are imitating 'physical science,' and are not aware that much of that prose is not altogether necessary. It has in fact been said with authority that there is 'a serious crisis in literacy'--a crisis in which social scientists are very much involved" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 217).

"Such lack of ready intelligibility, I believe, usually has little or nothing to do withthe complexity of subject matter, and nothing at all with profundity of thought. It has to do almost entirely with certain confusions of the academic writer about his own status (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 218).

"In many academic circles today anyone who tries to write in a widely intelligible way is liable to be condemned as a 'mere literary man' or, worse still, ' mere journalist.' Perhaps you have already learned that these phrases, as commonly used, only indicate the spurious inference: superficial because readable" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 218).

"The academic man in America is trying to carry on a serious intellectual life in a social context that often seems quite set against it. His prestige must make up for many of the dominant values he has sacrificed by choosing an academic career. His claims for prestige readily become tied to his self-image as a 'scientist.' To be called a 'mere journalist' makes him feel undignified and shallow. It is this situation, I think, that is often at the bottom of the elaborate vocabulary and involved manner of speaking and writing. It is less difficult to learn this manner than not.  It has become a convention--those who do not use it are subject to moral disapproval.  It may be that it is the result of an academic closing of the ranks on the part of the mediocre, who understandably wish to exclude those who win the attention of intelligent people, academic and otherwise" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 218).

"To write is to raise a claim for the attention of the reader.  That is part of any style.  To write is also to claim for oneself at least status enough to be read. The young academic man is very much involved in both claims, and because he feels his lack of public position, he often puts the claim for his own status before his claim for the attention of the reader to what he is saying (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 218).

" In fact, in America, even the most accomplished men of knowledge do not have much status among wide circles and publics. In this respect, the case of sociology has been an extreme one: in large part sociological habits of style stem from the time when sociologists had little status even with other academic men. Desire for status is one reason why academic men slip so readily into unintelligibility. And that, in turn, is one reason why they do not have the status they desire. A truly vicious circle--but one of which any scholar can easily break" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, pp. 218-19).

"To overcome the academic prose you have first to overcome the academic pose.  It is much less important to study grammar and Anglo-Saxon roots than to clarify your own answers to these three questions: (1) How difficult and complex after all is my subject? (2) When I write, what status am I claiming for myself? (3) For whom am I trying to write?" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 219).

"My first point, then, is that most 'socspeak' is unrelated to any complexity of subject matter or thought.  It is used--I think almost entirely--to establish academic claims for one's self; to write in this way is to say to the reader (often I am sure without knowing it): 'I know something that is so difficult you can understand it only if you first learn my difficult language.  In the meantime, you are merely a journalist, a layman, or some other sort of underdeveloped type'" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 220).

"To answer the second question, we must distinguish two ways of presenting the work of social science according to the idea that the writer has of himself, and the voice with which he speaks.  One way results from the idea that he is a man who may shout, whisper, or chuckle--but who is always there.  It is also clear what sort of man he is: whether confident or neurotic, direct or involuted, he is a center of experience and reasoning; now he has found out something, and he is telling us about it, and how he found it out. This is the voice behind the best expositions available in the English language" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 220).

"The other way of presenting work does not use any voice of any man.  Such writing is not a 'voice' at all.  It is an autonomous sound.  It is a prose manufactured by a machine.  That it is full of jargon is not as noteworthy as that it is strongly mannered: it is not only impersonal; it is pretentiously impersonal. Government bulletins are sometimes written n this way.  Business letters also.  And a great deal of social science.  Any writing--perhaps apart from that of certain truly great stylists--that is not imaginable as human speech is bad writing" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, pp. 221-22).

"(3) But finally there is the question of those who are to hear the voice--thinking about that also leads to characteristics of style.  It is very important for any writer to have in mind just what kinds of people he is trying to speak to--and also what he really thinks of them.  These are not easy questions: to answer them well requires decisions about oneself as well as knowledge of reading publics.  To write is to raise a claim to be read, but by whom?" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 221).

"One answer has been suggested by my colleague, Lionel Trilling, who has given me permission to pass it on. You are to assume that you have been asked to give a lecture on some subject you know well, before an audience of teachers and students from all departments of a leading university, as well as an assortment of interested people from a near-by city.  Assume that such an audience is before you and that they have a right to know; assume that you want to let them know. Now write" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 221).

"There is one last point, which has to do with the interplay of writing and thinking. If you write solely with reference to what Hans Reichenbach has called the 'context of discovery' you will be understood by very few people; moreover you will tend to be quite subjective instatement. To make whatever you think more objective, you must work in the context of presentations. At first, you 'present' your thoughts to yourself, which is often called 'thinking clearly.' Then when you feel that you have it straight, you present it to others--and often find that you have not made it clear. Now you are in the 'context of presentation.' Sometimes you will notice that as you try to present your thinking, you will modify it--not only in its form of statement but often in its content as well. You will get new ideas as you work in the context of presentation. In short, it will become a new context of discovery, different from the original one, on a higher level I think, because more socially objective. Here again, you cannot divorce how you think from how you write. You have to move back and forth between these two contxts, and whenever you move it is well to know where you might be going" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 222).

Gerth, Hans and C. Wright Mills (translators and editors).  1946 [1958] From MaxWeber: Essays in Sociology.  New York: Galaxy Books.

Mills, C. Wright. 1951 [1956] White Collar: The American Middle Classes.  New York:  Oxford University Press.

Gerth, Hans and C. Wright Mills.  1953 [1964] Character and Social Structure: the Psychology of Social Institutions. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc.

Mills, C. Wright. 1956 [1970] The Power Elite. New York: Oxford University Press.

Mills, C. Wright  1958 The Causes of World War Three.  London: Secker & Warburg.

Mills, C. Wright.  1959 [1976] The Sociological Imagination.  New York:  Oxford University Press.

Mills, C. Wright.  1960 Listen, Yankee:  The Revolution in Cuba.  New York:  Ballantine Books.

Mills, C. Wright.  1962 The Marxists.  New York:  Dell Publishing Company.

Mills, C. Wright.  1967 [1963] Power, Politics & People:  The Collected Essays of C. Wright Mills.  New York:  Oxford University Press.