C. Wright Mills Would Have Been a Blogger

Growing up in Rockland County, my dad would talk about the famous college professor who drove his motorcycle from our town into Columbia every day. I’ve been coming back to C. Wright Mills this week, because he’s unexpectedly fitting into an article that I’m writing. I stumbled across this bio of Mills and was struck by how well he fits in with the ongoing blogger discussion of academics as public intellectuals.

Mills wrote scholarly works but, in keeping with the style of a public intellectual, he was also a pamphleteer, a proclivity that often disturbed his colleagues and, in one of the more odious forms of academic hubris, led some to dismiss him as a “mere journalist.” In fact, this dismissal may, in addition to his boldness in attacking the big themes of social theory and analysis, account for the sad truth that since the late 1970s his major works are virtually unread in social science classrooms, have disappeared from many scholarly references, and are largely undiscussed in the academic trade. In the last decade of his life, manifestos and indictments of the prevailing social and political order issued from his pen as frequently as sociological works. In fact, The Power Elite, which has inspired a sub-discipline whose academic practitioners include G. William Domhoff, America’s leading consumer advocate and anti-corporate campaigner, Ralph Nader, and a veritable army of “public interest” researchers, has always been controversial on theoretical grounds, but also, despite its often meticulous and comprehensive collection of “data,” criticized for lack of objectivity in its clear democratic bias. In these days when most members of the professorate have retreated from public engagement except as consultants for large corporations, media experts, and recipients of the grant largesse of corporate foundations and government agencies who want their research to assist in policy formulation, or confine their interventions to professional journals and meetings, Mills remains an embarrassing reminder of one possible answer to this veritable privatization of legitimate intellectual knowledge. In 1939 his colleague Robert S. Lynd published a probing challenge to knowledge producers of all sorts called Knowledge for What? He asked the fundamental question: to whom is the knowledge producer responsible? To the state? To private corporations? To publics that are concerned with issues of equality social justice? (Robert S. Lynd, 1939)