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In recent years we have witnessed a series of extraordinary scandals and crises exposing corruption, criminality and greed in different sections of Britain’s ruling class. The financial crisis, the MPs' expenses scandal and the phone hacking scandal still haunt politicians, bankers, the media and the police, however ever much they might want to sweep them under the carpet, and they all now face a crisis of legitimacy as a result. Yet the scandals and revelations keep coming: Jimmy Savile, Libor-fixing, the Hillsborough cover-up—to name just a few. Each implicates distinct groups in British public life and each has given us glimpses of the powerful at work.
Leveson may have chosen to focus on the practices of the press, but the phone hacking scandal was as much about corruption and collusion between business executives, politicians and the police as it was about misconduct by journalists. It revealed not just acts of criminality, but the flagrant subversion of the public interest by relatively small, interconnected groups of rich and powerful people.
Who are these greedy, corrupt few? What are they up to? Are they all in on it together? If we want to challenge the current system and build a more just and humane society, we need to understand how power works and how elites rule.
A good place to start is with the American sociologist C. Wright Mills, the father of modern elite theory. Mills rejected the prevailing liberal view of America as an egalitarian democracy, insisting that it was a society ruled by military, economic and political elites, with the mass of the population alienated from decision making. Over the next two weeks New Left Project will be revisiting Mills’s seminal text, The Power Elite (1956), exploring its impact, significance and relevance to our current political situation. The series will include contributions from leading elite theorists as well as an online exclusive from the man himself.
In the introductory piece published today, Daniel Geary, Assistant Professor of History at Trinity College Dublin and the author of Radical Ambition: C. Wright Mills, the Left, and American Social Thought, introduces C. Wright Mills and considers the significance and the limitations of his pessimistic radicalism.
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Update: You can now view all the articles in this series here.
To conclude our series, The Power Elite Revisited, NLP today publishes a tribute to C Wright Mills written by the late Ralph Miliband shortly after Mills’s death in March 1962. This article first appeared in New Left Review I/15, May-June 1962 and is available online exclusively at NLP.
I mourn the death of C. Wright Mills, bitterly and personally. We had, in the last five years of his life, become close friends. I am not minded to write a detached appraisal of his work and thought. But I think I can write about the man he was, and what he was about.
Mills was 45 years old when he died of a second heart attack last March, at his home in West Nyack, near New York. He had by then long established himself as the most interesting and controversial sociologist writing in the United States. With books like White Collar, The Power Elite and The Sociological Imagination, he had succeeded in proving to a new generation of students what most of their teachers had managed to conceal from them: that social analysis could be probing, tough-minded, critical, relevant and scholarly, that ideas need not be handled as undertakers handle bodies, with care but without passion, that commitment need not be dogmatic, and that radicalism need not be a substitute for hard thinking. With what he called ‘pamphlets’, like The Causes of World War III and Listen, Yankee, he had wanted, and managed, to reach a wider public, in the hope of doing what one man could against the brainwashing and intimidation to which his fellow Americans were, and are, exposed from all sides, day in day out.
Mills was as American as could be. He was born in Texas, and liked to recall that his grandfather, in the old days of one man one gun, had died, shot in the back. However, he not only fled from the intellectual desert of Texas as soon as he had graduated from its University; let his enemies make of it what they will, he also came to feel a deep alienation from America, its ethos, its politics, its way of life. His was not the snob dislike which some Americans feel for a country incapable of matching the hierarchical graces of Europe; nor the alienation which often accompanies the romantic vision of vanished America, rural, small-town, face-to-face. Mills’ interest in Europe was strictly sociological. Nor did he feel the need to look for radical inspiration outside America: the Wobblies would do quite well. And he was not, as some critics alleged, an égaré Jeffersonian, hankering for a pre-industrial age: he liked stainless steel, efficient heating systems, fast motorcycles. He was an excellent mechanic and professional with a camera. He would have made a first-class engineer. What he loathed about America was not its industrial strength, but the mess which a profit-oriented society had made, and cannot but make of its human and material powers; not America’s cars, but their built-in shoddiness, not television but its commercialised misuse. Caveat Emptor did not strike him as the last world in social wisdom.
Enters The Power Elite. It is easy but dishonest to attribute the corruption of a society to its people. Rousseau was right: the people are never corrupt. But they are often corrupted; by those whom it pays to corrupt, by those who have the power to do it. In White Collar, which he thought his best book, he had analysed the various kinds of corruption which had affected the middle layers of American society. In The Power Elite, he went on to locate the corruptors-in-chief, the men of the ‘higher immorality’, and found them in three interlocking groups: the corporate rich and the ‘warlords’ (those whom an un- expected disciple, Eisenhower by name, has called the ‘industrial-military complex’) and the political directorate.
The Power Elite is a rich and intricate book, written, like all that Mills wrote, in a compelling style, intense, muscular, alive. It is one of the very few books to glitter among the grey mass of what, in the United States, passed for social analysis in the frightened fifties. There is room for debate about much of its detail. But I don’t think there is much room for serious debate about the book’s general thesis, namely, that in America, some men have enormous power denied to everyone else; that these men are, increasingly, a self-perpetuating élite; that their power is, increasingly, unchecked and irresponsible; and that their decision-making, based on an increasingly ‘military definition of reality’ and on ‘crackpot realism’, is oriented to nefarious ends.
Mills was an angry man, with the disciplined, directed anger of the humanist in an irrational society—for what is humanism if not anger at unreason? His fiercest anger, however, was not with the Power Elite: for they were merely acting out the role cast for them by the social setting in which they were allowed to wield power; nor with American labour leaders, the men whom he had, in one of his first books, hopefully called the New Men of Power. True, they had failed to form an effective counter-weight to the Power Elite; worse, they had adopted its ethos and its purposes. But then, Mills had long given up (mistakenly, I think) the belief that organised labour could ever, in an advanced capitalist society, be the maker of radical history—the ‘labour metaphysic’, he called that belief. It was not the Power Elite, Labour or White Collar which angered him most, but defaulting academics and intellectuals.
To an extraordinary degree, Mills had something which is not very common among academics and intellectuals: an intense respect for the intellectual craft, for the world of ideas, knowledge and scholarship, for the intellectual as the high priest of reason and truth. He really liked only two kinds of people: those who were good with their hands, a carpenter, a mechanic, a gunsmith; and those who were possessed by the intellectual passion, as he was himself. He never made the vulgar mistake of taking seriously only those who shared his view of the world. Unlike many radicals (not to speak of anti-radicals), he was an intensely listening man. The basic requirement was not shared opinions, but honesty and knowledge, scholarship and relevance. Every working day (and every day was a working day), he was engaged, through books, essays, articles, newspapers, in a silent but active debate with fellow writers, anywhere. I have never seen anyone read as creatively as Mills did. He couldn’t even read a detective story without pencil in hand.
‘All social scientists’, he wrote, ‘by the fact of their existence, are involved in the struggle between enlightenment and obscurantism’. But he knew that there was an ‘ought’ missing from that proposition, that many social scientists, in the struggle between enlightenment and obscurantism, are on the wrong side, or refuse to be involved, which comes to the same. This is what roused him to indignation— conformist unthinking, reason at the eager service of unreasonable kings, sophisticated apologetics for the inexcusable, social scientists as shields of orthodoxy and bellboys of authority.
It is from that indignation that stemmed The Sociological Imagination. That book was both a denunciation and a plea: a denunciation of social science as abstracted triviality, as windy pretension allied to timid respectability, of the uses of social science for the purpose, not of challenge, but of adjustment; and a plea—for the big probe, for a social science ‘of direct relevance to urgent public issues and insistent human trouble’, for the social scientist as a man fired with the will ‘to make a difference in the quality of human life in our time’.
The trouble with Mills was that he never managed to emancipate himself from a view of the intellectual as the free man, in duty bound to help make others free. Such a romantic, naive belief is inconvenient; it poses a threat. No wonder he made enemies in the academic fraternity.
It was only in 1956 that Mills first came to Europe, on leave from Columbia University. He had, until then, been very America-oriented. In April 1957, he came to a week-end seminar in Surrey, organised by the Students’ Union of the London School of Economics. He was a big man, who looked bigger, reserved but intensely alert, deliberate in speech and coolly appraising, unassumingly at ease with the students, whom he bowled over, quite unselfconsciously. Shortly after, in July, he and I went to Poland, where Adam Schaff, as the philosopher of official Poland, and Leszek Kolakowski, as the most acute of the young Polish ‘revisionists’, showed us two parts of an equation, to which neither had the complete answer, nor could have.
Until then, Mills had generally shared the outlook of that particular stream of American radicalism which views the Soviet regime as inherently evil, and present-day communism as the frozen caricature of a uniquely penetrating body of thought. For the record, I might as well add here that the label ‘Texas Trotskyite’ which some people stupidly tried to pin on him was doubly inaccurate: he was born in Texas but he was not a Texan; nor did he ever identify himself with any of the 57 varieties of American Trotskyism. He simply thought Trotsky one of the most remarkable minds of the Marxist tradition—who but a fool or an ignoramus does not? His visit to Poland, two subsequent visits to Russia, in 1960 and 1961, and much talk and debate with intellectuals in the Communist bloc, left him intensely interested and pondering, ‘ambiguous’, as he put it, about much of Soviet society, better aware of its problems, its evils and its promise. Unlike the dogmatic anti-Communists of the American Left, whom he now saw as ‘members of the old futilitarians of the dead left’, Mills did not react to the Soviet bloc as if he had a vested intellectual and political interest in the perpetuation of all that was evil in it: his world would not be shattered by the humanisation of Soviet society and by the unfreezing of its Stalinist mould. Some of his friends thought and said that he had ‘gone soft’ on the Stalinists. It was an absurd charge, which deeply distressed him, more than any other attack from any other quarter ever distressed him. He was the last man to surrender his judgment and his perception to the dogmatists, of either camp. He was still ‘working on’ Communism and the Soviet bloc when he died: his last book, The Marxists, published shortly after his death, is the last testimony to the rare honesty he brought to that effort. One of his unfinished manuscripts was a Letter to a Russian Intellectual, a book in which he hoped to enter into a thorough examination of the problems, common and dissimilar, which intellectuals of East and West confront, or ought to confront.
Some men are pamphleteers by vocation. Mills was not. He became one in the late fifties, reluctantly, out of a deeply-felt need to present, to as wide an audience as could be reached, alternatives to the military definition of reality which he believed to be at the centre of his country’s foreign policies. What he was concerned with, he wrote about. By the late fifties, he had come to be haunted (as only idiots are not) by the fear that East and West were trapped in a terrible dialectic, which would ultimately turn the planet into a thermo-nuclear crematorium.
The detailed analysis and prescriptions of The Causes of World War III matter less here than its insistence on ‘the wholesale cultural and political default of NATO intellectuals during the past decade and a half’ as one of the causes of World War III. He had no illusions as to the likelihood of his proposals being acted upon ‘this week by the power élite of the United States’, the more so since, from their standpoint, these proposals ‘were indeed utopian, expensive, idealistic, unsound and, for all I know, traitorous’. Mills was speaking above all to intellectuals, ‘scientists and artists, ministers and scholars… those who represent the human intellect… who are part of the great discourse of inquiry and reason, of sensibility and imagination’. I don’t know how many were persuaded; but I know that many listened, and drew strength from what they heard. He had, in those last years, become a voice and was becoming the spokesman of a movement, ‘the big daddy of the New Left’, as someone sneered. He did not relish the role. For all his intensity and impatience, he was a singularly modest, unpretentious man. He was embarrassed by the fan mail which poured into his letter box and he hated being distracted from the big books he wanted to write. But there was no surcease. For suddenly, there was Cuba.
As Mills wrote in Listen, Yankee, he had not thought much about Cuba until the summer of 1960—18 months after Fidel Castro took power in Havana. Cuba was forced upon his attention by visits to Brazil in the autumn of 1959 and to Mexico in the spring of 1960. ‘In both Rio de Janeiro and Mexico City’, he recalled, ‘Cuba was of course a major topic of discussion. But I did not know what was happening there, much less what I might think about it, and I was then busy with other studies’. He decided to ‘look into’ Cuba: by the time he went there in the late summer of 1960, he had set up one of his beloved ‘files’ and had read voraciously on Cuba and Latin America. The book which came out of that trip was written in six weeks, at white heat, the way Tom Paine must have written Common Sense, for another revolution.
Mills was rather detached about his previous books: the next ones would be much better. But he was proud of Listen, Yankee, and with good reason. For it is a good and brave book, in which one Yankee tried to explain, well and bravely, through the fog of misrepresentation with which the American press had shrouded the island, why the Cuban revolution was by far the best and most decent thing that had ever happened in and to Latin America. Mills did not go into Cuba gooey-eyed, nor did he come out of Cuba gooey-eyed. As he wrote, ‘...I am for the Cuban revolution. I do not worry about it. I worry for it and with it’. He did believe that Castro, having been his own Kerensky and Lenin, could avoid becoming his own Stalin as well. His desperate anxiety to persuade his countrymen that the Cuban revolution should be helped, stemmed from his conviction that nothing was more likely to make the moustache and not the beard the symbol of the revolution than the United States’ attempt to destroy it. Long before it happened, he had come to believe that the United States would attempt to destroy the revolution by force. It filled him with bitter, helpless shame. In fact, it broke his heart. It was in December, 1960, that he suffered his first major heart attack. It was altogether fitting that, when Mills died fifteen months later, Fidel Castro should have sent a wreath to the funeral. For Mills was a casualty of the Cuban revolution, and of the revolution of our times.
C. Wright Mills cannot be neatly labelled and catalogued. He never belonged to any party or faction; he did not think of himself as a ‘Marxist’; he had the most profound contempt for orthodox social-democrats and for closed minds in the Communist world. He detested smug liberals and the kind of radical whose response to urgent and uncomfortable choices is hand-wringing. He was a man on his own, with both the strength and also the weakness which go with that solitude. He was on the left, but not of the left, a deliberately lone guerrilla, not a regular soldier. He was highly organised, but unwilling to be organised, with self-discipline the only discipline he could tolerate. He had friends rather than comrades. Despite all this, perhaps because of it, he occupied a unique position in American radicalism. He was desperately needed by socialists everywhere, and his death leaves a gaping void. In a trapped and inhumane world, he taught what it means to be a free and humane intellect. ‘Get on with it’, he used to say. ‘Work’. So, in his spirit, let us.
This article is part of NLP’s series, The Power Elite Revisited.
http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/tribute_to_c_wright_mills
by Daniel Geary
Fifty years ago, the world lost one of its great left-wing intellectuals. On March 20, 1962, C. Wright Mills died of a heart attack in his home in West Nyack, New York. Mills was born in Waco, Texas in 1916. A precocious and rebellious youth, he gravitated to the academic field of sociology, earning his BA and MA at the University of Texas at Austin and his PhD from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. In 1945, he took a job at Columbia University, where he would work for the rest of his life.
Mills drew on the classical sociological theorists including Karl Mannheim, Max Weber, and Karl Marx. He often employed the latest research methods of modern American sociology. Yet, Mills was always attracted to sociology because more than any other academic discipline it promised to investigate the big questions: how modern society was organized and how the life chances and psyches of individuals within it were affected. Though Mills made his name while teaching at the most prominent sociology department in the world, he grew disenchanted with the academic discipline of sociology. But he never lost faith in what he called the ‘sociological imagination,’ which he defined as that ‘quality of mind essential to comprehend the interplay of man and society, of biography and history, of self and world.’
In the early 1940s, Mills forged a commitment to left-wing politics that would last a lifetime. Radicalism offered Mills the holistic view of society that he craved and embodied his values of democracy, equality, and individual creativity. Mills came to radical politics in a fallow period for the American left. Most of his work was written in-between the two great radical upsurges in the twentieth-century U.S.: the ‘Old Left’ of the 1930s and 1940s, centered around industrial unionism and socialist parties; and the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s, which challenged racial and gender hierarchies as well as the Cold War. In the mid-1940s, Mills had a brief bout of enthusiasm for organized labor’s potential to reshape modern industrial society along more democratic lines that led to the publication of his first book, The New Men of Power (1948). However, he soon concluded that organized labor had been incorporated into the Cold War state and was no longer a promising force for opposition. Unable to identify any possible agency of social change, Mills’s major works, White Collar (1951) and The Power Elite (1956), expressed a sharply pessimistic radicalism. Lacking a sense of countertendencies or dialectical contradictions that might lead to future progressive change, Mills offered a bleak analysis of the United States: a mass society dominated by repressive large-scale bureaucracies controlled by an ‘interlocking directorate’ of corporate, military, and political leaders—the ‘power elite.’
The Sociological Imagination (1959) was Mills’s best book. More than just a compelling polemic against trends in academic sociology, it offered an expansive and inspiring vision of the power of social intelligence to comprehend the world and to imagine better alternatives. Mills’s richest book was White Collar (1951). From several different angles, it offered a portrait of middle-class workers at mid-century and the bureaucratic organisations that restricted their creativity and independence. The Power Elite (1956), however, was Mills’s most important book.
When Mills wrote The Power Elite, American intellectual discourse was dominated by a consensus liberalism that celebrated the postwar social order for its widely-shared prosperity and endorsed the Cold War battle against Communism. Mills challenged the ‘pluralist’ view of liberals that the U.S. was a democratic society in which interest groups checked the power of one another. The power to make the ‘big decisions’ of war and foreign policy, he argued, was not dispersed among interest groups but rather concentrated in the hands of a power elite: a small, mostly self-perpetuating group drawn from interconnected political, economic, and military circles. One of the most important contributions of The Power Elite was to focus attention on the militarisation of American politics and society. Mills overrated the extent to which top military brass held power equivalent to that of political and corporate leaders, but his critique of the ‘military ascendancy’ was a major departure from a liberal discourse that had mostly justified the startling growth of American military power as a Cold War imperative. Years before President Eisenhower would coin the term ‘military-industrial complex,’ Mills demonstrated how military spending served the needs of economic leaders to foster economic growth through creating a ‘permanent war economy.’
Versus liberals, Mills put forth a more expansive vision of democratic society: one in which individuals would not simply be represented by interest groups but ‘in which men at large are presented with genuine alternatives, the moral meanings of which are clearly open to public debate.’ However, Mills pessimistically concluded that the capacity for meaningful political debate had been lost in a hollowed-out American public sphere. The power elite, he argued, had the ability to ‘officially define’ reality: to control the terms by which citizens understood major political issues. Trapped in a mass society, Americans had literally lost the ability to think for themselves. Thus Mills could locate no source of resistance to the power elite within American society. Like liberals, Mills perceived postwar American politics as marked by a stable consensus.
It is ironic then that Mills had his greatest impact on the New Left – a mass social movement whose emergence his social theory failed to predict. Yet, toward the end of his life, Mills softened his pessimistic stance. In the late 1950s, he started to sense growing sources of resistance to the Cold War. He began to believe that new social actors such as culture workers and Third World revolutionaries could replace the complacent industrial working class as agents of social change. Mills contributed personally to efforts to reenergise democratic debate by writing The Causes of World War Three (1958), which warned of the dangers of nuclear warfare and Listen, Yankee (1960), which defended the Cuban Revolution. Mills viewed the New Left in international terms, reflecting the connections he had made with left-wing intellectuals in Latin American as well as western and eastern Europe. He played a pivotal role in importing the term ‘New Left’ from Britain to the U.S. with his publication of ‘Letter to the New Left’ (1960) in New Left Review. Though Mills died while the New Left was still germinating, he became one of its most influential thinkers. For example, his work had a major impact on the major white left-wing student organisation in the U.S.: Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), which drafted its famous Port Huron Statement just months following Mills’s death.
To be sure, Mills had his flaws and limitations. In particular, his analysis neglected racism and sexism. Driven by his radical pessimism, his analysis often exaggerated power elite control and the loss of individual creativity. In his own time, Mills’s bleak analysis helped inspire New Left activism. By stripping readers of their illusions about who ruled American society, Mills could spur readers to make their country more democratic. However, it is no longer shocking to assert that a small, self-selected power elite rules the U.S. Today the pessimism of The Power Elite might only confirm the cynicism of so many citizens that little can be done to change our worlds.
Yet Mills’s work remains relevant for those of us who today seek a more just and equal world that fosters individual creativity. The uncompromising nature of Mills’s critique stemmed partly from his ambitious vision of a society organised along truly democratic lines. We need to recover this optimistic faith that always lay beneath the surface of Mills’s pessimistic radicalism. More than ever, we need to imagine alternatives to neoliberal capitalism and social austerity. But more than that, we need to explain not only why change is desirable, but also how it is possible. Mills’s work cannot help us here. It can certainly help us reenergise radical social thought, but what we need most of all is to rekindle the left as a viable social movement.
This article is part of NLP’s series, 'The Power Elite Revisited'.
Daniel Geary is Assistant Professor of History at Trinity College Dublin and is the author of Radical Ambition: C. Wright Mills, the Left, and American Social Thought.
http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/power_and_intellect
by Aeron Davis
I first encountered C. Wright Mills as a 1980s politics undergraduate student. As part of a body of work on elite theory he was offered as an alternative to the larger, broader traditions of Marxist and pluralist work. Even then, elite theory was cast as a poor, stunted relation; the Liberal Democrats of political and social theory. The intellectual schema, produced by Mills and other critical elite scholars was too radical for pluralists and liberals and was rather under-developed next to the varied offerings of (post) Marxism. In the intervening years, elite theory has suffered the ignominy of becoming part of a past academic cannon, with the result that it is now relatively neglected.[1]
However, when returning to do doctoral work many years later, Mills’s work appeared to me as relevant as ever. In my research since, largely revolving around the sociological investigation of elites,[2] I have been regularly reminded of its significance.
In the 1950s, Mills offered an alternative critical framework for analysing those in power that went beyond the strong Marxist emphasis on class and the ownership of the means of production. Organisation, modern bureaucracies, nationalism, war and publicity were, and are, other factors around which elites based their thinking, relations and actions. For Mills there was not simply a top class with a shared class consciousness that naturally cohered around the same interests. Elite power structures were more fragmented and complex. He emphasised the sociological investigation of the structures and practices of power. This ‘meso-level’ approach offered something more than micro-level empirical studies or larger, abstract and quantitative maps of society and power. At the same time, much of what Mills did remains compatible with Marxist work, potentially adding an extra dimension to critical projects, both conceptually and empirically.
The subject of elite power seems even more relevant today. Since the 1970s, social and economic policy-making has continued to disproportionately benefit those in power. Inequality in the US and similar capitalist democracies has risen steadily. The top 1%, or rather 0.001%, are now wealthier than ever. The real incomes of the middle and lower classes have stagnated or declined in recent decades. There are fewer, more powerful chief executives, presiding over larger conglomerates. Their incomes are hundreds of times greater than average earnings. Individual international financiers control rather larger capital amounts than they ever did before. US politicians are even more in hock to corporate donors. In the US elections this year, a record $6 billion was spent on campaigning. So too, America’s military industrial complex seems as active as ever in its interventions around the world. The 2003 invasion of Iraq demonstrates that tiny groups of politicians and advisors are still able to push the US and other nations into major conflicts with little accountability.[3] Declining levels of voter turnout and trust as well as large social movement protests in mature democracies are testament to the growing dissatisfaction of publics with their elites.
But at the same time there is much that has changed since Mills’s 1950s account. World War Two and the Cold War do not dominate US political thinking as they did then. Geo-politics has changed tremendously, with multiple regime changes and a proliferation of international institutions and treaties. Globalisation has proceeded with the growth of international transport, communication and finance. Financialisation and its consequences have transformed industry, trade and national economies. The ‘mass society’ of the 1950s, critiqued by Mills, now appears a rather outdated notion. Employment in mature economies has continued to shift from large-scale production to service industries and smaller scale production units. The mass media, so centralised and dominant, continues to be owned by large conglomerates, but is also now fragmented in form and dispersed in multiple ways. Civil society networks have flourished. The shrinking industrial labour movement has been balanced by the rise of multiple, organised interest groups, campaigning on the environment, civil rights, gender equality and consumer rights.
All these changes, amongst others, have a significant bearing on how we might now identify elite sectors, elite intermediaries, and the basis on which elites hold and exercise power in the twenty-first century. In terms of today’s power elites, critics previously argued that Mills had over-stated the strength of American military elites. This seems more the case now. Although US military expenditure and activity remain high, it is politicians who make the key decisions on budgets and armed conflicts. One also has to draw firmer distinctions between corporate and financial elites. Financiers were an important intermediary group for Mills. Now they are a powerful elite in their own right, probably the most powerful elite group operating in advanced economies. While some of their interests coincide with corporate and political elites, other goals may be quite different. The composition of elite networks has also become far more international since Mills wrote The Power Elite. The top 0.001% of the US, Russia or elsewhere, may have more in common with each other than they do with their national citizenry. All of this also suggests that political elites may be rather less powerful than they once were. The combination of international institutions, high finance and extended techno-managerial bureaucracies has restricted their choices and actions.
As for power elites taken as a whole, I would argue that two contradictory trends are in evidence. On the one hand, elites appear wealthier and more powerful than ever, relative to ordinary citizens. The ranks and incomes of the super rich grow annually. The top 1% now own a third of US net worth, including 40% of its financial wealth. Fewer politicians, CEOs and financiers make decisions that affect far larger publics (the US population has doubled since the 1950s). Meanwhile, fewer mega companies have come to dominate their market sectors. Just half a dozen media conglomerates own a majority of all media in the US, from film and music to publishing and news. Extensive public relations and lobbying operations have developed to enable management of news media and public debate, as well as the production of specialist information.
On the other hand, ruling elites appear more constrained by circumstances. Politicians, financiers and CEOs all know rather less than they did about those sectors they manage (elite ignorance was also a theme in Mills’s work). They are professional leaders, lacking experience or knowledge about what they decide on. It is a world of technical expertise, complexity and risk. Thus elites are more reliant on ‘experts’ and technicians to advise them, many of whom have specialist knowledge and narrow outlooks. Investment bankers can no longer understand complex financial products created by people with Maths PhDs. Politicians are not equipped to challenge expert advice on economics, military capabilities, health systems and a wealth of other policy areas. Large, complex state and international bureaucracies and legal systems make the implementation of elite decisions far more problematic and slow. CEOs and politicians are moved on from their positions ever-more rapidly. So too, the erratic power of a powerful and varied news media has offered greater challenges to elites wishing to gain or maintain power. US politicians, more than ever, are dependent on favourable news outlets and large financial war chests to fund advertising blitzes. Businesses, such as Barclays, News International and BP, can be hurt by extensive negative media coverage. 24 hour instant news and alternative news generators, make elite media management a far more difficult task. Consequently, the ruling lives of today’s elites, despite their huge rewards and retirement funds, can be nasty, brutish and short.
In effect, decision-making and wealth, and hence power, are more concentrated and centralised, but the wielding of power by individuals may be more constrained. The mechanisms of control, from financial to new ICT advances, are more inhuman and unforgiving, even for ruling elites. The range of intermediaries, who have an influence on elites, has extended. Journalists, editors, technical and expert networks, accountants and bureaucrats, at home and abroad, both aid and restrict elites. Risks and consequences are difficult to fathom. Paradigm shifts are harder to achieve.
The changes in elite personnel, as well as in the basis and exercise of their power, do not in any way make Mills’s work irrelevant. Indeed, the need to investigate elites and elite power structures seems as pressing as ever. Engagement with higher-level social theory, or extensive survey-based research, may be more intellectually attractive or score well on research exercises. General condemnations of neoliberalism may keep critical spirits up, as may studies of counter-cultural trends, consumers and opposition movements. But, if social scientists want to engage with contemporary questions of power, then more sociological-style investigations of elites should be encouraged. And, intellectually, Mills offers as good a conceptual starting point as any for such projects.
This article is part of NLP’s series,'The Power Elite Revisited'.
Aeron Davis is Professor of Political Communication at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He is the author of Public Relations Democracy (MUP, 2002), The Mediation of Politics (Routledge, 2007), Political Communication and Social Theory (Routledge, 2010), and Promotional Cultures (Polity, 2013).
References
[1] See for example G. William Domhoff, ‘Mills’s The Power Elite, 50 Years Later’, Contemporary Sociology, Vol. 35, 2006, pp.547-550; and Mike Savage and Karel Williams (eds.), Remembering Elites, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008.
[2] e.g. Aeron Davis, Political Communication and Social Theory, Routledge, 2010; and Aeron Davis, The Mediation of Power: A Critical Introduction, Routledge, 2007.
[3] See for example Ha-Joon Chang, 23 Things They Didn’t Tell You About Capitalism, London: Penguin/Allen Lane, 2010; and Charles Ferguson, Inside Job: The Financiers Who Pulled Off the Heist of the Century, Oxford: Oneworld, 2012.
http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/the_shifting_contours_of_elite_power
by Steven Lukes
The Power Elite was in part a denunciation: a sharp indictment of ‘the intellectual community’ of Eisenhower’s America for failing to provide ‘knowledge of the power elite and of their decisions.’ The intellectuals, and more particularly C. Wright Mills's fellow social scientists, had failed to live up to the requirements of democracy, which ‘implies that those who bear the consequences of decisions have enough knowledge—not to speak of power—to hold the decision-makers accountable.’
Instead they had embraced ‘the official view of the formal democratic system of power, the standard view of most academic social scientists’ of the time: the view that there is a plurality of ‘middle powers’, the ‘image of a balancing society in which no unit of power is powerful enough to do more than edge forward a bit at a time, in compromised countervailance with other such forces, and in which, accordingly, there is no unity, much less co-ordination, among the higher circles.’
The power elite, he argued by contrast,
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 than 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 consequence than the decisions they do make. For they are in command of the major hierarchies and organisations of modern society. They rule the big corporations. They run the machinery of the state and claim its prerogatives. They direct the military establishment. They occupy the strategic command posts of the social structure, in which are now centred the effective means of the power and the wealth and the celebrity which they enjoy.
The indictment was telling: Mills did mount a serious challenge to the complacent pluralist picture of American democracy—‘the theory of balance’—then prevalent, not least by pointing to the significance of failures to decide and act, as indicated in the passage just quoted. But the political scientists had a comeback, advanced by Robert Dahl, defender of the pluralist model at both local and national levels and theorist of ‘polyarchy.'
In ‘A Critique of the Ruling Elite Model' Dahl, reasonably enough, asked for evidence of the unity of the elite and of its workings. For Dahl, who was a behaviouralist, and his colleagues and followers this meant evidence in the form of key decisions generating significant outcomes. As we have seen, Mills had an effective answer to such an exclusive focus. What is not decided upon, by never reaching the policy agenda, or by being excluded from it, can be even more consequential, than what is. On the other hand, Dahl was right to note how little evidence Mills offered to support his claims. Reading The Power Elite you will search in vain for detailed causal claims: for mechanisms that link what those in elite positions do (or don’t do) and specific outcomes. Nevertheless, I agree with Alan Wolfe, who wrote an Afterword to the book when republished in 2000, that if ‘the test of science is to get reality right, the very passionate convictions of C. Wright Mills drove him to develop a better scientific grasp of American society than his more objective and clinical contemporaries.’ It is true that ‘not much of the academic sociology of the 1950s has survived, while The Power Elite is rivalled by only very few books in terms of its longevity. In his own way, Mills contributed much to the understanding of his own era.’
But to what extent does the book offer readers a basis for grasping the reality of American society today? The answer to that question can only be complex and so we need to distinguish three different aspects of the book’s argument.
First, there is the democratic impulse that drives it, which for Mills called for what is often called ‘critique’ or ‘demystification’: the activity of unveiling or unmasking illusions propagated by compliant intellectuals and accepted as the truth by what he (in a disturbingly elitist phrase) called ‘the masses.’ The central illusion to be exposed as such was, as indicated above, that of pluralist democracy: ‘the image of a balancing society’ in which no group or faction regularly prevails. It was all the easier to believe in this illusion because of the notion, popular in the U.S. in the 1950s and early 1960s, that modern industrial society had attained what Daniel Bell called ‘the end of ideology.’ As Seymour Martin Lipset argued, the basic, politically divisive issues about how to organise an advanced industrial society had been solved (a notion resurrected after the fall of Communism into a very brief after-life in Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History). But we are now, in 2012, living in an utterly different political and ideological universe, where the electorate is deeply polarised along ideological lines and what ‘balancing’ there is takes the form of political gridlock. There are plenty illusions left to unveil but nobody can suppose that American democracy is a well-functioning, harmonious political order based on what David Riesman called ‘the power dispersal of veto-groups.’ Indeed, one central issue that divides the contending ideologies is the very question of where power lies in American society today and who its targets or victims are.
Which leads us to the second aspect of Mills’s argument worth attending to: namely, his own conception of power. Does it help us to attain a non-illusory answer to that question? It is striking that the power of the members of Mills's power elite is very narrowly conceived. Their power resources derive solely from their official positions at the head of ‘the major hierarchies and organisations’—specifically, the government, the military and large corporations—‘the strategic command posts of the social structure.’ Individuals are powerful actors because they occupy leading positions in these central institutions. There is within this conception no room for or reference to other kinds of power: for example, the power to influence ideas and shape prevailing commonsense, to mobilise support for and against policies and even to ‘manufacture consent.’ Most significantly, Mills’s approach, in common with ‘elite theory’ generally, totally neglects what we might call extractive power—the power to extract, preserve and augment material power resources. It is true that Mills writes about ‘the corporate rich’ but only in terms of their corporate power. As the author of a recent book on ‘oligarchy’ (Jeffrey A. Winters, Oligarchy, Cambridge University Press, 2011) has noted, this fails to account for the materially-based power of the super-rich, whose wealth and incomes are sedulously preserved and defended by the democratic state—the power, in short,
of those who control high concentrations of wealth. They remain powerful whether or not they are the best at what they do, organisations are complex, or they hold any formal offices.
Such materially-based oligarchs of course existed in the 1950s but their significance is far greater today, as material inequality soars without apparent limit. An adequate account of today’s power elites must seek knowledge of the impact of that power on society at large, both direct (as fostered, for instance by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision) and indirect. In part their very existence has consequences for social relations and social consciousness, but they also influence ‘the ordinary environments of ordinary men and women’ in ways that are quite independent of whatever corporate power they may possess. And what are the prospects of turning such knowledge into the democratic power of holding this power elite accountable?
The third aspect of the argument of The Power Elite is its exclusively national focus: it exhibits what is sometimes called ‘methodological nationalism.’ The powerful are viewed in abstraction from the global environment: their power resources, the impact of their power and their interests, preoccupations and interconnections are all located within the United States. Such an approach is, of course, implausible today and was, indeed, misleading then.
Perhaps most plausible then was Mills’s portrayal of the military ‘warlords.’ At the height of the Cold War the future author of The Causes of World War Three (1958) could write that they, ‘along with their fellow travellers and spokesmen, are attempting to plant their metaphysics firmly among the population at large,’ to propagate the sense of ‘an emergency without a foreseeable end,’ so that ‘war or a high state of war preparedness is felt to be the normal and seemingly permanent condition of the United States.’ Alan Wolfe, in his 2000 Afterword, rightly discounted this prophecy, pointing to the decline of domestic support for a large and permanent military establishment. Most Americans, he suggested, ‘just want to get on with the business of making enough money to lead the best lives they can.’ In the 1990s, he observed, ‘opposition to military adventures abroad has seriously curtailed the ability of the military to have its way in both foreign and domestic policy;’ the American people would no longer be attracted by ‘the rhetoric of emergency—and with it the need for significant personal sacrifice.’ And yet within three years the political, not the military, elite led the US to war in both Afghanistan and Iraq, making effective use of the rhetoric of emergency and without any need for significant personal sacrifice.
What is least plausible today is Mills’s close-up picture of the big corporations and the machinery of the state, largely neglecting the world without. Business is ever more global in its operations, seeking profits through lower labour costs abroad and profitable markets everywhere, and in its structures and personnel, and corporate elites are increasingly transnational. Increasingly some corporations no longer carry an identifiable national identity and, despite the international regulating organisations, they have more and more ways to elude regulations and restrictions imposed by states, to which corporate elites have ever more tenuous ties. And the state elites are, accordingly, less and less in control of the economic environment on the success of which their legitimacy depends, and ever more preoccupied with reacting to and seeking to affect developments beyond their borders. These developments are nowhere better illustrated than by the current Euro crisis and nowhere better described than in the prophetic pages about the globalisation of capitalism in The Communist Manifesto. They were, of course, at work in the 1950s. The United States has for over a century played the crucial hegemonic role of maintaining the wider system, and in particular preserving it from the worst effects of crises. Its state elite, despite its close symbiosis with the corporate elite, has at times put defending the ever more global capitalist markets from disaster before advancing the interests of U.S. corporations. Thus, for instance, the United States’s role in reviving the European economies after the Second World War meant the prioritizing of global over national corporate interests. But the international situation and foreign policy only appear in the index of The Power Elite in relation to the military.
Yet this book does, without question, pass the test of being one of the classics of sociology. It confronts a range of fundamental issues, methodological, substantive and normative, it treats them boldly and systematically, and it is inspired by a distinctive vision. Its call to social scientists to expose the workings of power remains as urgent as ever. And its clear and vivid argument enables us to discern what still holds true in its account of where power lies in the present-day United States and to distinguish this from the ways in which it is truer to its time than to ours.
This article is part of NLP’s series, 'The Power Elite Revisited'.
Steven Lukes is Professor of Sociology at New York University. He is the author of many books, including 'The Curious Enlightenment of Professor Caritat' (1995), 'Power: A Radical View' (Expanded Edition, 2004) and 'Moral Relativism' (2008).
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