MILLS, CHARLES WRIGHT

born Aug. 28, 1916, Waco, Texas, U.S. died March 20, 1962, Nyack, N.Y. American sociologist associated with Marxism, with the theories of Max Weber, and with issues regarding the role of intellectuals in modern life. Mills received his A.B. and A.M. from the University of Texas in 1939 and his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin in 1941. As professor of sociology at Columbia University (from 1946), Mills sought to establish that social scientists should not be merely disinterested observers, engaged in what he called abstracted empiricism, but also activists asserting their social responsibility. He was concerned about the ethics of his sociological peers, feeling that free intellectuals often failed to affirm moral leadership, thus surrendering social responsibility and allowing the less qualified to assume positions of leadership. Mills's works focused on explaining and advancing the Marx-Weber tradition of economic determinism, and he qualified the idea of class by adding the category of status. All of his books were concerned with problems of social change, primarily in the United States. His analysis of the major echelons of American society appeared in The New Men of Power, America's Labor Leaders (1948), White Collar (1951), and The Power Elite (1956). Among his other works are The Sociological Imagination (1959), Listen, Yankee (1960), and The Marxists (1962). In his best-known book, The Power Elite, Mills explored the concept of an elite, or ruling class, based primarily on administrative and bureaucratic power rather than on the ownership of property. He viewed the power elite of the United States as the ruling group of the military-industrial complex, exercising arbitrary power in its own interests. A collection of Mills's essays appeared as Power, Politics and People (1963).