Sociology

Innovations in demography, or in other social sciences, are determined mainly not by the inner development of the science itself but by the impingement of historical events.

—Kingsley Davis, “The Sociology of Demographic Behavior” (1959)

The preoccupations of sociology, or the objective study of human groups and collective processes, inevitably change in time, for historical development per se continually creates milieus and circumstances that have no precedent. By design, sociology deals with the society that is, rather than the society that might be, which is the domain of social philosophy (or society that were, say in pre-industrial cultures, which is anthropology). The aim of sociology is the accurate analysis of the status quo. Even within sociology’s short history as a self-conscious intellectual enterprise, the dominant questions and methods have changed several times; so that whereas the founder of American sociology, Lester Ward, desired a comprehensive view of the world and exemplary evidence of social evolution (particularly as prerequisites for continuing social reform), today’s academic sociologists tend to be more modest and more empirical, eschewing prescription, if not criticism as well, and also dividing their discipline into an increasing number of subject-centered specialties—sociology of law, political sociology, sociology of the family, medical sociology, etc.; so that first-level academic reputations can be made simply by dominating thought and research solely within a particular specialized area. The academic profession has also come to emphasize verifiable “scientific” data, which are usually based on surveys with a fixed set of questions that are typically asked mostly by graduate students and hired assistants, tabulated by junior professors, and finally interpreted by senior professors whose names customarily head the published report.

Even though the academic profession emphasizes scrutiny of small subjects and a comparably narrow range of queries, great sociological questions remain, often to be answered in more impressionistic (or less “scientific”) ways by writers “trained” outside the field—usually in law, philosophy or journalism. The greatest sociological questions invariably inspire the most consequential books; and in retrospect, we see that the major sociological studies published in America between 1945 and 1968 dealt with the unprecedented nature of two new societies—first, the “totalitarianism,” emerging in Germany and Russia in the thirties, that seemed significantly different from earlier despotic regimes; and, second, an American milieu that everyone alive sensed as more than a leap beyond the thirties. So, given the prevailing limitations of post-War academic sociology, it is scarcely surprising that the most perspicacious answers to these encompassing sociological questions came largely from non-sociologists.

Even experienced observers took an unconscionably long time to recognize that Nazi Germany and/or Soviet Russia had evolved into a new kind of society, partly because new realities, like innovative art, always at first defy immediate comprehension, but mostly because these societies devoid of freedom were at first so facilely equated with old dictatorships. (Beyond that, the leftist sympathies of most socially concerned intellectuals kept them from recognizing how closely Stalin’s Soviet society resembled that of Nazi Germany.) The first Americans to examine Germany and Russia with new perception were refugee scholars, many of whom had suffered totalitarianism at first hand—Bruno Bettelheim in his essays on concentration camps published during the War, Franz Neumann in his large book on the Nazi state, Behemoth (1942); Sigmund Neumann in Permanent Revolution (1942), which regards Nazi and Soviet societies as basically alike; and several intellectuals (sometimes pseudonymous) whose early analyses appeared in such anti-Communist left journals as Politics (1944-49) and Commentary (1944-). The most brilliant of this last group was Hannah Arendt; her masterpiece, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). (Another significant early attack on Nazi “romantic” consciousness was Metapolitics [1941] by Peter Viereck—curiously then the very young son of George Sylvester Viereck, who was at times Hitler’s best-known American apologist.)

Arendt, born in East Prussia in 1906, received her Ph. D. in philosophy from Heidelberg and did clandestine tasks for a Zionist group before her quick departure from Germany in 1933. She worked for Jewish organizations in Paris during the late thirties and then came in 1941 to America, where for two years she wrote a column for a German-Jewish newspaper. Begun in 1945 and finished in 1949, though not published until 1951, The Origins of Totalitarianism has since been revised several times, as well as amended by the work of others, yet never surpassed as a work of sociological synthesis. Levels beyond previous studies of totalitarianism—whether analytical, personal, or semi-fictional—this book still remains an extremely perceptive study of a peculiarly modern aberration.

Arendt perceived that Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia represented similar societies, contrary political sentiments and traditions notwithstanding, and thus that Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin were two competitors (and sometime collaborators) torn from similar cloth. What differentiated these new societies from the old dictatorships was the extent of their control. Whereas the authoritarian despots cared primarily about political and economic dominance and thus about limiting potential opposition, the totalitarian regimes wanted not just to abolish dissent but universally to inculcate a particular social morality and particular philosophical beliefs. As they aimed to control not just politics but everything in society, including education and the communications media, totalitarianism obliterated the traditional distinction between society and the state. Thus, the machinery of intrusive terror, functioning on behalf of the chosen philosophy, superceded merely restrictive law. “Terror is no longer used as a means to exterminate and frighten opponents, but as an instrument to rule masses of people who are perfectly obedient,” Arendt writes. “As techniques of government, the totalitarian devices appear ingeniously effective. They assure not only an absolute power monopoly, but unparalleled certainty that all commands will always be carried out.”

Whereas the old-style dictatorships ruled in the name of conquest or of traditional privilege, the will of the majority notwithstanding, the totalitarian leader rules in the name of the mass majority, usually with its support, but against the prefaces and rights of all coherent minorities; for the totalitarian aim is a uniform society—a classless, group-less, socially undifferentiated mass. As an authoritarian state suppresses opposition in the name of acknowledged law, its most natural allies lie outside everyday society, as in, say, the army. By contrast, as the totalitarian regime demands not only daily universal obedience on behalf of a social vision, it enforces active support with powers already in place within society—initially the police, in collaboration with the regime’s most fanatical sympathizers. “Total domination does not allow for free initiative in any field of life—for any activity that is not entirely predictable,” Arendt writes. “Intellectual, spiritual, and artistic initiative is as dangerous to totalitarianism as the gangster initiative of the mob, and both are more dangerous [to a totalitarian regime] than mere political opposition.” She shrewdly points out that Hitler and Stalin were not anti-revolutionaries, but post-revolutionaries who came to power by eradicating opposition as represented not only by their predecessors but by the prior political system itself; for the passionate realization of their social vision demanded the use of any means, including ruthless and widespread violence. It was Arendt’s point, original at the time, that romantic idealism, not cynicism, ultimately animated the totalitarian mentality, though the eschatological belief that everything envisioned by the movement’s ideology should ultimately be possible could nonetheless rationalize cynical, disreputable means.

Indeed, one of the more distressing implications of Arendt’s thinking—a theme subsequently developed in her On Revolution (1962)—is that a totalitarian society would be the inevitable result of every successful total revolution; for in order to realize the ideal of remaking society from the ground up, the incipient totalitarian must separate the populace from everything reminiscent of the old world. However, since the comprehensive transformation outlined in the ideology can never be achieved quickly on earth, if ever at all, the leaders’ continued parroting of the ideology inevitably creates a gap between intention and result. Thus, rather than admit defeat, not only as political leaders but as agents of an historical mission, they depend upon staffing all government positions with party members, which is to say true believers, and then upon “total terror,” such as the threat of concentration camps (themselves miniature totalitarian milieus), and especially the police “to translate into reality the [putative] law or movement of history.”

The difference between the old authoritarians and the new totalitarians remains the major theoretical formulation of Arendt’s sociological thought; and the most useful metaphors for this crucial distinction appear in her essay “On Authority,” which is included in Between Past and Future (1961):

As an image for authoritarian government, I propose the shape of the pyramid, which is well known in traditional political thought. The pyramid is indeed a particularly fitting image for a governmental structure whose source of authority lies outside itself, but whose seat of power is located at the top....The proper image of totalitarian rule and organization seems to be the structure of the onion, in whose center, in a kind of empty space, the leader is located; whatever he does—whether he integrates the body politic as in an authoritarian hierarchy, or oppresses his subjects like a tyrant—he does it from within, and not from without or above.

Not content with just characterizing this new society, Arendt devotes the first two sections of Origins to outlining these forces in modern history that made it possible. Here she continually combines historical knowledge with a philosophical intelligence capable of perceiving fine, but crucial distinctions, and of positing viable categories, as well as following an unconventional line of thought to an original conclusion. (Her willingness to incorporate so much within her overarching idea makes Arendt at times the victim of her own Hegelian idealism.) One section of her masterpiece traces the modern evolution of anti-Semitism, which she attributes to the secularization of the traditional religious idea of messianic selection—“that fantastic delusion, shared by unbelieving Jews and non-Jews alike, that the Jews are by nature more intelligent, better, healthier, more fit for survival.” She dialectically demonstrates how historical philo-Semitism ultimately fed into Hitler’s fantasy of Jews as the hidden motors of society. Indeed, it is Arendt’s brilliant perception to note that the most virulent anti-Semitism deals not in visible Jews but imperceptible ones—the hidden conspirators (dramatized in the counterfeit “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”)—who are then portrayed as related to visible but innocent Jews. Therefore, according to Hitler’s ideology, the exile to concentration camps and subsequent extermination of all visible Jews (and part-Jews) would eventually encompass the invisible ones too. Analogously, in Stalin’s ideological system, the invisible demons were “counter-revolutionaries,” to cite the epithet that could be applied to one enemy group and then capriciously shifted to another; that is exactly how Stalin used it to eliminate millions of Russians during several great purges. Arendt typically notes that Stalin, just before his own death, initiated an attack on the “Jewish doctors” that implicitly appropriated Hitler’s anti-Semitism.

In another perceptive stroke, Arendt also connects racism to imperialism; for though imperialism served as an economic palliative to late nineteenth-century depressions, race-thinking successfully provided the popular ideological rationale for subjugating primitive, non-Caucasian peoples, in addition to mobilizing “the mob” more effectively than other issues. Historically, one kind of racism intellectually inspired another, as well as legitimizing all visions of a messianic design that would be realized by the elimination of contrary (or impure) races. Also, within Germany and Russia grew Pan-German and Pan-Slavic movements to which “Nazism and Bolshevism owe more. . . [respectively] than to any other ideology or political movement. This is most evident in foreign policies, where the strategists of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia have followed so closely the well-known programs of conquest outlined by the pan-movements before and during the first World War.” Neither Hitler nor Stalin, she continues, “has hesitated to admit his indebtedness to the pan-movements’ ideology or to imitate their slogans.”

A final cause of totalitarianism lay within politics itself—in the popular twentieth-century fashion of discrediting not only parliamentary parties and regimes but also the electoral system itself, both customarily in the name of social ideals that claim to be above politics (and thus above cumbersome parliamentary processes). Arendt documents how both fascists and communists in pre-Nazi democratic Germany mutually collaborated, both explicitly and implicitly, in polarizing the German population to the political extremes. Finally, the five-hundred-plus pages of Origins convey a profound historical disillusion, not only with secular idealism (especially in the Hegelian-Marxian tradition), but also with the rootless opportunism of the age. Both fascism and communism are especially condemned for putting such a cheap value on individual human life; these rejections also inform Arendt’s highly abstract neo-conservatism in both The Human Condition (1958) and her subsequent sociological essays, riddled as they are with such sentences as “authority has vanished from the modern world.”

The theme of the unprecedented character of totalitarianism was echoed in other books—most notably in True Believer (1951), an aphoristic essay by a San Francisco longshoreman, Eric Hoffer; and in The Authoritarian Personality (1950), by contrast a mammoth, verbose and dogged social-psychological study of prejudice compiled by the refugee sociologist-critic Theodor W. Adorno and several associates. More significantly, this new awareness of the totalitarian mentality began to inform the study of past chiliastic radicalisms, all of which were saved from social dominance (and thus from pervasive evil) by either political limitations or messianic failure—the medieval and reformation movements scrutinized by the Englishman Norman Cohn in The Pursuit of the Millennium (1957), the American religious rebel Roger Williams in Perry Miller’s unsentimental biography (1953), and native anti-intellectualism in Richard Hofstadter’s essays (1963). Subsequent scholarship also showed in detail how the effectiveness of both Nazi and Soviet totalitarian rule varied in different places and different times.

Arendt herself returned to her great theme in the 1966 revised edition of Origins, where she admitted that Russia is no longer so strictly totalitarian, and in Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), which is another highly perceptive and immensely influential essay. If the earlier book dealt in sociological categories, drawn with remarkable detachment, Eichmann in Jerusalem focuses largely upon an individual enmeshed within the Nazi system—a personally cordial bureaucrat who justly claimed that he personally “never killed anyone” and that he broke no law then known to him, but whose “innocent” responsibility to his bureaucratic job of transporting Jews produced horribly inhumane results—the partial destruction of European Jewry. Contradicting the prior stereotype of the Nazi killer, Arendt portrays Eichmann as a typically “normal” modern bureaucrat, not unlike millions of other effective executives around the world, “genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliché.” This theme of the nihilistic bureaucratic personality connected her sociology of European phenomena of sociological analyses of others of unprecedented developments in American life.

II

We may distinguish two main lines of thought in the diagnosis of the present state of sociology. The distinction between them corresponds very roughly to that between an emphasis on pure science and one on historical understanding of unique problems.

—Barrington Moore, “Theory and Contemporary Politics” (1955)

The study of contemporary American society is, in one sense, an extension of journalism, which by definition reports the events of the day; however, sociologists intend to go about the task of contemporary understanding far more seriously than journalists. For one thing, sociologists define changes of longer duration. If journalism is meant to be thrown away tomorrow, or at least next month, books are kept for subsequent consultation; as a result their ideas are subject to continual criticism. Also, while sociological journalism, even at its most pretentious, resembles sociological fictions in focusing upon the colorful individual as representative of a massive trend, sociology itself starts with generalizations about social drift and then characterizes specific causes and individual effects. Nonetheless, even the most haughty sociologists of contemporary affairs depend upon both newspapers and quasi-journalistic intuitions in choosing their subjects and in formulating their queries. Journalists preceded sociologists in recognizing, for instance, that the Second World War created a radically different America, which was not only more cosmopolitan, thanks to personal experience abroad and the proliferation of mass media, but also more liberated from the constraints of tradition; and subsequent sociological studies confirmed this journalistic impression. Moreover, sociologists in industrial societies abroad recognized that changes observed here are likely to transpire there soon afterwards.

The most influential diagnosis of this new society appeared in The Lonely Crowd (1950) by the lawyer-turned-sociologist David Reisman, assisted by two journalists-turned-sociologists, Reuel Denney (who also published poetry) and Nathan Glazer. To frame their generalizations, they proposed a tripartite typology for understanding “the collective character of the U.S. people”: tradition-direction, inner-direction, and other-direction, each term supposedly defining the representative character of certain historical periods—respectively, the primitive and medieval, the post-Reformation and capitalist, and the contemporary. If the tradition-directed man assimilated the values and behavioral guides established in his society (and had no reason to consider alternatives), the inner-directed person internalized his parents’ understanding and acted upon inner conscience, often amidst distracting alternatives. The other-directed style, by further contrast, was typically responsive to a “peer group.” To illustrate the nature and ways of this new human type, Riesman and his colleagues quoted from interviews, sociological surveys, their own observations, and indubitably popular literature and movies (as well as anthropological analogies). At a time when academic sociologists were becoming more impersonal and “scientific,” this triumvirate claimed their research “is based on our experience of living in America—the people we have met, the jobs we have held, the movies we have seen.” Indeed, many readers found the book to be a remarkably accurate portrait of academic-urban America in the fifties; and particularly in its abridged paperback edition (1954), The Lonely Crowd became a staple of undergraduate sociology courses.

Its influence was based primarily on offering explanations for social changes that were commonly felt—the rise of truly national fashions, the new life of suburbia, the greater sociability of people, the conscious striving for “conformity,” the decline of both parental and religious influence, the increasing independence (and interdependence) of young people, and a general change in the emphasis of people’s aspirations away from work and jobs to leisure. (“Only in the upper classes, precursors of modern other-directed types, did the making of love take precedence over the making of goods.”) As much as Riesman and his associates continually insisted that this typology referred to abstract “types—they do not exist in reality,” their narrative successfully evoked images of reified characters performing on the stage of history. Nonetheless, his generalizations about the New American’s specific traits were often so arbitrary that the opposite characteristics could have seemed just as persuasive. As cocktail-party gamesters inevitably discovered, most readers were neither purely inner-directed nor purely other-directed, but both or somewhere between; and the researchers’ interviews with Americans, reprinted and interpreted in Faces in the Crowd (1952), served more to dispute and obscure that crucial difference than illuminate it. Of course, merely by announcing that other-direction was the emerging personal style, The Lonely Crowd also influenced as it diagnosed; for not only did its authors’ severe critique of the inner-directed psyche contradict the critical implications of their oxymoronic title, but the popularity of the book inevitably created a self-fulfilling prophecy that proved itself increasingly true. (Their actual prescription—an “autonomous” character able to overcome both constraints and conformity—had an influence more implicit than explicit.) Riesman himself became less consequential over the years, however, dealing critically but inconclusively with leisure, abundance, and higher education, as well as such historical subjects as Thorstein Veblen and Sigmund Freud; and perhaps the most important extension to Reisman’s theme (unacknowledged) appears in Erving Goffman’s ingenious examination of role-playing in The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life (1959).

Riesman’s attempt to discuss America as a single sociological unit had a precursor in And Keep Your Powder Dry (1943) by the anthropologist Margaret Mead. Indeed, the appearance of both books, only a few years apart, signified that the diverse States had finally evolved into a single social entity—riddled by all sorts of differences and conflicts, to be sure, but still unified enough for sociologists to talk about 150 million Americans as a “mass society.” That last term had European origins, but it seemed so applicable to America that nearly every post-War sociologist of note appropriated or implied it. The phrase “mass society” defined a rootless populace which possessed a single dominant language that, regional accents notwithstanding, could be nationally understood; personal and occupational mobility without an immigrant’s feelings of estrangement; electronic media that could broadcast the same program simultaneously everywhere in the country; fads that became visible all over at once; and both social atomization and Riesmanian other-direction. The phrase appropriately characterized the kind of society that became, with modifications, increasingly familiar in England, then in Germany, and then in France. While one threat of mass society was the disappearance of variety both in the total population and within particular communities, its genuine achievement lay in enabling all Americans to feel intimately involved with the whole. “The novelty of the ‘mass society’ lies,” writes the percipient sociologist Edward Shils, “in the relationship of the mass of the population to the center of the society. The relationship is a closer integration [than before] into the central institution and value system of that society.”

Another line of research examined what effects this mass society might be having upon the populace. Several observers noted a mania for “joining,” to establish social ties in lieu of lost traditional connections; but the sociologist Philip Selznick judged that most of these allegiances, unlike those of family and place, were less than firm. “Segmental participation refers to the partial commitment which a man may give to organizations in which he has a limited interest and which do not affect him deeply.” Selznick also noted that this half-hearted sort of association colors the quality of social participation, so that “individuals interact not as whole personalities but in terms of the roles they play in the situation at hand. This is characteristic of urban life and of formal organizations where only the functional relevance of participants is prized. The personalities of individuals are leveled; men deal with each other as abstractions rather than as whole persons.” As a less than totalitarian society, America would not become uniform through these developments; and one of the most probing endeavors in the continuing tradition of American community studies— Small Town in Mass Society (1958) by Arthur Vidich and Joseph Bensman—described a rural community’s vehement reactions, most of them vain and self-defeating, to the outside world’s inevitable encroachments. Increasing homogeneity notwithstanding, America was still far from unanimous about anything, as differences of geography, generation, climate and class still produced innumerable cultural disparities. The last theme of diversity also animated Alfred Kinsey’s monumental Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953), which had the additional virtue of overcoming scholarly taboos. As Clyde Klockholn put it, “The foremost significance of Kinsey’s work as an indication of long-term trends consists precisely in its being done at all.”

The great cultural homogenizer, particularly of the young, was popular culture; and the idea of a mass society, as well as the methodological example of The Lonely Crowd, inspired other sociologists to examine closely the movies, comic strips, popular music, newspapers, and especially television. Their tone varied from condescension to sympathy, usually in direct proportion to their perception; but the most profound study of the most powerful new medium did not appear with the first wave of scholarship, in the early fifties, but in the sixties. Though written by a fully credentialed Professor of English, Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media (1964) offered a highly original anatomy of television’s unprecedented nature and intrinsic capabilities, as well as relating its impact to other sociological themes. Much indebted to the communications-determinist historiography of his fellow Canadian, Harold A. Innis, McLuhan suggests that television has radically revamped the sensibility of contemporary culture, causing discontinuous forms to succeed linear ones, reorienting the individual’s sensory systems, and causing grave social dislocations between TV-people and print-oriented folk. McLuhan pointed out that since so many Americans watch the same television program simultaneously, the medium alone makes them a “mass society,” and the fact that children watch it so much makes television a “third parent” that is possibly more influential than the natal two in imposing values and manners on impressionable sensibilities. The shift from inner-direction to other-direction could also be traced to the shift from print to mass-media, and Riesman himself tentatively broached this connection in a 1955 essay that appeared in McLuhan’s highly prophetic intellectual journal, Explorations (1953-59).

The overbearing social institution of mass society is, of course, bureaucracy, defined roughly as a network many times larger than a family but still considerably smaller than a state—or, more precisely, an organization designed to accomplish a continuing multi-dimensional task by systematically coordinating the labor of many employees. Thus, it is scarcely surprising that the evolving ways of bureaucracy and its effects on individuals should have become one of contemporary sociology’s major issues. In fact, organizations of this kind were not new to society, or sociology; for perhaps the most profound analysis yet of their nature and purpose had already appeared in books and essays written early in this century by the German sociologist Max Weber. He and his countryman Robert Michels saw the modern predicament not in terms of capitalism versus socialism but bureaucracy versus democracy.

However, certain American bureaucracies incorporated many more people and a greater diversity of roles, for nothing before in human history was as immense or as complicated as either General Motors or the U.S. Department of Defense. Secondly, these bureaucracies experienced a revolution in communications—the telephone replacing the written memorandum—and then changes in power produced by this revolution. Thirdly, those involved became increasingly self-conscious about bureaucratic problems, thus inspiring a new intellectual discipline called “Management”; for it is indicative that the most penetrating studies of these new bureaucracies came not from accredited sociologists but from professors of management—Peter Drucker’s The Concept of the Corporation (1946) and Jay Forrester’s Industrial Dynamics (1961).

The bureaucratic executive’s loss of personal identity and social control became the polemical theme of C. Wright Mills’ first influential book, White Collar (1951), which gained for him a lay audience his writings never lost; for in spite of his notoriety within his academic trade, Mills became the single most influential university sociologist in the post-WWII decades, not only for younger Americans but also for intellectuals abroad. His books abundantly exhibited such attractive qualities as personal courage, a desire to transcend conventional thinking, and a decided flair for catch phrases, as well as a penchant for abstracting an implied attitude or position—a ghost in the machine—and then casting this spectra as a reified character upon the stage of history, where qualities and ideologies are dramatically portrayed as locked in mortal combat. Mills knew from his professional beginnings that the greatest sociologists ask the largest, most encompassing questions, in addition to making generalizations that can be personally verified but not precisely tested; and before turning thirty, he announced a consciously Balzacian ambition to write about all dimensions of American society. Indeed, no other academic sociologist of his generation wrote books about so many prominent subjects—the unions in New Men of Power (1948), post-WWII immigrants in Puerto Rican Journey (1950), the new middle classes in White Collar (1951), the upper classes in The Power Elite (1956) and his own profession in The Sociological Imagination (1958). In addition to an extraordinary study of American pragmatists, done originally for his doctorate but published posthumously, he also produced closely edited anthologies, two intellectually slight polemical treatises, innumerable essays and reviews on all sorts of sociological subjects.

Mills had more than enough energy and ambition to be a great sociologist, were he not undone by three tragic flaws—an inexplicable ignorance of contemporary technology and its impact on society; a masochism that drove him to overwork, motorcycles, drink, and a premature death at 46 (in 1962); and less love for empirical considerations than for his polemical purposes and his egomaniacal self. This last flaw becomes particularly apparent in a comprehensive analysis of all his books, whose similar structures as much as their overlapping ideas suggest that Mills had an encompassing, imperious intelligence that rushed roughshod over the possible evidence offered by his many subjects. His great polemical theme, which was more persuasive to some people than to others, held that the systems of modern society crush the individual spirit; and just as White Collar opens with searing descriptions of bureaucratic life reminiscent of Karl Marx’s portrayal of the working day, so The Power Elite opens by outlining an interlocking network of alliances, and The Sociological Imagination opens by exposing the human irrelevance of established styles of sociological research. Always eager, in his pet phrase, to relate “private troubles with public issues,” Mills knew his analyses implied the question of what might be done; but perhaps because he was ultimately influenced more by philosophical pragmatism than by Marx (and then by Franz Kafka’s image of a combative individual trapped in a mysterious but oppressive bureaucracy), Mills offered two kinds of answers, both of which were less ideological than tentative and existential. One kind stemmed from his search for political allies in society, and then his progressive disillusion, one to each book, with other men’s saviors—industrial workers, the alienated middle class, the purportedly guilty patricians, the sociologists, “the intellectuals.” Toward his own end, as both his search and his prose became more and more hysterical, Mills placed his best on “the students,” a few years before many of them (or their successors) became truly revolutionary. The second kind of answer revealed his egomania—the implicit but reiterated theme that if only the objects of his study accepted C. Wright Mills himself as their most influential advisor, they would be better served, or saved. Indeed, a recurring mythic form in his books embodies a damning description of the forces that hinder the progress of the hero (Mills himself, in several guises) and then a call to the reader for aid. In this respect, it is indicative that the most empirically satisfactory of his books is the analysis of the society he knew best, his own academic profession—the topic where, fortuitously, Mills’ pet myth most truly wraps up the evidence. This continual self-assertion explains why Mills’ books are finally more less ideological and less visionary than his polemical criticism initially leads the reader to expect. He appears obsessed less by power than by forms of powerlessness that are analogous, if not identical, to his own; for although many ideas and ideologies spin through his writing, the principal axis is the self that represents heroism as such more than any particular idea.

Though Mills’ attack on his own profession was exaggerated, it is still true and still ignored—the dominant academic figures and their protégés have indeed repudiated the great critical tradition by evading not only political engagement but also the great questions of the time. As the conservative sociologist Robert A. Nesbitt wryly noted, none of the classic analytical concepts of his profession “is historically the result of the application of what we are today pleased to call scientific method.” Sociological theorists, exemplified by Talcott Parsons at Harvard, aim for “the systematic interrelationship of many empirical propositions,” but in practice they offer mundane truths about static situations, largely written in an abstract language full of interminable sentences. Sociological empiricists, epitomized by Paul Lazarsfeld and his teams at Columbia University, appropriated van Ranke’s ideal of historiography as primarily the “value-free” inventory of data, mostly to discover, in practice, what should have become obvious to an inquisitive observer; it was commonly judged that such sociologists provided more information than insight. The professional demographers were slower than journalists at perceiving, among other developments, the post-War increase in fertility rates, and then their subsequent decline in the post-pill sixties. All academic schools seemed more concerned with establishing sociology as a respectable university-based research enterprise than with offering a critique, or even a comprehensive image, of American society. Two themes emerging from the academic profession’s surveys of its own achievements, such as Robert K. Merton’s anthology Sociology Today (1959), are self-conscious concerns with development of current methods and with contributing bits to a universally acknowledged body of knowledge. Moreover, those divisions, narrowly circumscribed into subject-centered specialties, mentioned at the beginning of this essay, inevitably lead to narrower queries and smaller discoveries, while the Parsonian emphasis on consensus (over conflict) produces investigations oblivious to the fact of social change and its causes. Though all this academic effort represents, one suppose, some kind of disciplinary progress, the self-certified profession made less contribution than brilliant individual outsiders to the great intellectual tradition of objectively understanding human groups and collective social processes in our time.

* * *

Adorno, Theodore W., et al. The Authoritarian Personality. New York: Harper’s, 1950.

Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951. Second ed. New York: Meridian, 1958. Third ed. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1966.

———. The Human Condition. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago, 1958.

———. Between Past and Future. New York: Viking, 1961.

———. Eichmann in Jerusalem. New York: Viking, 1963.

———. On Revolution. New York: Viking, 1963.

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———. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. Philadelphia, PA: Saunders, 1948.

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———. White Collar. New York: Oxford Univ., 1951.

———. The Power Elite. New York: Oxford Univ., 1956.

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———. The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford Univ., 1959.

———. Power, Politics, and People. Ed. by Irving Louis Horowitz. New York: Oxford Univ., 1963.

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———, with Nathan Grazer. Faces in the Crowd. New Haven, CT: Yale Univ., 1952.

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