C. Wright Mills

C. Wright Mills

Charles Wright Mills (August 28, 1916 – March 20, 1962) was an American sociologist, and a professor of sociology at Columbia University from 1946 until his death in 1962. Mills was published widely in popular and intellectual journals, and is remembered for several books. Among them The Power Elite, which introduced that term and describes the relationships and class alliances among the U.S. political, military, and economic elites, White Collar, on the American middle class, and The Sociological Imagination, where Mills proposes the proper relationship in sociological scholarship between biography and history.

Mills was concerned with the responsibilities of intellectuals in post-World War II society, and advocated public and political engagement over uninterested observation. Mills biographer Daniel Geary writes that his writings had a "particularly significant impact on New Left social movements of the 1960s." In fact, Mills popularized the term "New Left" in the U.S. in a 1960 open letter, Letter to the New Left.

Read more about C. Wright Mills:  Biography, Works, Legacy, Outlook, Awards

Famous quotes containing the words wright and/or mills:

    The man possessed of a dollar, feels himself to be not merely one hundred cents richer, but also one hundred cents better, than the man who is penniless; so on through all the gradations of earthly possessions—the estimate of our own moral and political importance swelling always in a ratio exactly proportionate to the growth of our purse.
    —Frances Wright (1795–1852)

    Not wishing to be disturbed over moral issues of the political economy, Americans cling to the notion that the government is a sort of automatic machine, regulated by the balancing of competing interests.
    —C. Wright Mills (1916–1962)