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 professional celebrity, male and female, is the crowning result of the star system of a society that makes a fetish of competition. In America, this system is carried to the point where a man who can knock a small white ball into a series of holes in the ground with more efficiency than anyone else thereby gains social access to the President of the United States.”
—C. Wright Mills (1916–1962)
“Commercial jazz, soap opera, pulp fiction, comic strips, the movies set the images, mannerisms, standards, and aims of the urban masses. In one way or another, everyone is equal before these cultural machines; like technology itself, the mass media are nearly universal in their incidence and appeal. They are a kind of common denominator, a kind of scheme for pre-scheduled, mass emotions.”
—C. Wright Mills (1916–62)