File:C._Wright_Mills_(1916–1962).jpg · Wikimedia Commons · See Wikimedia Commons
OverviewAI-generated
C. Wright Mills (1916–1962) was an American sociologist and university teacher. Born in Waco, he died of a myocardial infarction in Nyack. His academic career included positions at Columbia University and the University of Maryland. Mills received a Guggenheim Fellowship for his work in sociology.
He is noted for works such as *The Sociological Imagination* and *The Power Elite*. Mills was educated at Texas A&M University, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and Columbia University. His personal library is held at the Harry Ransom Center.
Synthesized by Vinony from 33 facts across 6 sources: Wikidata, Crossref, Open Library, MusicBrainz, Last.fm, Vinony graph. Generated from structured data (not the Wikipedia text) and checked against those facts — may still contain errors.
Person · Open Library
- Born
- 1916-08-28
- Died
- 1962-03-20
- Works
- 45
via Open Library + Wikidata
Listeners · Last.fm
- Listeners
- 4
- Total plays
- 6
<a href="https://www.last.fm/music/C.+Wright+Mills">Read more on Last.fm</a>
Recent publications · Crossref
5 total works indexed
- Geant4—a simulation toolkit
· 2003 · cited 21,263x
- A global reference for human genetic variation
· 2015 · cited 17,770x
- Global burden of 369 diseases and injuries in 204 countries and territories, 1990–2019: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019
· 2020 · cited 15,951x
- Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Black Hole Merger
· 2016 · cited 11,696x
- Genome engineering using the CRISPR-Cas9 system
· 2013 · cited 10,904x
via Crossref · CC0
Quotes
- “To have peace and not war, the drift toward a war economy, as facilitated by the moves and the demands of the sophisticated conservatives, must be stopped; to have peace without slump, the tactics and policies of the practical right must be overcome. The political and economic power of both must be broken. The power of these giants of main drift is both economically and politically anchored; both unions and an independent labor party are needed to struggle effective.”
- “The two greatest blinders of the intellectual who today might fight against the main drift are new and fascinating career chances, which often involve opportunities to practice his skill rather freely, and the ideology of liberalism, which tends to expropriate his chance to think straight. The two go together, for the liberal ideology, as now used by intellectuals, acts as a device whereby he can take advantage of the new career chances but retain the illusion that his soul remains his own.”
- “If we accept the Greek's definition of the idiot as an altogether private man, then we must conclude that many American citizens are now idiots. And I should not be surprised, although I don't know, if there were some such idiots even in Germany.”
- “In a society of employees dominated by the marketing mentality, it is inevitable that a personality market should arise. For in the great shift from manual skills to the art of 'handling', selling and servicing people, personal or even intimate traits of employees are drawn into the sphere of exchange and become commodities in the labor market.”
- “The truth about the nature and the power of the elite is not some secret which men of affairs know but will not tell. ... No matter how great their actual power, they tend to be less acutely aware of it than of the resistance of others to its use.”
- “Most American men of affairs have learned well the rhetoric of public relations, in some cases even to the point of using it when they are alone, and thus coming to believe it.”
via Wikiquote · CC BY-SA
~33 min read
Encyclopedic overview
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 published widely in both popular and intellectual journals, and is remembered for several books, such as The Power Elite, White Collar: The American Middle Classes, and The Sociological Imagination, which was in 1998 named by the International Sociological Association as the second most important sociological book of the 20th century.
Mills was concerned with the responsibilities of intellectuals in post–World War II society, and he advocated public and political engagement over disinterested observation. One of Mills's biographers, Daniel Geary, writes that Mills's writings had a "particularly significant impact on New Left social movements of the 1960s era." It was Mills who popularized the term "New Left" in the U.S., in a 1960 open letter "Letter to the New Left".
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “C. Wright Mills” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.