C.w. mills biography
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White Collar
White Collar: The American Middle Classes (1951) describes the forming of a "new class," the white-collar workers. In this book, he criticized specific people and ideas within his field.
Mills was worried that sociology was becoming too focused on just describing things as they are, instead of questioning and criticizing social life.
His father wanted him to go to Texas A&M University, but Mills found it "suffocating" and left after his first year. She also helped type and edit his work.
At Texas, Mills also met Hans Gerth, a sociology professor from Germany.
Even though he recognized that there is an inter-relationship between the individual person and their society as a whole that must be understood in the context of history and the nature of the people involved, Mills was unable to find viable solutions and methods of bringing about the social changes he saw as necessary to overcome the inequalities in human society.
Wright Mills's ideas continue to influence scholars today. Mills believed that understanding Marxism was important for all sociologists. Mills believed that political, economic, and military groups had the most power, not culture.
Mills never called himself a "Marxist" publicly. Listen, Yankee: The Revolution in Cuba.
Wright. Additionally, his outspoken opinion that social scientists should not only be observers of society, but should also take responsibility to act for the betterment of society based on their findings, stimulated others to act in this way. During World War II, Mills became friends with historians like Richard Hofstadter. He thought that the liberal model didn't work well to understand all of society.
Mills argued that large organizations made middle-class workers lose their independent thinking.
Mills was heavily influenced by Marxist thought:
- He echoed the idea of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels that "It is not the consciousness determinating the everyday life but it is the very life [pre] determinating the consciousness." [2]
- He was against any individualistic, reductionist, and obscure images of what constitutes society.
For example, if one person is unemployed, it's a trouble. 1959. Mills’ concept of the sociological imagination emphasizes the importance of recognizing the interplay between individual lives and larger social structures. The key factor is the combination of private troubles with public issues: the combination of troubles that occur within the individual’s immediate milieu and relations with other people with matters that have to do with institutions of an historical society as a whole.
Mills' own work drew heavily on Weber's ideas, applying them to the American social and political situation. ISBN 0710032544
- Mills, C. Wright.
Q: "The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relationship between the two in a society.” - C.W.Mills.