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Charles Wright Mills war ein US-amerikanischer Soziologe. Er beschäftigte sich insbesondere mit den Machtstrukturen moderner Gesellschaften und der Rolle der Intellektuellen in der US-amerikanischen Gesellschaft der Nachkriegszeit. Mills Werke wurden zu soziologischen Klassikern der Herrschafts- und Elitesoziologie, insbesondere des Power Structure Research.

Seine bekanntesten Werke sind Die Machtelite, in der er das Zusammenwirken der politischen, militärischen und wirtschaftliche Eliten analysiert; White Collar: The American Middle Classes untersucht die moderne Mittelklasse; The Sociological Imagination stellt den Zusammenhang dar, der zwischen der subjektiven Erfahrung des Einzelnen in seiner individuellen Biografie mit der Struktur der Gesellschaft und der geschichtlichen Entwicklung der Gesellschaft besteht.

Mills betonte in seinem Werk die Verantwortung des Intellektuellen in der Gesellschaft der Nachkriegszeit. Sein Biograph Daniel Geary urteilt, Mills Schriften hätten einen bedeutenden Einfluss auf die gesellschaftliche Bewegung der Neuen Linken in den 60er Jahren gehabt. Mills soll den Ausdruck „New Left“ populär gemacht haben, als er 1960 seinen offenen Brief an die Neue Linke veröffentlichte. Wikipedia  

✵ 28. August 1916 – 20. März 1962
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Charles Wright Mills: Zitate auf Englisch

“These men have replaced mind with platitude, and the dogmas by which they are legitimated are so widely accepted that no counterbalance of mind prevails against them. They have replaced the responsible interpretation of events with the disguise of events by a maze of public relations.”

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C. Wright Mills buch The Power Elite

The Power Elite (1956)

“IBM Plus Reality Plus Humanism=Sociology”

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C. Wright Mills

Power, Politics, and People Boston: Beacon Press, (1963).
1960s

“The idea of the elite as composed of men and women having a finer moral character is an ideology of the elite.”

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C. Wright Mills buch The Power Elite

Quelle: The Power Elite (1956), p. 14.

“One great lesson that we can learn from its systematic absence in the work of the grand theorists is that every self-conscious thinker must at all times be aware of — and hence be able to control — the levels of abstraction on which he is working. The capacity to shuttle between levels of abstraction, with ease and with clarity, is a signal mark of the imaginative and systematic thinker.”

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C. Wright Mills buch The Sociological Imagination

The Sociological Imagination (1959)

“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.”

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C. Wright Mills buch The Power Elite

Quelle: The Power Elite (1956), p. 4.

“It is not characteristic of American executives to read books, except books on 'management' and mysteries. … Those who who do venture into this arena … are looked upon by their colleagues with mingled awe and incredulity.”

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C. Wright Mills buch The Power Elite

Quelle: The Power Elite (1956), p. 130.

“The top of modern American society is increasingly unified and often seems wilfully co-ordinated: at the top there has emerged an elite of power. The middle levels are a drifting set of stalemated balancing forces: the middle does not link the bottom with the top. The bottom of this society is fragmented, and even as a passive fact, increasingly powerless:at the bottom there is emerging a mass society.”

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C. Wright Mills buch The Power Elite

The Power Elite (1956)

“It is the political task of the social scientist — as of any liberal educator — continually to translate personal troubles into public issues, and public issues into the terms of their human meaning for a variety of individuals. It is his task to display in his work — and, as an educator, in his life as well — this kind of sociological imagination. And it is his purpose to cultivate such habits of mind among the men and women who are publicly exposed to him. To secure these ends is to secure reason and individuality, and to make these the predominant values of a democratic society.”

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C. Wright Mills buch The Sociological Imagination

The Sociological Imagination (1959)

“The American elite does not have any real image of peace — other than as an uneasy interlude existing precariously by virtue of the balance of mutual fright. The only seriously accepted plan for peace is the full loaded pistol. In short, war or a high state of war-preparedness is felt to be the normal and seemingly permanent condition of the United States.”

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C. Wright Mills buch The Power Elite

The Power Elite (1956)

“[A]s a proportion of the labor force, fewer individuals manipulate things, more handle people and symbols.”

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C. Wright Mills buch White Collar: The American Middle Classes

Quelle: White Collar: The American Middle Classes (1951), P. 65.

“In the formulas of 'personnel experts', men and women are to be shaped into the 'well rounded, acceptable, effective personality.' Just like small proprietors, they cannot higgle over prices, which are fixed, or 'judge the market' and accordingly buy wisely.”

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C. Wright Mills buch White Collar: The American Middle Classes

White Collar: The American Middle Classes (1951)

“For the first time in American history, men in authority are talking about an 'emergency' without a foreseeable end,…Such men as these are crackpot realists: in the name of realism they have constructed a paranoid reality all their own.”

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C. Wright Mills buch The Power Elite

The Power Elite (1956)

“An expensive arms race, under cover of the military metaphysic, and in a paranoid atmosphere of fright, is an economically attractive business. To many utopian capitalists, it has become the Business Way of American Life.”

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C. Wright Mills

The Causes of World War Three (1960)

“America is a nation with no truly national city, no Paris, no Rome, no London, no city which is at once the social center, the political capital, and the financial hub.”

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C. Wright Mills buch The Power Elite

Quelle: The Power Elite (1956), P. 47.

“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.”

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C. Wright Mills

The New Men of Power (1948), p. 281.
1940s

“They know of no solutions to the paradoxes of the Middle East and Europe, the Far East and Africa except the landing of Marines. Being baffled, and also being very tired of being baffled, they have come to believe that there is no way out—except war—which would remove all the bewildering paradoxes of their tedious and now misguided attempts to construct peace. In place of these paradoxes they prefer the bright, clear problems of war—as they used to be. For they still believe that "winning" means something, although they never tell us what.”

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C. Wright Mills

The Causes of World War Three (1960)

“For the corporation executives, the military metaphysic often coincides with their interest in a stable and planned flow of profit; it enables them to have their risk underwritten by public money; it enables them reasonably to expect that they can exploit for private profit now and later, the risky research developments paid for by public money. It is, in brief, a mask of the subsidized capitalism from which they extract profit and upon which their power is based.”

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C. Wright Mills

The Causes of World War Three (1960)

“The broadening of the economic order which came to be seated in the individual property owner… dramatized by Jefferson's purchase of the Louisiana Territory… "The supremacy of corporate economic power… consolidated by the Supreme Court decision of 1886 which declared that the Fourteenth Amendment protected the corporation… [the New Deal, leading to], within the political arena, as well as in the corporate world itself, competing centers of power that challenged those of the corporate directors.”

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C. Wright Mills buch The Power Elite

Quelle: The Power Elite (1956), P. 270-272; key shifts in power relations which Mills contends have brought us to the current state.

“Those in authority within institutions and social structures attempt to justify their rule by linking it, as if it were a necessary consequence, with moral symbols, sacred emblems, or legal formulae which are widely believed and deeply internalized. These central conceptions may refer to a god or gods, the 'votes of the majority,' the 'will of the people,' the 'aristocracy of talents or wealth,' to the 'divine right of kings' or to the alleged extraordinary endowment of the person of the ruler himself.”

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C. Wright Mills

Character & Social Structure (1954).
1950s

“To really belong, we have got, first, to get it clear with ourselves that we do not belong and do not want to belong to an unfree world. As free men and women we have got to reject much of it and to know why we are rejecting it.”

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C. Wright Mills

Quelle: Letters & Autobiographical Writings (1954), p. 187.

“When ever the standards of the moneyed life prevail, the man with money, no matter how he got it, will eventually be respected.”

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C. Wright Mills

"Diagnosis of Our Moral Uneasiness", III
Power, Politics, and People (1963)

“Laws without supporting moral conventions invite crime, but much more importantly, they spur the growth of an expedient, amoral attitude. In our kind of society - with its absence of pre-capitalist traditions - the only way to do away with training devices is to change the laws and their enforcement so that, unlike the current income tax, they do not depend upon individual integrity. Another way is to pass only laws that result from great social movements with concomitant changes in moral codes, but there is no such movement underway in any area of American society today.”

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C. Wright Mills

"Diagnosis of Our Moral Uneasiness"
Power, Politics, and People (1963)

“Moral distrust of men in public life is an old American convention. In the current campaign, however, it has reached unprecedented heights: each of the leading candidates has felt it necessary to make public an accounting of his personal income.”

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C. Wright Mills

"Diagnosis of Our Moral Uneasiness".
Power, Politics, and People (1963)

“Liberalism, as a set of ideals, is still viable, and even compelling to Western men. That is one reason why it has become a common denominator of American political rhetoric; but there is another reason. The ideals of liberalism have been divorced from any realities of modern social structure that might serve as the means of their realization. Everybody can easily agree on general ends; it is more difficult to agree on means and the relevance of various means to the ends articulated. The detachment of liberalism from the facts of a going society make it an excellent mask for those who do not, cannot, or will not do what would have to be done to realize its ideals.”

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C. Wright Mills

"Liberal Values in the Modern World"
Power, Politics, and People (1963)

“The first rule for understanding the human condition is that men live in second-hand worlds. They are aware of much more than they have personally experienced; and their own experience is always indirect.”

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C. Wright Mills

"The Cultural Apparatus"
Power, Politics, and People (1963)

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