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| C. Wright Mills : Letters and Autobiographical Writings
ISBN: 9780520928091
Platform/Publisher: Ebook Central / University of California Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Limited; Download: 7 Days at a Time
Subjects: Social Science;
The U.S. intellectual and political world was jolted in 1962, when famed progressive political commentator and sociologist C. Wright Mills died of a heart attack at age 45. This collection of Mills's selected letters and shorter unpublished or uncollected writings reminds us of the writer's scrupulous and generous mind, presenting ideas that continue to resonate today. Edited by his daughters, the collection offers a glimpse into the writer's personal life as well as into his intellectual relationships with such vital 20th-century thinkers as David Riesman, Saul Alinsky, Leo Lowenthal, Harvey Swados and Dan Wakefield (who wrote the introduction to the book). Most illuminating are Mills's "letters" to "Tovarich," an imaginary friend in the Soviet Union, to whom he muses on American politics and the state of the world. He occasionally demonstrates his navet, as when he writes about race relations in the U.S., but his insights are keen when he writes about university life and McCarthyism. One of the great discoveries included in the book is Mills's FBI file, which was started after he wrote the bestselling Listen, Yankee (1960), a defense of the Cuban revolution. This file, which documents a possible assassination attempt on Mills in response to the book, is a chilling reminder of the hostility faced by liberal intellectuals in the 1950s. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
C. Wright Mills, an American sociologist, was one of the most controversial social scientists of the mid-twentieth century. He considered himself a rebel against both the academic establishment and American society in general, and he rarely tried to separate his radical ideas from his teaching and writing. Irving Louis Horowitz summarized much of Mills's ideas in the subtitle of his biography of him: An American Utopian. Mill's most traditional sociological study is The Puerto Rican Journey. His most direct attack on his colleagues in sociology is The Sociological Imagination (1959) (which he found left much to be desired). His most ideological work is The Power Elite (1956), an attempt to explain the overall power structure of the United States. Mills thought that the dominant "value-free" methodology of American sociology was an ideological mask, hiding values that he did not share. According to his younger colleague Immanuel Wallerstein, Mills was essentially a utopian reformer who thought that knowledge properly used could bring about a better society. (Bowker Author Biography) |
