The Competitive Personality
C. WRIGHT MILLS
FOR
LIBERALS,
competitiOn has never been merely an impersonal
mechanism regulating the economy of capitalism. It has been a
guarantee of political freedom, a system for producing free indivi–
duals, and a testing field for heroes. These have been the alibis of the
liberals for the hurt that competition has caused the people ground
between the big sharp edges of its workings.
In every area of life, liberals have imagined independent indivi–
duals freely competing so that merit might win and character develop:
in the free contractual marriage, the protestant church, the voluntary
association, the democratic state, as well as on the economic market.
Competition is the way liberalism would integrate its historic ·era; it
is also the central feature of libera1ism's style of life.
The hero of liberalism has exemplified the ways of competition in
every sphere of life, but it was in the economic sphere that his merit
came out most clearly, and it was by virtue of his business career
that he attained power and glory and even the legendary purity of
which heroes are made.
As
the worlds of monopoly spread out their grasp, the classic
exemplar of liberalism, the old captain of industry, took on, at least
in his cruder images, a somewhat bloated and overbearing shape. By
the twentieth century he had been replaced in the business world by
other types of economic men, among them the industrial rentier and
the corporation executive, the little business and white collar men, as
well as a type we shall presently describe as the new entrepreneur.
None of these have successfully filled the heroic place of the old, un–
divided captain of industry.
The public image of the rentier is not that of a productively com–
petitive man; he is either the stealthy miser or the lavish consumer. He
doesn't live the business-wise life of competition, and even the liberal
economists dislike his economic role. The corporation executive has
never been a popular middle-class idol; he is too cold and high with
impersonal power. On the engineering side, he is part of inexorable
