BOOKS
ABSTRACTIO AD ABSURDUM
WHITE COLLA R: THE AM ER ICAN MI DDLE CLASSES. By C. Wright
Mills. Oxford University Press. $5.00.
Mills's theme is the rise of the "new" American middle class:
office workers, executives, government employees, salaried professionals,
salesgirls and other service-workers. The "old" middle class are in–
dependent free-enterprisers, exploiting either their own property (farmers
and businessmen who own their own farms and businesses) or their own
talents on a free-lance basis (self-employed lawyers, engineers, writers,
doctors, etc.) . The "new" work, for wages or salary, for somebody else;
it might be called a salariat and is more significant today in this country
than is Marx's concept of a proletariat . Mills estimates that between
1870 and 1940 the " new" has increased from 15 per cent to 56 per cent
of the total middle classes, while the "old" has sunk from 95 per cent to
44 per cent. Since both the fact of this shift and its general implications
have long been familiar, the point of Mills's book must lie elsewhere.
H e might have given us a good description of the " new" middle
class, the sort of thing the Lynds did in
M iddletown.
Or, following
Veblen, an aesthetic impression and a moral evaluation . Or, as Marx
did in the first volume of
Capital,
both of these wi thin the frame of a
new historical interpretation. Indeed, he has attempted all three, but
with an unexpected lack of success. U nexpected because he has written
some excellent things in the past, has done a lot of sociological field
work, is well versed in theory, and, himself, is a lively, intelligent, ir–
reverent, omnivorous fellow, the least academic professor I know. Yet
I must confess I found his book boring to the point of unreadability. Of
course this may
be
my fault. But it may also be his.
As a descriptive sociologist, Mills fai ls because he is forever getting
in the way of his data, like an M .e. who talks through the acts.
Middle–
town
was interesting not because of any literary talent or power of
generalization, but simply because the authors respected their material:
they let it speak for itself, giving it in great crude unrefined hunks.
But
Mills pokes and pulls and p rods his data, " processing" it so relentlessly
that its intrinsic quality is vitiated. I'm told that in preparing the book,
he and his wife collected a number of long and fascinating "depth
