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PARTISAN REVIEW
wanders. This happened on nearly every page. Thus I find the follow–
ing sentence impenetrable, not because of any subtlety or complexity of
thought but simply because I get lost in the terminology: "To the
economic facts of abundance, the rise in real standards of living, and the
upward mobility, there was added a relatively fluid system of deference
in a rising status market." This, too, throws me for a loss: "The
bureaucratic ethos is not the only content of managerial personalities."
And when the abstract is wedded to the self-obvious, an unholy union
that is all too often consummated, then one is not only baffled but also
irritated. Viz. : "Political consciousness is most immediately determined
by politically available means and symbols." It is not
just
a question of
abstract terminology : Veblen used plenty, as does Marx, without ceasing
to communicate pleasurably. But their styles express their own per–
sonalities, and a person is not abstract but concrete and thus comprehen–
sible, since the reader is also a person. But Mills's personality, which as
a matter of fact is quite pungent, comes through not at all in his
writing, at least in this book; here he wears the drab uniform of the
academic sociologist, and expresses, or rather suppresses, himself as con–
ventionally as his colleagues do. H e does make fitful efforts to be
literary and "brilliant," but these are just changes of uniform: sociologese
is replaced by journalese. And not very good journalese, because he has–
n't a good ear. " In the main drift of this structure"-but a structure
doesn't drift, it stands still. "The mass media hold a monopoly of the
ideologically dead: they spin records of political emptiness"-the parts
just don't fit together, verbally, and also there are all those damned
abstractions again.
Mills says a little about a great many things, so little and about so
many that one's curiosity is never really satisfied. Instead of developing
--or, sometimes, even defining-his leading concepts, he plays with
them, he, so to speak, "refers" to them, arranging and rearranging them
but neither giving an adequate description of the reality which these
concepts are, after all, just a shorthand way of talking about, nor
working out logically the relations of these concepts among themselves.
Thus he makes great play with the term, " bureaucracy," and yet,
though he himself has written much about it in the past and though
it is so much used, and abused, today that one cannot be sure what
it means to any writer unless he tells one explicitly, the nearest he comes
to defining it is a couple of sentences on page 78 which raise more
questions than they answer. So too, with "prestige," another of
his
key concepts. Here, true, he leads off with a definition-but what a
definition!
