BOO KS
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Prestige involves at least two persons: one to claim it and another
to honor the claim. The bases on which various people raise prestige
claims, and the reasons others honor these claims, include property
and birth, occupation and education, income and power-in fact, almost
anything that may invidiously distinguish one person from another. In
the status system of a society, these claims are organized as rules and
expectations which regulate who successfully claims prestige, from whom,
in what ways, and on what basis. The level of self-esteem enjoyed by
given individuals is more or less set by this status system.
My dictionary does the job better in six words: "ascendency based on
recognition of power." This kind of thing is academic leaf-raking; its
chief utility is that it gives employment to sociologists. It is a substitute
for thinking. So is its "opposite number," the melodramatic journalese
the author uses when he tries to flee the groves of academe (but vigor
of statement cannot make up for lassitude of thought).
Doesn't it really come down to this, a matter of thinking? The
book is boring because it has, like so much other academic and/or
sophisticated-intellectual writing today, all the apparatus of intellection
without the thought process that sets it in motion, like a grcat hard
intricately convoluted seashell that encloses nothing living. In this
book, Mills is a propagandist rather than a thinker. A certain
dis–
interestedness
is necessary if one is to think about, or describe, reality.
Oddly enough, I think one find s this in Marx: he wanted to fit things
into his theoretical framework, true, but there is also always present
an intellectual fascination with finding out how reality "works," letting
the chips fall where they may; this, I think, has produced the lasting
elements in Marx's thinking. One feels very little of this here. Propa–
ganda rather than reflection is the note-as, the chapter headings,
punchy as an ad man could dream up ("The Managerial Demiurge,"
"Brains, Inc.," "The Great Salesroom," "The Enormous File"), which,
like advertising slogans, are so much more fascinating than the products
they announce. Like the middle-class salaried brainworkers whose life-style
he deplores-there is a curious subterranean bond between the author
and the people he so indignantly writes about-Mills is too busy, in
too much of a hurry to get much thinking "done." He has a bad habit of
making big statements which he doesn't develop enough for the reader
to be sure what he means, let alone find it interesting, and of "covering"
vast topics in very little space. He consecrates exactly five pages (144-9)
to a survey of political thought in this country since 1900, introducing
this feat of daring and virtuosity with his usual fortissimo: "An over–
simplified history of free, political intellectuals in the United States falls
into four broad phases, outlined according to their major areas of at-
