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PARTISAN REVIEW
a period of ideological as well as material abundance, the charges should
of course be dismissed. He is, however, vulnerable to the more serious
charge of posturing. As Christianity, following the death of Christian
belief, multiplied its armchair apologists in the universities, so Socialism
has its professional and passionate academics, transforming their socialism
into sociology. Mills must be ranked as one of these caretakers of the
socialist polemical tradition. He incites without hope; he offers not a
single saving myth-no hope from the proletariat; nor from the en–
gineers; and certainly not from a cultivated and responsible upper
class, that fantasy-compliment of the conservative critics to themselves.
Further, it is hard to see what group of readers Mills can hope to move.
Literate
and
committed audiences are as scarce these days as salvation–
bearing social classes. Mills' sympathetic reader is, I suppose, that stable
Partisan R eview
type, culturally rather than politically committed-the
literary son of socialist fathers, who takes over the tatters of liberal
belief and becomes the moralizing man in an immoral society.
What confutes the militancy of C. Wright Mills is his marginal
relation to both the academy and the doctrinal vacuum of American
politics surrounding it. From inside the academy Mills looks like a
political man, a polemicist; from outside his commitments look aca–
demic. Just this double jeopardy makes it likely that his criticism,
despite its genuine cutting edge, will gain public favor. Criticism is
part of the largess of American culture, and the critic who bestows it
may hope for generous receipts. Even Mills, the angry man of Ameri–
can social letters, may ultimately expect to hitch a ride on the American
gravy train, against his personal will, as one of its most celebrated
critics. For criticism too is a saleable commodity, as long as it remains
profession al and sharpens no movement of protest.
If
Veblen, to whom
Mills is often compared when he is being rated favorably, can be
canonized by
Fortune,
Mills may expect no less, and probably within
his own lifetime.
Time
could render his face iconic for a week. This
means no insult to Mills. The mass society which is rapidly overtaking
our inherited liberal one has no explicit faith, and its implicit faith is
so diffuse that it can digest any virtuoso heretic striking blindly at
where dogma used to be.
The dogma at which Mills strikes has become so shadowy that he
never locates it explicitly as his target. Briefly, it is the classical liberal
thesis that the institutions of government are distinct from the institu–
tions of property. Mills' antithesis, also not stated explicitly in this book,
is the classical socialist denial: power is not separate from property;
corporate property cannot be realistically or legitimately considered pri-
