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vate. By submitting the present American situation to an essentially
socialist analysis, Mills demonstrates (successfully, I think) how irrelevant
to American reality liberalism has become. Property, and the hidden
privileges and flow of opportunity that go with it, does not exist ante–
cedently to government. Indeed, in our present social arrangement, the
major institutions of government and the major institutions of property
tend openly to merge. The primitive stuff of institutions are the humans
who staff them, and Mills goes about the theoretically simple but
polemically complex task of spotting the men who circulate among the
merging institutions, therefore occupying what he calls the "command
posts" atop American society.
Mills perhaps credits the old liberal dogma of separate and balanc–
ing institutions with too much life, so that he fatigues the reader with
lengthy parades of tycoons in Washington, generals at ease in executive
suites, and the new hybrid politicians, with business hearts and military
heads. But the book is no mere expose of money lords, or of the vested
interests of our military economy. Indeed, Mills says too little of the
movement of funds that is sapping the economic potential of America,
and talks mainly about the movement of men that is sapping our civic
potential. For this alliance, between the high officers of executive gov–
ernment and the chief managers of corporate property, Mills finds a
new name: the power elite. Despite the fact that such an alliance is
the staple of socialist theory, Mills holds that this new name for it is
necessary. For a third institution, the armed services, has become the
mortar holding the two familiar old institutions of rule together, and
has come to personify for a politically illiterate public the idea of po–
litical and economic stability: a permanent war economy based on a
negative ideology of an absolute enemy.
Mills has written as fine an obituary notice on liberal society as
any lover of the genre could hope to read. Chapters 11 and 12, in
particular, survey our liberal inheritance and exhibit its bankruptcy both
as political theory (Ch. 11: "The Theory of Balance" ) and political fact
(Ch. 12: "The Power Elite" ) . The liberal principles of a govern–
ment instituted and operated separately from property, against which
the propertied classes had rights and toward which the powers of
government were limited- these principles have been quietly abro–
gated. Even granting that the founding fathers, following Locke's
Second Treatise,
enacted a government charged with protecting the
natural rights of property, nevertheless according to classical liberalism
political institutions were something superimposed upon economic ones
and different from them. By gradual extension, the liberal principle
