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Left intellectuals in England and America are truly dedicated to pursuing
this demanding and even heroic course. Judging from their readiness to
embrace simple agitational causes like unilateral disarmament and to
identify with charismatic left-authoritarian regimes like Castro's or
Nkrumah's, they are more concerned with nursing their hostility
to
modern Western society and satisfying their passion for ideological
conflict. The New Left tends to be indifferent to economics, the study
of which has always inclined socialists towards revisionism. (This was
even true of Marx, as George Lichtheim has recently shown.) It also
exhibits, as Crosland notes, a contempt for democratic institutions,
for which, of course, there is a certain justification where newly inde–
pendent backward countries are concerned. I find it disturbing, how–
ever, that so many apologists for authoritarianism in the underdeveloped
world seem to be moved to question the value and relevance
of
democracy in the West as well. Even Mills, in one of his later essays
included in
Power, Politics and People,
wonders whether there might
not be new and better ways of achieving social change than through
the "historic agencies" of parliaments and parties of the left, although
he does not even hint at what he has in mind.
It
is necessary to separate Mills's work as a sociologist from his
openly political pronouncements, while recognizing that the frequent
excellence of the former owes much to a sense of relevance shaped by
the traditional political concerns of the left. On the whole, Mills had a
salutary influence on American academic sociology, especially as its critic.
Thus the re-publication of some of his best short pieces in this large
collection of his essays is welcome, particularly his early writings on the
sociology of knowledge and on class in America.
But as a political thinker, and more specifically as a socialist
theoretician, there is less to Mills than meets the eye, his role as an
intellectual mentor of the New Left notwithstanding. In spite of his
characteristically American predilection for moralizing about politics
and the conduct of the powerful, his politics were animated largely by
the memory of Marxism. I do not mean by this merely that there were
many residues of Marxist ideas in his thinking, but that what he was
perennially seeking was a comprehensive theory of modem society from
which definite political conclusions could be drawn. Marxism had
provided such a theory in the past, but Mills was too sophisticated to
believe that it could provide without extensive revision a political pro–
gram in the world of the welfare state and the cold war. He wanted
to hang on to the theoretical possibilities of Marxism while abandoning
much of its substance, but he never found a substitute for what had
