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DENNIS H. WRON6
Most frequently, he refers to the uniting of power and intellect
as his political goal. The definition of the intellectual as "maker of
history" is the remnant of the Marxist heritage to which Mills is most
deeply attached. He attacks the view that contemporary history is a
tragic process of impersonal drift on the grounds that bureaucratization
has so centralized economic, political and military power that a small
group of men have become history-makers and should be held account–
able for their actions. But instead of rejecting the fact of centralization
itself and suggesting how it might be reversed or at least modified, he
asks rhetorically: "Is it not thus clear that the scope and the chance
for conscious human agency in history-making are just now uniquely
available?" He goes on: "And surely here is the paradox of our
immediate situation: the facts about the newer means of history-making
are a signal that men are not necessarily in the grip of fate, that
men
can
now make history. But this fact stands ironically alongside the
further fact that just now those ideologies which offer men the hope
of making history have declined and are collapsing in the overdeveloped
nation of the United States."
Mills sometimes sounds as though what he most wanted was to be
President of the United States. Long before he became briefly an
apologist for Castro's dictatorship and began to give Khrushchev's
Russia the benefit of too many doubts, there was an unpleasant note in
his preoccupation with power. In effect, Mills was a pornographer of
power: he never tired of blasting the "power elite," but he had a
strange mixture of contempt for their intellectual mediocrity with a
desire to stand in their shoes, and these feelings seemed
to
occupy
him
more than did his vision of a more fraternal, decentralized society.
George Orwell's famous judgment of James Burnham applies equally
well to C. Wright Mills.
Those of us who knew Mills personally at all are aware that he
was an abrasive, domineering personality, though often an attractively
expansive and vigorous one. But the point is not essentially personal.
For a concentration on power was, of course, central to Marxism and
it was this element that bridged the gap between Western European
Marxism at the end of the nineteenth century and Leninism. In Mills
and in a different way in Burnham, as in many others, obsession
with
power reappears as a free-floating, personal trait once Marxism as a
system of thought has been abandoned. Thus do ideologies perpetuate
their defects even when they are no longer popular.
For all the value, therefore, of Mills' occasionally sharp observations
of American society and his magnificent effort
to
instill a sense of the
