482
PARTISAN REVIEW
that conflict that C.
Wright Mills: An American Utopian
is most com–
pelling.
The middle section, "Sources," illuminates the intellectual in–
fluences on Mills's work, including Marxism, American pragmatism,
Max Weber, and Karl Mannheim. Horowitz demonstrates that Mills
had little interest in definitional consistency or conceptual clarity.
His "pragmatism" lay in eclectically borrowing concepts from past
sociological theorists in his ongoing battle against a society he as–
sumed to be morally illegitimate. This prevented a clear conceptuali–
zation of the possible relationship between subjective predilections
and the scientific pursuit of enlightenment, the problem which led to
the breach between Mills and his academic colleagues.
The last third of the book, "Substances," deals with Mills's ma–
jor books,
The New Men of Power, White Collar, The Power Elite, The
Causes of World War Three,
and
Listen, Yankee,
as well as his projected
"six to nine volume comparative study of the world range of present
day social structures," his "epochal sociology." Horowitz's summary
and analysis of each work are combined with excerpts from contem–
porary reviews. In his early studies, such as his dissertation on the
sociology of American pragmatism and
The New Men of Power,
Mills's
amorphous ideological radicalism was tempered by the demands of
social scientific inquiry, including those of conceptual delimitation
and empirical precision, and these works were warmly received by
Mills's academic colleagues. But as his ideological predilections
began to color and even substitute for empirical evidence and con–
ceptual clarity in
White Collar
and especially in
The Power Elite,
Mills
met with increasing criticism. At first, he responded in his book,
The
Sociological Imagination,
by delegitimating more modest, incremental
attempts at expanding the range of sociological knowledge. Then,
after a decade of impatience, he turned from social science to engage
in ideological exhortation in
The Causes of World War Three
(1958),
Listen, Yankee
(1960), and "The New Left" (1960). By then his rela–
tionship to most of his academic colleagues was one of mutual suspi–
cion, not to say contempt.
The incisive reviews of
White Collar
and
The Power Elite
by
David Reisman, Talcott Parsons, and Daniel Bell provide some of
the greatest displays of acuity. Critics of Mills's
White Collar
claimed
that he attributed to the white-collar classes a degree of alienation
which there was no empirical reason to believe his subjects actually
felt. They pointed out that Mills failed to recognize the role of ethnic
loyalties, religious beliefs, and familial commitments in providing
