C. Wright Mills: the Struggle to Make History

Abstract

During the two decades prior to the 1960s, C. Wright Mills stood out as the leading voice of radical opposition to the sociological establishment, its dominant assumptions and perspectives. As a pioneer of unorthodox ways of looking at the world in which he lived, his attempt to introduce an authentic radical note into the largely apologetic and conservative mainstream of American sociology earned him both recrimination and praise.¹ His work has a direct bearing on what are still central issues in the debate between socialist and more orthodox academic theorists of contemporary society, a debate recently brought into prominence by the writings of Gouldner, Giddens and others. A primary aim of these theorists is to effect a fusion or convergence of the perspectives of Marxism and sociology, both functionalist and Weberian.²