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C. WRIGHT MILLS, SOCIOLOGY, AND THE POLITICS OF THE PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2011

HOWARD BRICK
HOWARD BRICK*
Affiliation:
Department of History, University of Michigan Email: [email protected]
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Extract

How are we to grasp the genealogy of the “public intellectual”? When, how, and at whose hands did this term first come into use, framing an ideal of democratic responsibility for those who devote their work life to fostering knowledge and criticism—an image usually raised as a reproach to academic insularity though also sometimes assailed for encouraging an evasion of scholarly rigor? At first blush, the phrase seems redundant: the emergence of “intellectual” simpliciter is usually linked to a particular episode—the Dreyfusards’ defense of the French republic—that already implied a commitment by writers, thinkers, and artists to political or civic action. From that time and place, the term traveled quickly across borders and before long to the United States, occasioning controversies from the start over who represented the “intellectual” as a social type and who did not, what activities or purposes best defined the role, and whether that role deserved respect, derision, or reinvention. To be sure, the social, cultural, and political world of “modern” societies has always featured individuals noted for scholarly, creative, speculative, or critical work that resonates with literate audiences attuned to key issues of the moment—whether such people were known as ministers, philosophes, journalists, poets, men or women of letters, Transcendentalists, or even, in some eighteenth-and nineteenth-century usages, natural philosophers or scientists. Nonetheless, the emergence of the noun “intellectual” (and its plural) from the early twentieth century, and its widening use since the 1920s, spawned a persistent and self-conscious discourse concerning the character, value or virtue of such figures. A skeptic might conclude that the addition of the modifier “public” has perpetuated old, tangled debates about intellectuals as such, without bringing with it much greater clarity. Words nonetheless are signs of historical troubles and social discontents. Excavating the usages of “public intellectual” over time can highlight some of the dilemmas that have confronted writers, critics, citizens, and political actors, past and present.

Type
Essays
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Modern Intellectual History , Volume 8 , Issue 2 , August 2011 , pp. 391 - 409
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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References

1 The clearest exponents of these alternative assessments are Jacoby, Russell, The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe (New York: Basic Books, 1987)Google Scholar; and Posner, Richard, Public Intellectuals: A Study in Decline (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001)Google Scholar.

2 A great deal of writing on US “intellectual history,” for that matter, concerns figures who made their names and found their audiences outside the academy. If such figures occupied academic posts as well, they nonetheless carried significance (for the historian) by virtue of the effect and influence their work had in social affairs broadly speaking; and so such “intellectuals” were by definition “public.”

3 On earlier models, see, for instance, Kramnick, Isaac, “Eighteenth-Century Science and Radical Social Theory: The Case of Joseph Priestley's Scientific Liberalism,” Journal of British Studies 25 (1986), 1–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Capper, Charles, Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life, vol. 2, The Public Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

4 As Stefan Collini has demonstrated, the term “intellectual” (as noun) came with “the question of intellectuals”—a field of discussion, full of variation and hard to navigate, that has borne, along with some insight, a host of loaded meanings and misunderstandings. Among the latter lies the reflexive identification of “intellectuals” with a particular kind of politics. The salience of the Dreyfus case in sparking the spread of the neologism has encouraged a presumption that the social figure in view belongs on the leftward part of the spectrum, challenging constituted authorities—though recent historiography concerning ideological components of the American right turn has turned attention to a wide range of conservative intellectuals as well. The most important general account in this respect remains George H. Nash, The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America since 1945 (New York: Basic Books, 1976). The trend continues through works such as Jennifer Burns, Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Michael Kimmage, The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers, and the Lessons of Anti-Communism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); and such exceptionally supple work as Angus Burgin's “The Radical Conservatism of Frank H. Knight,” Modern Intellectual History 6 (2009), 513–38. For an introduction to the “question of intellectuals,” focused on Britain but having wider reference, see Collini, Stefan, Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 1–44Google Scholar.

5 The preoccupations of this period were reflected somewhat later, in summary, in Rieff, Philip, ed., On Intellectuals: Theoretical Studies, Case Studies (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1969)Google Scholar; and Coser, Lewis, Men of Ideas: A Sociologist's View (New York: Free Press, 1965)Google Scholar.

6 The arguments were most vigorously stated in Noam Chomsky, “The Responsibility of Intellectuals,” New York Review of Books, 23 Feb. 1967, reprinted in idem, American Power and The New Mandarins (New York: Pantheon, 1969).

7 The reinvigoration of “public” commitments in response to the privatism of market ideology was evident in the conjoint concepts of “civil society” and “public sphere.” See Flora Lewis, “The Rise of ‘Civil Society’,” New York Times, 25 June 1989, 27; Hall, John A., ed., Civil Society: Theory, History, Comparison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)Google Scholar; Habermas, Jürgen, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Burger, Thomas (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989)Google Scholar; Calhoun, Craig, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992)Google Scholar, especially the dissenting contribution by feminist political theorist Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” in ibid., 109–42.

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13 Parsons remarked on the rise of sociological theory as “a historic breakthrough in Western intellectual history” in his final, unfinished manuscript, “The American Societal Community,” posthumously published as American Society: A Theory of the Societal Community, ed. Giuseppe Sciortino (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2007). See Brick, Howard, Transcending Capitalism: Visions of a New Society in Modern American Social Thought (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 242Google Scholar.

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17 On American sociologists’ negative response to Mannheim see Kettler, David and Meja, Volker, Karl Mannheim and the Crisis of Liberalism: The Secret of These New Times (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1995)Google Scholar.

18 Geary, Radical Ambition, 66.

19 The break-up of the Popular Front under the force of the Stalin–Hitler pact; the rush of postmortems on the Depression-era left, such as Lewis Corey's “Marxism Reconsidered,” The Nation, 17 Feb. 1940; and the impulse to chart a reformist position equidistant from left and right made the years around 1940 a first installment of “end-of-ideology” sentiment. See Howard Brick, Transcending Capitalism, 143.

20 Gregory D. Sumner, Dwight Macdonald and the politics Circle (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996); on the politics style of alienation as an element of deradicalizing trends see Brick, Howard, Daniel Bell and the Decline of Intellectual Radicalism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986)Google Scholar; and idem, “The Disenchantment of America: Radical Echoes in 1950s Political Criticism,” in Donohue, Kathleen G., ed., Liberty and Justice for All? Rethinking Politics in Cold War America (1945–1965) (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, forthcoming)Google Scholar.

21 Geary, Radical Ambition, 81.

22 Ibid., 102

23 Studies of the “new middle classes” (die neue Mittelstand) had commenced in Germany during the 1920s. The social-democratic scholar Emil Lederer wrote on the subject in 1926, a work translated under the auspices of Columbia University and the Works Progress Administration, as The New Middle Class (New York, mimeograph, 1937).

24 Geary, Radical Ambition, p. 106.

25 Mills, cited in Geary, Radical Ambition, p. 134.

26 See Geary's comparative treatment of Mills and Riesman, and his critique of Riesman, at 135–42.

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28 See Geary, Radical Ambition, p. 175.

29 Mills did have a tentative and before long testy relation with the democratic-socialist intellectuals of Dissent magazine, founded by Irving Howe and Lewis Coser in 1954. See Geary, Radical Ambition, 148, 202–4.

30 See David Riesman's comments on Mills's vanity, cited in Haney, David Paul, The Americanization of Social Science: Intellectuals and Public Responsibility in the Postwar United States (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2008), 229Google Scholar.

31 Ibid.

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33 Klausner, Samuel and Lidz, Victor, The Nationalization of the Social Sciences (Philadephia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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36 Haney, The Americanization of Social Science, 172–202.

37 Ibid., 203–21.

38 Camic, “Structure after Fifty Years.”

39 Joel T. Isaac, “Cold War Modern: Epistemic Design and the Postwar Human Sciences,” paper delivered at the International Congress of History of Science and Technology, Budapest, Hungary, 30–31 July 2009; idem, Knowledge by Design: Crafting the Human Sciences in Modern America (forthcoming, Harvard University Press).

40 Stapleford, Thomas, The Cost of Living in America: A Political History of Economic Statistics, 1880–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009)Google Scholar.

41 Jewett, Andrew, “Science and the Promise of Democracy in America,” Daedalus 132/4 (Fall 2003), 64–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Jewett, To Make America Scientific: Science, Democracy, and the University before the Cold War (forthcoming); Hacohen, Malachi Haim, Karl Popper: The Formative Years, 1902–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)Google Scholar; Janek Wasserman, “Black Vienna, Red Vienna: The Struggle for Intellectual and Political Hegemony in Interwar Vienna, 1918–1938 (PhD dissertation, Washington University in St Louis, 2010).

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43 Haney cites recent literature on “public sociology” as a key inspiration for his critique of “sociology-as-science,” although the most vocal proponent of “public sociology,” Michael Burawoy, carefully distinguishes his advocacy of public engagement from blanket denunciations of academic sociology. In Burawoy's nuanced view, “public sociology” assumes its place and purposes in an ongoing interaction with “professional sociology” as well as with two other types of work he names “policy sociology” and “critical sociology.” See especially Burawoy, Michael, “For Public Sociology,” American Sociological Review 70 (Feb. 2005), 4–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

44 Haney, Americanization of Social Science, 232, 250–51.

45 The shift of policy-oriented knowledge production outside universities to privately funded but governmentally connected think tanks has marked an epochal shift in the relations between institutions, power, and democracy. See the discussion of the “Powell report” in Hollinger, David, “Money and Academic Freedom a Half-Century after McCarthyism: Universities amid the Force Fields of Capital,” in idem, Cosmopolitanism and Solidarity: Studies in Ethnoracial, Religious, and Professional Affiliation in the United States (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006)Google Scholar; and the conclusion to Rohde, Joy, “Gray Matters: Social Scientists, Military Patronage, and Democracy in the Cold War,” Journal of American History 96 (June 2009), 99–122CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

46 Moore, quoted in Haney, Americanization of Social Science, 147–8. Apologies for the title of this section to Veysey, Laurence, “Who's a Professional? Who Cares?” Reviews in American History; 3/4 (1975), 419–21CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

47 Geary, Radical Ambition, 96–7.

48 Showing additional current interest in Mills, John H. Summers has edited a superb anthology of Mills's (mostly hitherto unpublished) writings and speeches, The Politics of Truth: Selected Writings of C. Wright Mills (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); and Stanley Aronowitz compiled a marvelous three-volume compendium of commentary on Mills's work, C. Wright Mills, in the series of Sage Masters of Modern Social Thought (London: Sage Publications, 2004). New biographical-critical studies of Mills are forthcoming from both Summers and Aronowitz.

49 Mair, Peter, Ruling the Void: The Hollowing of Western Democracy (London: Verso, 2009)Google Scholar.