Difference between revisions of "C. Wright Mills"

While American society in the fifties was as a whole characterized by conformism, scholars working quietly in academia proposed a subtle critical analysis of the consumerist malaise. In "White Collar: The American Middle Classes" (1951), the sociologist C. Wright Mills contended that bureaucracies had overwhelmed the new class of city workers, depriving them of all independent thought and turning them into cheerful robots, paid a decent salary, but alienated from the world because of their inability to affect or change it. In "The Power Elite" (1956) Mills called attention to the interlaced interests of the leaders of the military, corporate, and political elements of society, suggesting that the ordinary citizen was a relatively powerless subject of manipulation by those entities.