Mills, Charles Wright
Mills, Charles Wright (1916–62)An American sociologist whose most important work was published during the 1950s. As a radical on the political left, he was an unusual figure in American sociology at this time, taking up a position that might be better described as liberal-populist rather than socialist. His most important substantive studies were probably White Collar (1951), an analysis of the American middle class, and The Power Elite (1956) in which he argued that the United States was governed by a set of interlocking and self-perpetuating elites.
He is remembered primarily for The Sociological Imagination (1959)—an excellent introduction to and outline of the humanist impetus behind sociology as a discipline. The sociological imagination is the sociological vision, a way of looking at the world that can see connections between the apparently private problems of the...
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