C. Wright Mills in Copenhagen: Collaboration, Politics, and the Making of 'The Sociological Imagination

Abstract

American sociologist C. Wright Mills is one of the most important and controversial sociologists of the post-war period. Of Mills’ works, one book stands out: The Sociological Imagination, published by Oxford University Press in 1959. Little known is that Mills drafted his book during a 12-month Fulbright visit to University of Copenhagen 1956-1957. In the rich biographical literature on Mills this is mentioned only in the passing, or not at all. Based on hitherto unused archival material, this paper offers the first detailed account of his Copenhagen-visit during the Cold War. Bringing together this bulk of new historical traces sheds new light on the year Mills himself referred to as a “pivotal moment.” These 12 months in Copenhagen, amid the Cold War, was formative for Mills in two ways: First, Copenhagen was an entrepot to European center-left thinking both east and west of the Iron Curtain. Second, the stay in Copenhagen offered a ‘space of selfhood’, allowing Mills a necessary respite to develop his critical thinking. He did so in close cooperation with like-minded colleagues in Copenhagen. In the mid-1950s, the discipline was in the making in Denmark, and the visit of a prominent US scholar like Mills offered opportunities for Danish sociologist to further the discipline – and their standing within the discipline.

Introduction

“The life of an individual cannot be adequately understood without references to the institutions within which his biography is enacted. For this biography records the acquiring, dropping, modifying, and in a very intimate way, the moving from one role to another.”

C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (1959), 161.

American sociologist C. Wright Mills is widely recognized as one of the most important and controversial sociologists of the post-war period. Mills’ analyses in White Collar (1951) and The Power Elite (1956c) were at the time leading socially critical books that attracted attention far beyond American borders. His later critical works such as The Causes of the Third World War (1958) and Listen Yankee: The Revolution in Cuba (1960b) won wide acclaim, particular on the New Left, which Mills himself had embraced in his 1960 “Letter to the New Left” in the New Left Review. Mills’ career within the New Left was cut short, however, by his untimely death in 1962, at age 48. After his death, Mills’ books came to be a regular part of the New Left's social criticism (Geary, 2008).

Of all Mills’ works, one book stands out: The Sociological Imagination, published by Oxford University Press in 1959. Aronowitz (2012: 216) characterizes The Sociological Imagination as “nothing short of a program for a new social science.” The book is a crash course in critical sociological thinking, where Mills bluntly confronts the sociological mainstream thinking of his time, outlining his own ideal of sociological research that focuses on both the individual and the broader social and historical context, and where the researcher is committed to social relevance and social criticism. Even though the book caused controversy when published (Gane & Back, 2012, 400-402); today, it remains as a profoundly relevant advocate for critical social research. 60 years since Mills’ early death in 1962, The Sociological Imagination is still going strong (Scott & Nilsen, 2013). On the International Sociology Association’s (ISA) list of “books of the century” from 1997, The Sociological Imagination occupied second place, right behind Max Weber's Economy and Society (1922).¹ Mills’ book is on mandatory reading lists for sociology students around the world. The Open Syllabus Explorer, which maps (primarily American) university syllabi, ranks The Sociological Imagination as number 168 on its overall list with more than 3,000 assignments counted.² A search on Google Scholar reveals 24,367 citations to The Sociological Imagination.³

However, the focus of this article is not on Mills and The Sociological Imagination’s relevance for today’s social sciences, but on the history of the book itself and especially its Danish roots. Glancing at the very last pages of The Sociological Imagination (Mills, 1959, 227-229), one finds Mills’ acknowledgements. The list includes, not surprisingly, eminent historians and social scientists of the era, such as Richard Hofstadter, Ralph Miliband, David Riesman, and more than 30 others. Most are house-hold entries in the rich intellectual-biographical literature on C. Wrights Mills and his works. However, Mills introduces his “Acknowledgments” by noting (Mills, 1959, 227):

“Earlier versions of this book were presented to a seminar in social science during the spring of 1957 arranged in Copenhagen by Henning Friis, Consultant to the Socialministrat [sic]. I am very grateful to him and to the following members of this seminar for their penetrating criticism and kind suggestions: Kirsten Rudfeld, Bent Andersen, P. H. Kühl, Poul Vidriksen, Knud Erik Svendsen, Torben Agersnap, B.V. Elberling.”

None of these names are internationally known sociologists or intellectuals of the 1950s. Arguably most of them were lesser-known academics even in the Danish context. That these people occupy such a prominent place on Mills’ list of acknowledgement suggests the importance of the Danish context for the genesis of Mills’ sociology classic.

Overall, very little is known about Mills’ stay in Copenhagen. There is no scarcity of biographical accounts of C. Wright Mills and his life and work. Most of focus on the conflicts around him, his personal life (including his three marriages), and his intellectual roots. Mills is not easily categorized. Tilman (1979) lists not less than nine different categorizations of Mills intellectual roots (Marxist, Weberian, Freudian, institutionalism etc.), and adds a tenth by labelling Mills as an eclectic. On a more personal level, Mills has been categorized as a radical, an outsider, a rebel, and a public intellectual. Mills’ stay in Copenhagen during 1956-57 is only mentioned very briefly in some of the biographical accounts (cf. Eldridge, 1983: 30; Horowitz, 1983; Brewer, 2004: 9; Geary, 2008: 715; Aronowitz, 2012: 214; Mills, 2018: 63-64).⁴ The most thorough description is provided by Summers in his C. Wright Mills: An American Rebel Abroad (2006a). Summers provides details of Mills’ travels and study abroad in the final years of his life. However, for Summers - and others - Copenhagen remains at most a rather incidental platform, serving to facilitate Mills’ visits to other European countries where he met several prominent intellectuals of the time and developed an international outlook and the idea of a “global new left” (Geary, 2008).

The purpose of the following biographical note is to add a piece of the puzzle of C. Wright Mills and his most influential work following the work of Brewer (2004, 2005), who uses Mills’ own approach of linking biography and social context to explore Mills' life and work. Other scholars have in the same way read Mills’ work together with his biography focusing typically on his relationship to Paul Lazarsfeld at Columbia (Sterne, 2005; Summers, 2006b), his European tour (Brewer, 2004; Summers, 2006a; Geary, 2008; Mills, 2018), or his relationship to Hans Gerth (Oakes & Vidich, 1999). Brewer’s argument (2004, 2005) is that the biographical context is a key to understanding the making of The Sociological Imagination. Brewer, however, only mentions Mills’ year in Copenhagen in the passing⁵, focusing instead on his upbringing in Texas (Brewer, 2005) and his travels across Europe, and his visits at LSE during his Fulbright Scholarship in Copenhagen and again in 1959 (Brewer, 2007).

Mills wished to spend his sabbatical at more prestigious institutions such as the LSE in London but ended up in Copenhagen. In the literature on Mills, this is often explained as the price for going to Europe. Something confirmed by Mills himself stating: ‘Hell, anything is OK, as long as I get there.’ (Mills, 2018: 62). But what happens if zoom in on the Danish context and Mills stay in Copenhagen?

My argument is that Copenhagen offered a specific space of selfhood for Mills (Brewer, 2005). First, during the early Cold War, Scandinavia’s ideological position as a middle way between the West and the Communist Bloc, was a fertile context for developing new ideas. It is noteworthy that, besides starting his work on the Sociological Imagination, Mills also started his autobiographical ‘Letters to Tovarich’ whilst staying in Copenhagen. These letters to a fictive Soviet intellectual friend were written between 1956 and 1960 (the intended publication entitled Contacting the Enemy never materialized).⁶ According to Brewer (2005, 670-71), the letters show how Mills’ ‘confrontation with the bonds that tied him to his roots’, was made possible by his visit to Cold War Europe, as well as his distance from US sociology. Second, Copenhagen served well as hub for getting well-acquainted with European sociology. Staying in London would have made his visits to Eastern Europe much more complicated logistically. Third, as will be elaborated further below, in Denmark sociology was in the 1950s far from an established discipline, which offered academic freedom to write and collaborate with like-minded people in- and outside academia and across disciplines. Finally, Mills was an internationally renowned sociologist on his arrival, but in Copenhagen he was at the same time a stranger and marginalized vis-à-vis the sociological hotspots in the US. Following Simmel’s classical essay on the stranger (Simmel, 1921 [1908]), marginality offers a unique position for developing innovative ideas and behavior (see also Gieryn & Hirsch, 1983). Altogether, Copenhagen offered a space of selfhood, that allowed for creative collaboration and ‘optimal marginality’: ‘Optimally marginal intellectuals have access to the creative core of an intellectual tradition, while avoiding organizational, financial, cultural, or psychological dependencies that limit innovations’ (McLaughlin, 2001, 273).

The argument is not that The Sociological Imagination was the 1:1 result of Mills’ 12 month stay in Copenhagen. Key aspects of the book can be traced back to Mills’ earlier writings (Aronowitz, 2012; Brewer, 2004) and he continued to work on the manuscript even after his stay in Copenhagen (Mills, 2018). However, because Mills wrote his most popular book in Copenhagen, it is important for both our understanding of the book and of the sociologist C. Wright Mills to answer questions such as: How did Mills end up in Copenhagen? What did he do in Denmark? How did he engage with Danish social science? Was the Danish capital just a hub for Mills’ European adventures or does his stay deserve more attention? These are the key questions for this article. The answers draw on larger empirical puzzle analyzing material from several archival collections in Denmark (The Fulbright Commission in Denmark, University of Copenhagen, and the private papers of social scientist Henning Friis and the novelist Elsa Gress), the C. Wright Mills Papers at University of Texas, Mills’ published letters (and a few unpublished), as well as contemporary printed material.

Bringing together this bulk of new historical traces brings new light to the year Mills spent in Copenhagen as a possibly important "space of selfhood" (Brewer, 2005: 666) - what Mills himself referred to as a “pivotal moment.”

Danish Sociology in the 1950s

To understand why C. Wright Mills ended up in Copenhagen, we need to take a step back and look closer at the establishment of sociology as an academic discipline in Denmark in the decade after World War II. In 1947, the young Danish political economist Henning Friis, flew across the Atlantic to New York to take up a Fulbright scholarship at the New School of Social Research. The trip almost did not happen. Friis, himself the son of a history professor, and a highly regarded member of the Danish Social Democratic Party, had in the 1930s been part of the left intellectual elite in Copenhagen (Harsløff, 1997). Friis had been involved in various forms of protest activities and for a few months had even been a member of the communist youth movement in Denmark. This was sufficient grounds for Friis initially being denied a visa to the United States (Schmidt & Miller, 2006: 67). Only after intervention by the Danish authorities, was it made clear to the U.S. visa authorities in Copenhagen that Henning Friis, despite his youthful sins, now belonged to the front lines of the Danish battle against communism: the social democratic labor movement. There is nothing to suggest that the paths of Friis and Mills crossed in New York. While C. Wright Mills took up his post at Columbia University and worked on The New Men of Power (published in 1948), Friis used his time in the U.S. to cultivate an American network. Upon his return to Denmark, Henning Friis continued his career as leading civil servant in the Ministry of Social Affairs. In the early 1950s, Friis experienced one of his life's great defeats, losing the battle to become the first professor of Sociology at the Copenhagen University. The choice fell instead on Kaare Svalastoga, a Norwegian-born and U.S.-trained scholar representing the kind of empirical American sociology that would later become a target of Mills’ critique in The Sociological Imagination.⁷

In the early 1950s, sociology was only gradually making its way as a university discipline in Copenhagen (Andersson & Dabrowski, 1996).⁸ In 1950, it was established as a sub-discipline within the Department of Economics (partially initiated by the Rockefeller Foundation), taught by Kaare Svalastoga. In 1954, Svalastoga was appointed temporary professor in sociology, and in 1955 this was turned into a permanent professorship (Rudfeld & Webb, 1977: 3; Andersson & Dabrowski, 1996: 155-165). Only from 1958 did sociology have its own department at the University of Copenhagen. As suggested above, Svalastoga, as student of the American sociologist George Lundberg, represented a very empirical approach as was evident from the contributions to the 1952-established journal Sociologiske Meddelelser (Sociological Review). It was edited by Svalastoga and the young sociologist Erik Høegh, and published by the Danish Sociological Association, founded the same year by Svalastoga and university colleagues.⁹ The Sociological Association especially emphasized the importance of “empirical sociological research”. A review of the articles published in Sociologiske Meddelelser during the period 1952-1958 reveals a very strong preference for detailed empirics and technical methods, with very few theoretical reflections - and only one single reference to the work of C. Wright Mills (Høegh, 1958).

However, the small group around Kaare Svalastoga was not the only sociology group in Denmark. In 1950, Henning Friis and others had established the Danish Sociological Society (Dansk Sociologisk Selskab) as a Danish branch of ISA. After his unsuccessful bid for the first Danish professorship of sociology, Friis worked persistently to establish an independent Danish institute for social science research (Friis & Petersen, 1998) outside the university. The idea dated back to his stay in New York in 1948-49, where Friis had contacted Paul Lazarsfeld and the Rockefeller Foundation exploring the prospects for a Danish research institute, which, like Lazarsfeld’s Bureau of Applied Research, would function as a “half-way house” between social research and political administration. From his position as international consultant in the Ministry of Social Affairs and making good use of his political contacts, Friis worked diligently to promote his idea of a politically anchored, independent, interdisciplinary institute. After a year-long political process, which included several confrontations with professor Svalastoga, the Danish Parliament voted in 1957 to establish the institute, which commenced its activities the following year (Friis & Petersen, 1998).

There was even a third group of Danish sociologists to be found at the Copenhagen Business School. In 1952, the professor of Sociology (from 1938) at Aarhus University, Theodor Geiger, passed away and his sociology professorship was turned into a professorship in Economics. Consequently, his student and research assistant Torben Agersnap left Aarhus and was in 1954 appointed as associate professor at the Copenhagen Business School, starting a research group that later became the Department of Organization and Industrial Sociology (Kropp, 2015: 29).

In short, Danish sociology in the early 1950s was a small but institutionally contested discipline organized around three groups: one group around Svalastoga, the Sociological Association, and what gradually became the Department of Sociology at the University of Copenhagen; another around Friis, the Danish Society for Sociology, and what eventually became the Danish Institute for Social Research; and finally, a group organized around Torben Agersnap at the Copenhagen Business School. Beyond institutional rivalry, the three groups differed also – to some degree - in their approaches to sociology: The Svalastoga-group was looking for the general empirical laws of society whereas the two other groups had a more applied approach and arguably also a more critical (or political) inclination. However, they all had one thing in common: a strong fascination with American sociology.

Why Mills, Why Copenhagen?

In the early years of the Cold War, the United States was a reference point for European social scientists (Thue, 2006; Rausch, 2007; Haney, 2008), and the establishment of good relations with the United States could strengthen not only the discipline’s status but also the individual academic’s research career. Henning Friis had been a ‘first mover’ with his visit to the New School of Social Research in New York, and he draw on his contacts to Paul Lazarsfeld at Columbia University and the Danish Fulbright Commission to pave the way for a prominent American professor of sociology to come to Denmark.¹⁰ Lazarsfeld often was a go-between between the American sociology community and Europe (see Thue, 2006 for Norway) and Columbia University was the epicenter of American sociology, with Lazarsfeld and Robert Merton as leading figures. At the same time, there was a high degree of mutual skepticism between Mills and the sociology community at Columbia (Summers, 2006b). Mills had started as Lazarsfeld’s colleague in 1945, but their relationship was soon marked by disagreements. Mills managed to remain at Columbia and establish his success in his own right with a series of articles in the leading sociological journals and with books such as White Collar and The Power Elite. However, neither Mills nor Lazarsfeld kept silent about their disagreements. In several articles from the end of the 1940s, Mills presented critiques of Lazarsfeld’s empirical sociology that later would become a major component of The Sociological Imagination (Aronowitz, 2012).

In this light, Lazarsfeld’s recommendation of Mills as Fulbright professor in Copenhagen is understandable. That would send Mills away from Columbia for a period – and Mills had expressed his keen interest in going to Europe. It is not clear, however, as to whether Friis actively identified Mills as the desired candidate. Friis certainly knew of Mills’ work. Mills’ critical sociological work accorded well with Friis’ left-leaning biography, and Mills’ personal views and non-theoretical approach to sociology was close to Friis’ own.¹¹

The rivalry between Friis and Svalastoga led to the somewhat paradoxical situation that it was not Svalastoga and the sociology section at University of Copenhagen but two psychology professors, Franz From and E. Tranekjær Rasmussen from the Department of Psychology, who submitted the formal request to the United States Educational Foundation in Denmark to invite C. Wright Mills as a Fulbright scholar. An application to get Mills to Denmark in 1955-56 was submitted too late, and an agreement could be reached only to have Mills come the following year.¹² The main argument for having Mills come to Copenhagen was that for years there had been a ‘considerable interest among students of psychology for more extensive orientation in social psychology,’ which the university itself had difficulty in fulfilling, and the applicants argued that ‘Dr. Wright Mills is the person best suited to help us to start.’ The application especially refers to a book written by Mills and Gerth, Character and Social Structure (1953), which was an introduction to the American tradition of social psychology based on a pluralistic understanding of the relationship between the individual and society (Aronowitz, 2012: 159-166).¹³ Interestingly, the first Danish introduction to social psychology published in 1956 as a 130 page manuscript for social work students did not have a single mention of Gerth and Mill’s book (Hoeck-Gradenwitz, 1956).

Mills was not a difficult catch. In a letter to Max Horkheimer in December 1952, Mills affirmed that he saw the United States as becoming increasingly provincial, and therefore wanted to try living in Europe.¹⁴ This would be his first trip to the European continent. Mills would have preferred to go to England, but when Denmark offered the possibility, he jumped at the chance: ‘You ask why Copenhagen? Well, they asked me, nobody else did. Second, I like the idea of going to this little country.’¹⁵ In January 1956, Mills wrote to his parents that it now looks as if he and his family will be going to Copenhagen.¹⁶ In this letter Mills complains about the financial side of the arrangement, but he also declares that ‘after waiting 15 years to get to Europe, I cannot let that stand in my way.’ In April of the same year, Mills explains that he is still waiting for the final answer to ‘the Copenhagen deal’ (adding in pencil that he has been promoted to ‘full professor’). Finally, on May 8th, he can inform his parents that the agreement had been reached, with a departure 20 days later.¹⁷

Mills was, with just one month's notice, finally offered a Fulbright Scholarship at the Department of Psychology at the University of Copenhagen. For Mills, the Fulbright scholarship was mainly an instrument for travelling – he was from the outset skeptical towards the political-ideological connotations of Fulbright program. ‘No general preparation seems to me necessary, certainly no “briefing”’, Mills stated in his mandatory report to the Fulbright Commission before leaving the US.¹⁸ The dream of coming to Europe was now fulfilled (Brewer, 2004) but he was representing himself.

Sociologist in Cold War Europe

In Summers’ biography of Mills’ sojourn abroad, Copenhagen functioned as a base of operations for Mills’ many trips across Europe (Summers, 2006a): to Germany, Yugoslavia, Britain, Poland, Norway, and France, during which he met several intellectuals of the contemporary left, including Ralph Miliband, E. P. Thompson, and Zygmunt Baumann (see also Gane & Back, 2012, 405-6). These visits helped reinforce Mills’ political awareness as part of the New Left, and in the project statement that he wrote in his evaluation report to the Fulbright Commission, Mills summarized his trips as a ‘Comparative study of intellectuals’.¹⁹

It was a coincidence that Mills ended up residing in Europe precisely the year 1956. However, there is little doubt that the events of 1956 were formative for Mills as for many center-left intellectuals in Europe (see Ossewaarde, 2012 for a discussion on Mills and the Cold War). 1956 was one of the most dramatic years of the Cold War (Westad, 2017: 183-208). In February, at the Soviet Communist Party's 20th Party Congress, Khrushchev held his famous speech denouncing Stalin and the Stalinist crimes. The speech sent shockwaves through the European communist parties. In late June of the same year, workers in the Polish city of Poznan took to the streets in protest, a protest that would be crushed by police and military with tanks, resulting in over 70 deaths and imprisonment of the participants. The autumn saw conflicts over access to the Suez Canal that evolved into an armed conflict between Egypt on the one hand, and Britain, France, and Israel on the other. At about the same time, anti- communist/anti-Soviet protests began to take place against the regime in Hungary, and the resulting suppression of the revolt by Soviet tanks left 50,000 dead and a quarter of a million Hungarians fleeing to Western Europe.

When the waves from the 20th Party Congress and later the Hungarian uprising reached Denmark, the result was a severe crisis for the Danish Communist Party, which, although small and politically marginalized, still had a certain appeal to intellectual groups (Thing, 1993). The 1956 crisis led directly to soul-searching and fragmentation among the organized communists, and in Denmark in 1958, a breakaway faction founded the Socialist People's Party, as the first New Left style party in Denmark (Jacobsen, 1995). The 1956-57 period was also marked by activism from left wing of the social democratic party, which sought to attract the former communist “fellow travelers” and to push the Danish Social Democrats more ideologically towards the left (Petersen, 2001: 9-13).

Friis was a central figure in these activities. In December 1956, Friis together with the future prime minister Jens Otto Krag and a handful of other Social Democrats (including Bent Andersen, who also attended the meetings with Mills), took the initiative to approach leftist intellectuals who had been disillusioned by communism (Petersen, 1999). The first step was to bring together 77 prominent Danish intellectuals in a group appeal to the Social Democratic Party Congress in 1957, the goal of which was to implement a “more active social and cultural policy.” The next step was the formation of non-partisan discussion forum called “Socialist Debate” in 1958 (Petersen, 2001: 10-12).

There is no direct trace that connects Mills to these activities. But Mills’ critical thinking and his advocacy of the New Left certainly overlaps with the ideas that were brought up in these circles. During and after his stay, a few of his texts were published in Denmark. The newspaper Berlingske Tidende, in the autumn of 1956, published two op-ed pieces by Mills: one on national power and the other on cultural prestige (Mills, 1956a, b). In the summer of 1957, the New Left magazine Dialog published a lecture by Mills entitled "The Power Structure in American Society" (Mills, 1957). Common to these publications was that they were translations of texts that had been published in other languages, featuring especially Mills’ work on the power structure in soeciety (and not his work with the Sociological Imagination), and that they contained no references to Denmark or Danish conditions. For Mills, Denmark was a part of Europe.

Several of Mills texts were translated by the author and social critic Elsa Gress, who became a close friend of Mills during his stay, having first met him while she studied at Columbia University in 1952.²⁰ Gress, who was clearly fascinated by the character of Mills, says that "The first time I saw Wright Mills, he was sitting like a big crestfallen teddy bear in a giant bed at our mutual friends, the historian Richard Hofstadter and his wife" (Gress, 1969: 153). In an essay published two years after Mills’ death, Gress wrote a tribute that far surpassed the attention Mills had received during his stay:

“With all his personal sensitivity, yes, shyness, and his deeply individualistic commitment to the struggle for the survival of culture, Charles Wright Mills was an intrepid revolutionary, a primitive socialist at heart, though not of mind and thought, a man who knew his time and its problems and was more modern than most in the sense of being aware of his time -- aware of the promises and threats of his time -- but at the same time a human being with full loyalty to the historical conditions of his time and with the moral courage to analyze and propose ideals. This unusual, indeed unique, mixture of humanity and competence makes him into a dignified rallying point even after his death.” (Gress, 1964: 186).

Mills as Guest Professor in Copenhagen

In late May of 1956, Mills arrived in the Danish capital with his wife Ruth and their one-year-old daughter Kathie. Somewhat in contrast to Mills’ political left turn, the family was accommodated during their stay in a large apartment with domestic help at Svanemøllevej 64 in the Hellerup area, a wealthy district of large villas housing many embassies, in the northern edge of Copenhagen (Summers, 2006a, I, 8-9. Decades later, one of his neighbors recalled his childhood fascination of the American professor and his fleet consisting of a motorcycle and a converted VW van (for family trips).²¹ Prior to his arrival, Mills had ordered a BMW motorcycle from Germany, and the BMW became his preferred mode of transport not only on European highways, but also in Copenhagen.²²

Mills overall experience of life in Copenhagen was positive except for the Danish language, which he described as ‘a terrible language that’s hard to learn; but most om them speaks English quite well’.²³ He elaborated his daily-life experiences of Denmark in a series of letters to his family.²⁴ We learn that his wife was transporting herself on a bicycle with a small motor on the front – ‘a very Danish little snail’. That the family liked Danish Modern furniture and especially the typical combination of oak and teak. Economically things went well as the family could afford a ‘full time maid’ and ‘all the food and beer we want’. And the Danes were in positively described as friendly and easy going: ‘The Danes, I think, know all about the absurdity of the world and they all laugh’.

In September 1956, Mills began his teaching at the University of Copenhagen. He lectured in Social Psychology for an hour each Monday and Friday, to a packed auditorium in both the Fall 1956 and Spring 1957 semesters. In addition, during both semesters he offered a bi-weekly two-hour seminar to advanced students entitled “Advanced Problems in Social Psychology”.²⁵ Mills did not make much of the fact that he was teaching psychology rather than sociology students. The notes and syllabus of his lecture series, entitled “Social Psychology – Copenhagen” suggests that Mills had recycled several old lectures, as early as one dated "Fall Quarter 1944" from the time when Mills worked at the University of Maryland.²⁶ The topics in the lecture series included those that had been central to his research. His approach to social psychology was that -- like sociology-- it should study the interaction between individuals and social structures. In the first lecture, he sketched out his approach: ‘In our historical situation the hybrid, “social psychology”, has come to appeal to those who are eager to understand social structures in such a way as to see how they have shaped the character of individual men and women.’ In other words, it was a matter of connecting Freud and Marx. Reality should not be reduced to either the one or the other. Mills continued:

“We need to study men enacting roles in the political, economic, and religious institutions in various societies; we need to form theories of how, on the one hand, types of personalities are variously anchored in each of these institutional orders; and, on the other hand, how institutional orders themselves are variously combined, to form historical types of social structures. In the course of these lectures, we shall set forth a general model of social structure which will help us carry out these aims.”

Students who had read Mills and Gerth’s Character and Social Structure (1953) prior to these lectures may have felt the pangs of recognition, for Mills’ lecture was largely a direct repetition of the book's introduction. In the lecture manuscript, Mills had fortunately shown enough care to have made a few corrections: ‘in the course of this book’ thus became ‘in the course of these lectures.’ We do not have manuscripts for the entire series of Mills’ lectures, but those that exist suggest that Mills followed the book, allowing leeway for additions and space for improvisation.

Those attending his lectures would later report on their fascination with this American professor who was not only a welcome international breath of fresh air at a time when academics were significantly less transnational than today, but also broke with the stuffy image of the university professor. Mills parked the motorcycle outside the university and came up to the podium still dressed in his leather jacket.²⁷ Mills, on the other hand, was hardly ecstatic in his assessment of Copenhagen University and the Danish students. The University of Copenhagen, in Mills’ eyes, was ‘not altogether the liveliest place in the world’ and he was ‘not impressed by any passionate pursuit of knowledge on the part of the Danish students’.²⁸ In a letter to an American colleague, he complained about the ‘passive, calm, judicious, smug, civilized, and dull student assembly’ who had attended one of his lectures (Summers, 2006a: 40-41).

Elsa Gress, a prominent Danish left-wing social critic and author who developed a friendship with Mills, later lamented that for Mills, the Copenhagen students were simply disappointing, as they did not live up to his ideas about Europe: ‘The Danish students simply did not offer enough resistance -- here he had found the young Americans to be passive and complacent and hoped for a completely different spirit in Europe -- and then he came up against an even more passive and nearly as complacent youth.’ Gress continued explaining, however, that Mills’ attitude was partly a cultural misunderstanding on both sides. The clash of cultures was evident when the students, at the end of his lecture series, could finally express their appreciation:

“When a student gave him a bouquet of flowers after his final lecture in Copenhagen, he was utterly disoriented. Were they making fun of him? Like most American men, Wright Mills was worried about his virility and others' assessment of it, and this concern momentarily dominated over his sociological training: the Danish flower gesture became a suspicion of him as a sissy. I had to use many good words to reassure him on this occasion.” (Gress, 1969: 155).

His first months in Copenhagen did also not generate much good news for Mills on the publishing front. His The Power Elite had appeared just prior to his departure to Europe. It attracted much attention, but the many critical reviews hit Mills hard during the early period in Copenhagen (Summers, 2006a: 36-38). The book was also reviewed in Denmark, where the young political scientist Erling Bjøl, in September 1956, gave it an appreciative, albeit critical treatment (Bjøl, 1956). Bjøl found that the polemicist Mills sometimes overshadowed Mills the sociologist. At the same time, Mills was suffering from failing health, resulting in reduced work capacity, and he sounds quite despondent when, in November 1956, he laments,

“Of course you can work anywhere, but somehow I do not think of Copie as helping you get down to it. It is not that exciting; on the contrary it's very quiet.”²⁹

However, after the New Year 1957, his stay in Copenhagen became very productive. Perhaps the quiet atmosphere in Copenhagen gave Mills the needed respite with which to renew himself. Perhaps Copenhagen was a place where he could digest the criticism he had received and build on it productively. Furthermore, Mills’ somewhat loose relationship with the university environment was offset by his contacts outside of it. In a report to the Fulbright Commission after his visit Mills explicitly stated that ‘[t]here are only one professor of sociology in Denmark, although there are two opposing “schools”. I was asked to come to Copenhagen by “the other school”.³⁰ It was largely Henning Friis himself and a number of those who either helped form or subsequently came to work at the social research institute who also became the small circle of people with which Mills had contact in Denmark, and with whom he met for seminars to discuss the draft of The Sociological Imagination. Friis and Mills also developed a personal relationship, and on several occasions, Mills wrote to Friis during his trips to the European mainland.³¹ Mills also planned to enroll Friis in his network activities for New Left intellectuals. In a letter to Friis from August 1957, Mills, admittedly “half full of Weinbrand,” wrote of developing plans for a series of seminars on ‘”and Social Science” at the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences in cooperation with its director, Professor Schaff. The impressive list of people who were supposed to be giving lectures included Ralph Miliband, Jean Paul Sartre, Max Horkheimer, Edmund Wilson, Gunnar Myrdal, and Henning Friis: "You of course are Scandinavian coordinator," Mills assured him.³² Apparently, nothing came of these plans, but they bear witness to Mills’ ambitions and to Friis' relationship with him.

Clearly, Henning Friis had an advantage in as much as he had initiated Mills’ visit and could steer Mills to Friis’ own group. Mills himself was well-aware of who was the real mastermind behind his stay in Denmark, “Henning Friis”, he wrote, “[...] was very important in getting me over there: he is the social science advisor to the government from the university.”³³ Furthermore, Friis and his network were attractive for Mills. Friis and large parts of his group occupied key positions on the social democratic left of that time, close to the New Left that Mills had gravitated towards on his trips through Europe in the dramatic year 1956. Like most intellectuals, and true to elementary sociological “law,” Mills preferred to spend time with people whom he felt would be sympathetic toward his intellectual and political views.

The Making of the Sociological Imagination in Copenhagen

What would become The Sociological Imagination makes its first appearance in the historical sources early in 1957. After a period of ill health, Mills had regained strength and was working feverishly, writing on several manuscripts simultaneously. In a letter to Friis from February 1957, Mills explained that he was “[v]ery hot these days about a little book on Social Science I've suddenly begun to produce. In fact, it is almost writing itself. ... I hope late in the spring to have a rough manuscript completed and that you will read it critically one evening.”³⁴

Things went even faster than Mills himself had imagined. In a powerful spurt of energy, he wrote just three weeks later that he now had a “well-written first draft” of 220 pages, describing the book as follows:

“[a] statement of the promise, the tasks, the nature of the social sciences (Ch. 1). It is at once a “defense” (without appearing to be such) of the kind of stuff I've done, and a really detailed criticism of “methodological inhibition” (Ch. 2) a la Lazarsfeld, and of “the fetishism of the concept” (Ch. 3) a la Parsons. It also contains a complete and I believe first-rate, rewrite of a never-published essay “On Intellectual Craftsmanship” (Ch. 4), and a brand-new version of “The Political Promise” (Ch. 5), which is set within a neat little view of the role of reason in human affairs, in history. Within it I have also finally been able to state the central role of historical studies in the social sciences as a whole. I am very excited about it all and can’t conceive of any sudden shift in my evaluation of it.”³⁵

Friis quickly organized a study group, which in the spring met with Mills and discussed the individual chapters of the book, which at the time had the working title The Social Sciences, their Nature and their Tasks.³⁶ On the cover page of the copy of the manuscript, found in Henning Friis' personal papers, it says explicitly:

“It is made available in its present form only to the “Social Science Study Group of Copenhagen, spring 1957” with the understanding that these drafts are not to be circulated beyond the members of this group. No portions can be quoted or reproduced in any form without written permission from the author.”

The cross-disciplinary group consisted of eight persons, representing political economists interested in social policy and psychologists:

• Henning Friis (1911-1989): political economist, public intellectual, leading civil servant in the Ministry of Social Affairs, from 1958-79 founding director Danish Institute of Social Research

• Kirsten Rudfeld (1919-2012): political economist, civil servant in the Ministry of Social Affairs.

• Bent (Rold) Andersen (1929-2015): political economist, civil servant in the Ministry of Social Affairs, later Professor of Social Policy at Roskilde University and Minister of Social Affairs (in 1982).

• P.-H. Kühl (1914-2000), psychologist, employed in prison sector, later Danish Institute of Social Research

• Poul Vidriksen (1932-1992): psychologist, long academic career University of Copenhagen

• Knud Erik Svendsen (1926-2008): economist, research librarian Royal Danish Library, later academic career as development economist

• Torben Agersnap (1922-): economist, from 1952 working as sociologist at Aarhus University and Copenhagen Business School.

• Bror Vilhelm Elberling (1920-2003), political economist, editor Danish Newspaper Yearbook (Avisårbogen), later lecturer at the Royal School of Librarianship (Copenhagen)

None of the eight group members were sociologist by training but they shared an interest in social problems and sociology. Torben Agersnap, as a student of German sociologist Theodor Geiger and heading a section for organizational sociology at Copenhagen Business School, was the most sociology-minded member of the group. However, all members were engaged in the social problems of the times. Three members of the group (Rudfeld, Friis, and Andersen) were employed in Ministry of Social Affairs and two (Kühl and Vidriksen) were engaged in social psychology, Kühl as a prison-psychologist. Andersen and Friis were outspoken and prominent members of the Social Democratic Party – Andersen later became minister of social research for a short period in 1982. And in their quest for a social science relevant for society, according to Agersnap (1996: 101), they shared a common concern “about the unilateral development of the naive positivist sociology at the University of Copenhagen during these years”. In other words, if Mills was looking for a responsive audience to test and develop his ideas, he needed not look no further.

There exists no surviving paper trail documenting exactly what happened at these seminars, which took place in the Ministry of Social Affairs. In a 50-years perspective three of the participants recall that the group had informal ‘intense and lively’ discussions on drafts for the individual chapters of the Mill’s manuscript.³⁷ A comparison of the Copenhagen manuscript with the published book cannot say much about what Mills took home with him from the discussions. Mills left Copenhagen, and it was only two years later, in 1959, that Oxford University Press published The Sociological Imagination. Others could have had their say in the process.³⁸ However, Mills clearly felt the need to explicitly thank precisely this particular Copenhagen study group in the book, and in a letter to Hans Gerth from April 1957, Mills speaks enthusiastically about the manuscript, noting that "Nine friends here reading it and we have the little seminars of 3½ hours on each chapter, in the various languages of the western world."³⁹ Arguably, Mills Copenhagen backing-group was not only important with respect to confirming Mills ideas and as a safe space for knitting together his criticism of the state-of-art of sociology, but it also offered cross-disciplinary perspectives from colleagues deeply engaged in transforming Danish society into a welfare state. Mills speaks of his time in Copenhagen as a “pivotal year”.

In May 1957, C. Wright Mills departed Copenhagen for a stay in Innsbruck in Austria – his time here is described by his daughter Mills (2018). The following year he returned to the United States. In 1959, Oxford University Press finally published The Sociological Imagination. Not surprisingly, Mills’ attacks were not well received by the American sociological profession's elite who had been the direct target of the book. Robert Merton, in his keynote address to the 1959 ISA Conference, held in the Italian town of Stresa, referred to “the recent little book by C. Wright Mills” (Summers, II: 266), but hardly in complimentary terms. In the early years after publication, The Sociological Imagination generally attracted less attention than Mills’ other books, such as The Causes of World War Three, published in 1958, and especially in Europe, his growing criticism towards the United States fueled his popularity on the European Left, which continued after his death in 1962. In Denmark, White Collar was translated in 1968 (as De nye middelklasser). But it would be fifty more years, not until 2002, before The Sociological Imagination would appear in Danish (as Den sociologiske fantasi).

The evaluation report from the Fulbright Foundation's Danish office, addressed to the U.S. State Department in Washington, offers very different perspectives on Mills Copenhagen-visit. Mills’ two (formal) Danish hosts, the professors Franz From and E. Tranekjær Rasmussen from the University Copenhagen’s Department of Psychology, expressed their unabashed satisfaction with Mills’ visit.⁴⁰ They wrote enthusiastically about ‘large audience’, ‘extremely inspiring’ lectures, ‘pedagogical significance’ and ended their letter by affirming ‘our heartfelt thanks to the Educational Foundation in Denmark for making this valuable visit possible.’ Even though this is sounds like professors thanking a grant giver using the conventional clichés, there is no doubt that from the perspective of the University of Copenhagen, Mills’ visit was a benefit. He introduced a new perspective -- social psychology -- and he was an international breath of fresh air. However, C. Wright Mills was no mainstream American sociologist, nor any kind of conventional Fulbright professor. The Fulbright Program had been established early in the Cold War, as part of what we today would call a "soft power strategy" in relation to Europe (Lebovic, 2013). The official goal of the Fulbright program, like the Marshall Plan exchange program and the Rockefeller Foundation’s programs, was to strengthen academic exchanges across the Atlantic with a view to upgrading the skills of (especially social) scientific research in Europe (Thue, 2006; Rausch, 2007; Buus & Petersen, 2013). However, the programs should also be viewed as an important part of the Cold War cultural battle for ‘hearts and minds’. The Foundation's Danish office did not share the two Danish professors’ enthusiasm about Mills and noted that this ‘enthusiasm should not, however, be interpreted as evidence of Professor Mills' effectiveness as a Fulbright grantee, for the naiveté of these Danish professors is fairly well recognized.’ The Fulbright officials then follows with an extremely sharp criticism of Mills:

“Professor Mills’ most recent book, The Power Elite, which came out after his selection for an award, is not regarded as scientifically sound by American experts in this field. As a result of newspaper interviews with Professor Mills and articles he wrote for the press, the book has called to the attention of the Danish public and has no doubt been widely read in circles interested in American institutions and sociological studies of the U.S. In view of this, as well as in view of Professor Mills’ articulacy, his opinions have been accepted and repeated by less sophisticated Danes. While it might be healthy for it to be known that Americans are free to criticize their country, the value of awarding a government grant to an outspoken critic of the United States as Professor Mills seems dubious. In any events, the Foundation cannot in all honesty claim that he made a positive contribution – academic or personal – to exchange objectives.”⁴¹

Conclusion

The existing biographical literature on Mills has not diverted much attention to his stay in Copenhagen except mentioning it as a hub for his European tour, which in turn often is described as a watershed in Mills development as a sociologist and public intellectual. The purpose of this paper is to fill a gap in the literature on C. Wright Mills arguing that his year in Copenhagen was formative in the sense it gave Mills a critically necessary respite (space of selfhood), access to Europe during an important phase in the Cold War and brought him into direct contact with a team of like-minded Danish colleagues with whom he could refine his ideas. Mills himself considered his intellectually fruitful spring 1957 period of work as ‘pivotal’.⁴² As it is stated in the acknowledgement of The Sociological Imagination these Danish encounters influenced Mills’ work.

Even though, he was not affiliated with the sociology section at University of Copenhagen, Mills had close relations with and made an impression on sociologists and other social scientists outside the University of Copenhagen walls. Furthermore, there is evidence to suggest that Mills helped stimulate a growing interest in the middle class (white collar workers) among Danish social scientists. Beginning in 1960, a growing discussion about this group and its political orientation appears in both the scientific journals and in the wider public debate (see Hansen, 1960; Høegh, 1960). Furthermore, Mills’ work was picked up by the Danish New Left from the late 1960s. To sum up: Mills 12 month visit in Copenhagen was an important part of Mills intellectually biography – as well as of the early history of Danish sociology.