Abstract
This article presents a reevaluation of C. Wright Mills’s classic book, The Power Elite, in light of recent historical evidence about the changing nature of the corporate elite in the United States. I argue that Mills’s critique of the mid-twentieth century American elite, although trenchant and in large part appropriate, fails to acknowledge the extent to which business leaders of that era adopted a moderate and pragmatic approach to politics. Operating with an orientation they termed “enlightened self-interest,” the elites of that era promoted policies that—at least to an extent—served the interests of the larger population. I show how the history of the American corporate elite as well as the character of the current US big business community allows us to gain a clearer perspective on the actions of the group’s mid-century counterparts.
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Notes
There is, not surprisingly, a huge literature on Mills and The Power Elite, some of which I discuss below. See Geary (2009, pp. 152–168) for a detailed and sensitive recent treatment by a historian, and http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/series/the_power_elite_revisited for a series of brief essays on the book by leading British sociologists. See Adler (2009) for an excellent discussion of the value of rereading classic works in sociology.
For illustrations of work that Mills saw as reflective of these views, see, among others, Bell (1960), Dahrendorf (1959), Galbraith (1952), and Riesman (1950). As I have argued elsewhere (Mizruchi and Hirschman 2009), these works were considerably more subtle, and less celebratory, than Mills suggested.
See, for example, Mills’s biting discussions of what he called “grand theory” and “abstracted empiricism” in his 1959 book, The Sociological Imagination. Although the criticism of “grand theory” was directed primarily at Talcott Parsons, who was at Harvard, the attack on “abstracted empiricism” appears to have been directed at Mills’s Columbia colleague Paul Lazarsfeld. The latter is a point on which two very different biographers of Mills—Horowitz (1983, pp. 95–99) and Geary (2009, pp. 170–173)—agree.
Mills (1956, p. 18) defined the power elite as “those political, economic, and military circles which as an intricate set of overlapping cliques share decisions having at least national consequences.”
Several of the most well-known critiques of Mills, including those by Dahl, Bell, Adolf A. Berle, Jr., William Kornhauser, Talcott Parsons, Paul M. Sweezy, and Dennis H. Wrong—all cited in this article—were compiled into a book edited by Domhoff and Ballard (1968). Here I cite all these articles, with page numbers where necessary, as they appeared in the Domhoff and Ballard volume, with a 1968 date. Most of them originally appeared in the years immediately following the publication of The Power Elite.
As Mills put it (1956, p. 280), “We cannot infer the direction of policy merely from the social origins and careers of the policy-makers … not all men who effectively represent the interests of a stratum need in any way belong to it or personally benefit by policies that further its interests.”
The idea that a high level of military spending was necessary to maintain the economy in the postwar period was a widely-shared view among critics of American capitalism. For a classic example of this view, see Baran and Sweezy (1966).
See Phillips-Fein (2009) for a detailed treatment of efforts by American business to roll back the policies of the New Deal.
The US Chamber of Commerce adopted a more moderate approach for a brief period during the 1940s under the leadership of Eric Johnston. Johnston was eventually pushed out of his position in 1946 under pressure from local branches of the Chamber, who found his policies overly liberal. See Mizruchi (2013, pp. 53–56) for a discussion of Johnston’s tenure.
Mills analyzed the group to which he referred as the power elite, which consisted of leading members of the business, political, and military communities. In my historical discussion here (see Mizruchi 2013 for a more detailed presentation), I refer primarily to a group I call the “corporate elite,” which consisted (and consists) of the heads of the largest American companies. Although Mills indicated that the three groups in his triumvirate held relatively equal levels of power, it is possible to interpret his analysis as giving priority to business (see, for example, Sweezy 1968), an interpretation that I share. Although I also considered the role of political elites in my study, my focus was on the corporate elite, which I saw as both influencing and influenced by the state. Given the importance of corporate leaders in both Mills’s analysis and mine, a discussion focusing on these business officials is relevant to an assessment of Mills’s argument.
Ralf Dahrendorf (1959, pp. 41–47), for example, argued that the diffusion of stock ownership across the general populations of developed market societies indicated that these societies had transcended capitalism altogether. The suggestion, based on Berle and Means’s classic book (1968 [1932]), that the control of corporations had passed to hired managers, indicated, according to Dahrendorf, that ownership of capital was no longer a relevant variable in contemporary societies. See Mizruchi and Hirschman (2009, especially pp. 1083–1096).
See Keith Poole’s website, http://voteview.com/, for systematic evidence of this increased polarization over time, virtually all of which is accounted for by the increasing conservatism of Congressional Republicans.
Funding for the bank was eventually restored, but widespread opposition continues to exist.
Mills argued, of course, that Congress was an element of the middle levels of power and thus was not where the “big decisions” were made. Questions could be raised about this point even in Mills’s time. Virtually every important domestic issue of the postwar period was at one time or another debated in Congress, a point that Mills, with his focus on foreign policy, neglected to mention. At the same time, Mills was likely correct that power in the US government had, at the time he was writing, moved increasingly to the executive branch. One could argue that in the contemporary United States, the legislative branch has reasserted its power. This was certainly the case during the Obama presidency, in which virtually every initiative the president proposed after the Republicans gained control of the House in the 2010 elections was thwarted. It is reasonable to hypothesize that the centralization of power in the US government is related to the degree of unity within the elite. If, as I have argued, the contemporary American corporate elite is fragmented relative to the elite of the postwar period, it would follow that the locus of state power could have shifted from the executive branch to the Congress.
A recent study by Chu and Davis (2016b) demonstrates that between 1997 and 2010, the density of the network of director interlocks among American firms was reduced by more than 30%. The average number of ties among the Standard & Poor’s 1500 leading US firms declined from 7.14 in 2000 to 4.98 in 2010. The average distance between firms increased from 3.21 in 2000 to 4.23 in 2010. In 2000 there were 62 firms in the network with more than 20 interlocks. By 2010 there was only one such firm.
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Acknowledgments
Portions of this research were funded by the National Science Foundation (grant # SES-0922915) as well as a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
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Mizruchi, M.S. The Power Elite in historical context: a reevaluation of Mills’s thesis, then and now. Theor Soc 46, 95–116 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-017-9284-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-017-9284-4