A 1950s Radical

Born in 1916 to a middle-class family, C. Wright Mills became assistant professor in one of the most prestigious University in the US (Columbia) at the age of thirty. His atypical trajectory took him from his home state of Texas to New York, the country’s intellectual capital, at a time when American sociology was going through major changes. During the interwar period, the practitioners of the still fairly nascent discipline agreed neither on its methods nor on its object (Steinmetz, 2007). Mills, who rose up in this very open intellectual environment, wanted to help develop a science of the social. However, while he emphasized an empirical approach to social phenomena, he distanced himself from sociology’s gradual shift toward professionalization, which came to prevail after the war. He believed sociology should be active and critical rather than bureaucratic and conservative. As he put it in The Sociological Imagination, “I do not believe that social science will ‘save the world’ although I see nothing wrong at all with ‘trying to save the world’- a phrase which I take here to mean the avoidance of war and the re-arrangement of human affairs in accordance with the ideals of human freedom and reason.” (SI, p. 193).