Character and Social Structure

C. Wright Mills’s oeuvre is based on an ambitious theoretical framework, combining pragmatism and classical sociology. Mills began developing this general system for interpreting individual actions and the social world in the early 1940s. Its most accomplished presentation is found in the book Character and Social Structure, co-authored by Hans Gerth. This general treatise, which was only published in 1953, billed itself as a “social psychology” handbook. The authors argue that this discipline “has become the main area of contact between the decisive intellectual traditions of our time” (Gerth & Mills, 1953, p. XXIII). The term as they use it should not be misunderstood, however – as the British sociologist Thomas B. Bottomore has pointed out, Gerth and Mills meant by “social psychology” a psychology of institutions and of the social roles they called for playing. They were engaging with sociology more than with psychology (Bottomore, 1956, p. 66).