Frasi di Charles Wright Mills

Charles Wright Mills è stato un sociologo statunitense.

È ricordato soprattutto per aver studiato la struttura del potere negli Stati Uniti d'America nel suo libro Le élite del potere. Tale struttura secondo Mills è costituita dalla triade della élite economica, di quella politica e di quella militare.

C. W. Mills era un convinto sostenitore della responsabilità degli intellettuali nella società successiva alla seconda guerra mondiale. Secondo lui erano necessari prese di posizione ed impegno al posto di un disinteressato interesse accademico, in modo da costituire un "apparato di comprensione pubblica" e di "coscienza collettiva" in grado di contrastare le politiche delle élite istituzionali, espresse nella triade economica, politica, militare.

Dal 1941 al 1945 è professore associato di sociologia alla University of Maryland di College Park . Dal 1945 al 1948 è direttore del Labor Research Division del Bureau of Applied Social Research della Columbia University di New York City, N.Y. coordinato da Paul F. Lazarsfeld . Dal 1945 al 1962 lavora al dipartimento di sociologia della Columbia University prima come lettore , poi come professore assistente , poi ancora come professore associato , infine come full professor . Dal 1954 al 1956 è anche lettore esterno al William Alanson White Institute of Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis, and Psychology in New York. Morì prematuramente nel marzo 1962 di un attacco cardiaco.

Sociologo di fama internazionale, considerato da alcuni uno dei maggiori del nostro tempo, ogni sua opera sollevò accese polemiche e scandalo specialmente negli Stati Uniti, la cui società fu esaminata con grande profondità nella sua analisi. Mentre i conservatori lo bollavano come "uomo di sinistra", i liberal si stupivano non avesse tenuto nella debita considerazione l'importanza politica ed istituzionale della Corte Suprema. D'altro canto l'ex Unione Sovietica, pur pubblicando il suo libro Le élite del potere come critica della società statunitense, concludeva nell'introduzione che l'autore era comunque schierato "nelle speranze e nelle simpatie dalla parte del mondo occidentale".

In realtà l'analisi di Mills prendeva in considerazione i profondi cambiamenti maturati nella società statunitense anche e soprattutto a causa della seconda guerra mondiale, al punto di arrivare a definirla "post-moderna". Tali cambiamenti spazzavano via le illusioni settecentesche di una possibile divisione dei poteri e vedevano anzi crescere in modo irresistibile la concentrazione dei poteri politico, militare, industriale. Concentrazione che si sarebbe poi chiaramente manifestata in quello che lo stesso presidente Eisenhower definì nel suo ultimo discorso "il pericoloso complesso militare-industriale".

Le élite del potere fu attentamente studiato da Fidel Castro e Che Guevara nelle prime fasi della rivoluzione cubana, che all'epoca Mills vedeva con simpatia come possibile terza alternativa tra capitalismo e bolscevismo. Per dare un'idea dell'importanza di C. W. Mills, si pensi che alcuni studiosi sostengono che: "In relazione ai movimenti di rivolta globale del sessantotto, la CIA identificava C.W. Mills come uno dei più influenti intellettuali della Nuova Sinistra a livello mondiale, nonostante fosse morto già da sei anni". Wikipedia  

✵ 28. Agosto 1916 – 20. Marzo 1962
Charles Wright Mills photo
Charles Wright Mills: 57   frasi 0   Mi piace

Charles Wright Mills Frasi e Citazioni

“Non può essere compresa né la vita di un individuo né la storia di una società senza comprendere entrambe.”

Origine: Citato in AA.VV., Il libro della sociologia, traduzione di Martina Dominici, Gribaudo, 2018, p. 48. ISBN 9788858015827

“Lascia che ogni uomo sia il metodologo di se stesso, lascia che sia il teorico di se stesso.”

Origine: Citato in AA.VV., Il libro della sociologia, traduzione di Martina Dominici, Gribaudo, 2018, p. 47. ISBN 9788858015827

Charles Wright Mills: Frasi in inglese

“[O]ne could translate the 555 pages of The Social System into about 150 pages of straightforward English. The result would not be very impressive.”

C. Wright Mills libro The Sociological Imagination

Origine: The Sociological Imagination (1959), p. 31, commenting on the verbosity of the chief work of competing sociologist Talcott Parsons.

“Here's to the day when the complete works of Leon Trotsky are published and widely distributed in the Soviet Union. On that day the USSR will have achieved democracy!”

Mills was invited to speak in the Soviet Union as an honored guest, due to his criticisms of economies in the West; he was asked to make a toast at a banquet, and in his contrarian way, toasted Trotsky, whose works had been banned in the Soviet Union by Stalin. Reported in Saul Landau, "C. Wright Mills: The Last Six Months", Ramparts (August 1965), p. 49-50.
1960s

“The more we understand what is happening in the world, the more frustrated we often become, for our knowledge leads to feelings of powerlessness.
We feel that we are living in a world in which the citizen has become a mere spectator or a forced actor, and that our personal experience is politically useless and our political will a minor illusion. Very often, the fear of total permanent war paralyzes the kind of morally oriented politics, which might engage our interests and our passions. We sense the cultural mediocrity around us-and in us-and we know that ours is a time when, within and between all the nations of the world, the levels of public sensibilities have sunk below sight; atrocity on a mass scale has become impersonal and official; moral indignation as a public fact has become extinct or made trivial.
We feel that distrust has become nearly universal among men of affairs, and that the spread of public anxiety is poisoning human relations and drying up the roots of private freedom. We see that people at the top often identify rational dissent with political mutiny, loyalty with blind conformity, and freedom of judgment with treason. We feel that irresponsibility has become organized in high places and that clearly those in charge of the historic decisions of our time are not up to them. But what is more damaging to us is that we feel that those on the bottom-the forced actors who take the consequences-are also without leaders, without ideas of opposition, and that they make no real demands upon those with power.”

Origine: Letters & Autobiographical Writings (1954), pp. 184-185.

“Competition has been curtailed by larger corporations; it has been sabotaged by groups of smaller entrepreneurs acting collectively. Both groups have made clear the locus of liberalism's rhetoric of small business and family farm.The character and ideology of the small entrepreneur and the facts of the market are selling the idea of competition short. These liberal heroes, the small businessmen and the farmer, do not want to develop their characters by free and open competition; they do not believe in competition, and they have been doing their best to get away from it.When the small businessmen are asked whether they think free competition is…a good thing, they answer…, 'Yes, of course—what do you mean?' … Finally: 'How about here in this town in furniture?'—or groceries, or whatever the man's line is. Their answers are of two sorts: 'Yes, if it's fair competition,' which turns out to mean: 'if it doesn't make me compete.' … The small businessman, as well as the farmer, wants to become big, not directly by eating up others like himself in competition, but by the indirect ways means practiced by his own particular heroes—those already big. In the dream life of the small entrepreneur, the sure fix is replacing the open market.But if small men wish to close their ranks, why do they continue to talk…about free competition? The answer is that the political function of free competition is what really matters now…[f]or, if there is free competition and a constant coming and going of enterprises, the one who remains established is 'the better man' and 'deserves to be where he is.' But if instead of such competition, there is a rigid line between successful entrepreneurs and the employee community, the man on top may be 'coasting on what his father did,' and not really be worthy of his hard-won position. Nobody talks more of free enterprise and competition and of the best man winning than the man who inherited his father's store or farm. …… In Congress small-business committees clamored for legislation to save the weak backbone of the national economy. Their legislative efforts have been directed against their more efficient competitors. First they tried to kill off the low-priced chain stores by taxation; then they tried to eliminate the alleged buying advantages of mass distributor; finally they tried to freeze the profits of all distributors in order to protect their own profits from those who could and were selling goods cheaper to the consumer.The independent retailer…has been pushing to maintain a given margin under the guise of 'fair competition' and 'fair-trade' laws. He now regularly demands that the number of outlets controlled by chain stores be drastically limited and that production be divorced from distribution. This would, of course, kill the low prices charged consumers by the A&P;, which makes very small retail profits, selling almost at cost, and whose real profits come from the manufacturing and packaging.…Under the threat of 'ruinous competition,' laws are on the books of many states and cities legalizing the ruin of competition.”

C. Wright Mills libro White Collar: The American Middle Classes

Section One: The Competitive Way of Life.
White Collar: The American Middle Classes (1951)

“Hegel is correct: we learn from history that we cannot learn from it.”

C. Wright Mills libro The Power Elite

Origine: The Power Elite (1956), p. 23.

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