The cultural apparatus: C. Wright Mitts’ unfinished work

Conclusion Mills wrote to his Oxford publisher in 1955. “One book grows out of another; the trouble is not only is there no end to it, but after the second is pressing upon you before you can finish the first, for planning is more fun than working.” 78 Indeed, this mode of working was common to all of Mills’ projects. He worked fast and furiously and always juggled a number of different ideas in various stages of formation. This certainly was the case with The Cultural Apparatus. In a 1955 letter to his publisher Mills enthusiastically said of the book “I'm into it.” He predicted, optimistically, that unlike his other books, this book would be easy, a natural for him that “writing it will not involve the anguish that White Collar and Elites have provided.” By 1959, however, Mills had to admit that this optimism was premature. In “The Personal Note to the Reader” he confessed that “I've never had so much trouble writing a book as I have with this one, and I’ve never taken so much pain with the writing of it as I’ve taken to heart the criticism of being repetitious, verbose and prone to jargon.” 79 Mills never completed the project. By the late 1950's he became preoccupied with the political issues of “war and peace” and American foreign policy in Cuba, the latter in particular. His health was poor as a result of a heart attack he suffered in December of 1959 on the eve of a televised debate with an American advisor in Latin America, A.A. Berle. He became embroiled in what he understood as necessary public work from within the media and he remained adamant about the personal significance of The Cultural Apparatus in 1959.     

Fated to be a professor?

My family has included professors for four generations, most of them associated with the University of Toronto. This accounts for my attending that university as an undergraduate where I first studied sociology, and perhaps suggests that I was fated to go on to become a professor myself. I also embraced as a teen-ager the now obsolete identity of “intellectual,“ centered on left-wing political convictions and literary aspirations. This led me into the orbit of the “New York intellectuals“ when in graduate school at Columbia and later to sympathetic identification with my former teacher C. Wright Mills's argument in The Sociological Imagination. My father's posting as a diplomat in Washington during the early years of the Cold War made me, however, a critical supporter of American foreign policy and a liberal opponent of the New Left of the 1960s, a salient presence in the New York University sociology department where I have long taught. The collapse of communism in the early 1990s has led to the death of socialism as an ideal and a decline in the influence of Marxism within sociology. It is difficult to foresee what the effects of this on the field will be in the long run. Dennis H. Wrong, author of The Problem of Order: Power, Its Forms, Bases, and Uses.     

Imagining The Sociological Imagination: the biographical context of a sociological classic

Charles Wright Mills's arguments in The Sociological Imagination are very popular and this paper focuses on the biographical context in which his programmatic statements were occasioned. This breaks new ground by locating The Sociological Imagination and earlier programmatic statements in the professional and personal travails that motivated them. This approach is adopted in order to display the intersection between biography and sociology in Mills's life and career, a feature that he made a central part of sociology's promise. The paper utilizes this approach to reflect on the reasons why The Sociological Imagination became so popular and was able to transcend Mills's general unpopularity at the time of his death; and as part of the explanation of why the dismissal of the book on its publication contrasts with the contemporary view, enabling it to transpose successfully to a time significantly different than at its writing.     

Toward a reflexive sociology

Gouldner’s call for a “reflexive sociology” in 1970 remains a largely unexamined idea, yet with the breakdown of functionalism’s begemony and the present ferment in theory its time may finally have come. In attempting to clarify and reconstruct Gouldner’s idea, I begin with his concepts “background assumptions” and “domain assumptions,” linking them with Kubn’s ideas. Employing levels of abstraction to approach Gouldner’s material systematically, I proceed to develop and illustrate two contrasting background assumptions or world hypotheses: “stratification” and “interaction.” Finally, I examine some methodological implications of these world views, centering on defining problems, ratio scales and images of measurement, sampling and multivariate-analysis procedures. Introduced to sociology by C. Wright Mills, Bernard Phillips studied with Robin N. Williams, Jr. and taught at the University of North Carolina and the University of Illinois (where he overlapped with Alvin W. Gouldner for a year) before coming to Boston University. A cofounder of the ASA section, Sociological Practice, Phillips’ interests are in Societal Change, Theory and Methods.     

Presidential Address On THE SOCIOLOGICAL IMAGINATION REVISITED

This article offers a critical reading of C. Wright Mills's The Sociological Imagination (1959). Such a reading reveals the need to reassess the basis, practice, purpose, and impact of sociology. Accordingly, interpretive materials drawn from stories about and by alcoholics and a new cultural grouping, Adult Children of Alcoholics, are used to illustrate the foundations of a minimalist sociology.
Know that the … sociological imagination has its chance to make a difference in the quality of life in our time. (Mills 1959, p. 226)     

Durkheim's contribution to the sociological analysis of history

Emile Durkheim has long been viewed as one of the founders of the so-called variables-oriented approach to sociological investigation. This view ignores his considerable achievements using the methodology of “case-based” historical analysis, most prominent among them, his lectures on the history of French education (The Evolution of Educational Thought).In this paper I first outline the intimate relationship that Durkheim envisioned between historical and sociological investigation. I then turn to his work on French education for substantive illustrations of his approach. Finally, I explore certain points of intersection between Durkheim's approach to history and present-day concerns, especially in regard to the role of culture in history and the opposition between prospective and retrospective (“teleological”) strategies of historical analysis.     

Critical sociologies and ressentiment: The examples of C. Wright Mills and Howard Becker

It is widely acknowledged that American sociology underwent a metamorphosis during the 1960s. This transformation was both paradigmatic and political. Advocates of critical theory, broadly understood, driven by a markedly leftist political sensitivity, took center stage in that turbulent decade and marginalized proponents of formerly authoritative frameworks such as Functionalism, in general, or Parsonsian action theory while casting suspicion upon sociological work presuming to be objective and value-free, i.e., “scientific.” Among the formidable figures who engineered this paradigm shift were C. Wright Mills and Howard Becker, both of whom have been elevated to iconic status. They are presumed to have helped lead professional sociology out of the dark ages and to have invigorated the discipline with a constructive humanism that attended to real social problems and which called for a better world, one committed to a genuine egalitarianism. In the final analysis, however, there is reason to doubt whether the works of Mills and Becker—and the metamorphosis they helped bring about—were at all constructive and humanistic. Rather, the evidence seems to suggest that the motive force behind Mills’ and Becker’s research was ressentiment. Following Max Scheler’s classic work on the subject of negative feelings in modern society, I argue that Mills and Becker were ultimately driven by an egalitarianism that was neither affirming nor loving. Rather, this egalitarianism was essentially leveling, content to forever dismantle social realities and lower entities presumed elite without ever reconstituting the world. Thus, Mills and Becker (and by extension large coteries of contemporary sociologists) were against many things, but for very little; the objects of their criticism were clear enough, but their meliorative agendas were either absent altogether, or, when pressed, incoherent from self-contradiction. And, as Scheler contended, critical sociological work bereft of an affirming voice contributes to the negation of value. The author is indebted to Harold J. Bershady and Richard Farnum who contributed to an earlier version of this paper. The author thanks editor Lawrence Nichols and the anonymous reviewers for their constructive criticisms.     

Remembering Sartre

In this article reviewing three books on Sartre written by Ronald Aronson, Bernhard-Henri Lévy, and Ronald Santoni, I note that an enduring interest in Sartre’s life and philosophy centers on the justifiability of revolutionary violence and terror. I argue that critics too often, and sometimes obsessively, focus on the same texts and actions, typically related to his support for communism in the 1950s. They thus often reproduce a Cold War narrative of his life and work, wrongly obscuring his other great political engagement on behalf of national liberation and anticolonial resistance movements around the world. When critics do, however, consider his views in relationship to decolonization, they are often reduced to the muckracking pages of his preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth – a text that is in fact unrepresentative of positions he took in more sustained works, such as The Critique of Dialectical Reason and the 1964 “Rome Lecture” on ethics. I suggest that this “Cold War lens” ought to be removed, so that a fuller and more nuanced understanding of Sartre’s views on political violence might be achieved. Indeed, Aronson’s book is the only one among the three that begins to make this move.

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Second-generation Central Americans and the formation of an ethnoracial identity in Los Angeles

ABSTRACT

Whether Latinos in the United States are an ethnic or racial group is extensively debated. Some propose Latinos are an ethnic group on their way to becoming white, others contend Latinos are a racialised group, and an alternate perspective posits Latinos are an ethnoracial group. This study intervenes in this debate by examining the identities of second- and 1.5-generation Central Americans in Los Angeles, California. Drawing on 27 in-depth interviews, I show Central Americans have an identity repertoire, which includes national origin, panethnic, racial, and minority identities. I also capture the situations and reference groups that influence the deployment of ethnic and racial identities. These results suggest Central Americans develop an ethnoracial identity. I argue Central Americans’ ethnoracial identity emerges from agency – subjective understandings of themselves and resisting invisibility in Mexican Los Angeles – and from structure – a racialised society, institutionally-created panethnic categories, and racially-based experiences.     

From the culture of poverty to the underclass: An analysis of a shift in public language

This paper focuses on the emergence of the “underclass,” and the decline of the “culture of poverty,” as terminologies used in scholarly and popular analysis of certain lowincome groups in American society. It is argued that the theoretical cores of these two concepts are similar but not identical, and that a shift in “public language” has occurred. This shift represents the most recent chapter in the historical process of word substitution that Matza (1966) claims has characterized society’s response to the disreputable poor. The factors responsible for this shift are analyzed, and the consequent potential for miscommunication is highlighted. where his research interests include poverty policy and program evaluation. He is the author (with John B. Williamson) ofPoverty and Public Policy (1986). This article is a revised version of a paper presented at the annual meeting of the Society for the Study of Social Problems, August 1986. I wish to thank the anonymous reviewers ofThe American Sociologist for their thoughtful comments and suggestions.     

Seymour Martin Lipset: The social uses of anomaly

Let me preface my remarks by saying that we are here to honor a living, breathing colleague. My great concern, and in this I am sure that I speak for my colleagues as well, is that any imputation of a postmortem be avoided. Indeed, I would like to believe that Marty will review these various contributions and make his own assessments-critical or approvingly. The fact that he is not present in this conference hall should not deter us from speaking frankly and forthrightly. Marty merits nothing less. What binds us all is the sure knowledge that the work of Lipset speaks to us in personal as well as professional ways. That he has touched so many of us in both the private and public realms is itself a testimonial of the magnitude of his contribution to the field of political sociology. So it is in that spirit of a collégial dialogue that I offer these remarks. Let us hope that a year from now a session of one person can be held, at which S. M. Lipset will provide rebuttals and responses to those of us herein gathered. His most recent work in the field is Behemoth: Main Currents in the History and Theory of Political Sociology. The two major sources for traching the written works of Seymour Lipset are contained in Reexamining Democracy: Essays in Honor of Seymour Martin Lipset, edited by Gary Marx and Martin Diamond. Newberry Park, California: Sage Publishers. 1992, especially pp. 332–355. For work done by Lipset after 1991; as embodied in his later work, see Lipset's essay on “Steady Work: An Academic Memoir,” Annual Review of Socialogy: Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1996, pp. 1–27. My reference to works mentioned in the narrative can be found in either of these bibliography sources.     

Beer and Tea: Harmony and Contradiction Among Two Unlikely Counterparts

This essay begins by examining the representations and interpretations of women and men in two sets of images: the Women's Institute Alternative Calendar and a television commercial for Guinness beer. Both of these compositions are exceptional in their own right, and have captured the imaginations of wide audiences. Taken together, the counterpointing of culture and nature, serenity and intensity, and feminine charm and virility creates a montage of images that both reflect and represent traditional forms of femininity and masculinity. This essay draws on a variety of sociological and interdisciplinary theoretical approaches, with an emphasis on the storied nature of lives, sexuality, and life change. C. Wright Mills declares that the sociological imagination is necessary in order to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society (Mills, 1959, p. 6). The author's aim in this essay, following through on Mills's idea, is to provide insight into the lives of earlier cohorts of women and a glimpse into how personal and social change comes about.     

The State of Research in Latino Academic Attainment

In this essay, I present an interdisciplinary examination of the state of research in Latino education, addressing not only the cultural forces influencing Latinos’ educational attainment, but also the structural conditions faced by them—as a racialized minority group—throughout their schooling and that have a cumulative effect on their academic attainment. Overall, I suggest that by engaging in a critical review of the literature on Latinos’ educational attainment, the reader will acknowledge that the racially driven hierarchical structural arrangements are highly responsible for the patterns observed.     

Utility, informed preference, or happiness: Following Harsanyi's argument to its logical conclusion

Harsanyi (1997) argues that, for normative issues, informed preferences should be used, instead of actual preferences or happiness (or welfare). Following his argument allowing him to move from actual to informed preferences to its logical conclusion forces us to use happiness instead. Where informed preferences differ from happiness due to a pure concern for the welfare of others, using the former involves multiple counting. This “concerning effect” (non-affective altruism) differs from and could be on top of the “minding effect” (affective altruism) of being happy seeing or helping others to be happy. The concerning/minding effect should be excluded/included in social decision. Non-affective altruism is shown to exist in a compelling hypothetical example. Just as actual preferences should be discounted due to the effects of ignorance and spurious preferences, informed preferences should also be discounted due to some inborn or acquired tendencies to be irrational, such as placing insufficient weights on the welfare of the future, maximizing our biological fitness instead of our welfare. Harsanyi's old result on utilitarianism is however defended against criticisms in the last decade. Harsanyi (1997) argues, among other things, that in welfare economics and ethics, what are important are people's informed preferences, rather than either their actual preferences (as emphasized by modern economists) or their happiness (as emphasized by early utilitarians). The main purpose of this paper is to argue that, pursuing Harsanyi's argument that allows him to move from actual to informed preferences to its logical conclusion forces us to happiness as the ultimately important thing. The early utilitarians were right after all! Since I personally approve of Harsanyi's basic argument, I regard myself as his follower who becomes more Catholic than the Pope. (It is not denied that, in practice, the practical difficulties and undesirable side-effects of the procedure of using happiness instead of preferences have to be taken into account. Thus, even if we ultimately wish to maximize the aggregate happiness of people, it may be best in practice to maximize their aggregate preferences in most instances. This important consideration will be largely ignored in this paper.) The secondary objective is to give a brief defence of Harsanyi's (1953, 1955) much earlier argument for utilitarianism (social welfare as a sum of individual utilities) that has received some criticisms in the last decade. The argument (e.g. Roemer 1996) that Harsanyi's result is irrelevant to utilitarianism is based on the point that the VNM (von Neumann-Morgenstern) utility is unrelated to the subjective and interpersonally comparable cardinal utility needed for a social welfare function. Harsanyi's position is defended by showing that the two types of utility are the same (apart from an indeterminate zero point for the former that is irrelevant for utilitarianism concerning the same set of people). Received: 29 May 1997 / Accepted: 3 November 1997     

What is a problem?

Among others, the term “problem” plays a major role in the various attempts to characterize interdisciplinarity or transdisciplinarity, as used synonymously in this paper. Interdisciplinarity (ID) is regarded as “problem solving among science, technology and society” and as “problem orientation beyond disciplinary constraints” (cf. Frodeman et al.: The Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2010). The point of departure of this paper is that the discourse and practice of ID have problems with the “problem”. The objective here is to shed some light on the vague notion of “problem” in order to advocate a specific type of interdisciplinarity: problem-oriented interdisciplinarity. The outline is as follows: Taking an ex negativo approach, I will show what problem-oriented ID does not mean. Using references to well-established distinctions in philosophy of science, I will show three other types of ID that should not be placed under the umbrella term “problem-oriented ID”: object-oriented ID (“ontology”), theory-oriented ID (epistemology), and method-oriented ID (methodology). Different philosophical thought traditions can be related to these distinguishable meanings. I will then clarify the notion of “problem” by looking at three systematic elements: an undesired (initial) state, a desired (goal) state, and the barriers in getting from the one to the other. These three elements include three related kinds of knowledge: systems, target, and transformation knowledge. This paper elaborates further methodological and epistemological elements of problem-oriented ID. It concludes by stressing that problem-oriented ID is the most needed as well as the most challenging type of ID.     

An accidental journey: Becoming a sociologist

This sketch describes how I accidentally became a sociologist. More importantly, it describes undergraduate sociology training at a private liberal arts university during the Great Depression of the 1930s. The University of Maryland began a Ph.D. program in sociology just before World War II began. I report on graduate training there, as well as the social and intellectual life of the department. C. Wright Mills began his academic career at Maryland. I consider his place in the department, my experiences with him as my dissertation director, and how he influenced my lifelong study on the bearing of social stratification to politics.     

Modernity and the hybridization of nationalism and religion: Zionism and the Jews of the Middle East as a heuristic case

This article looks at nationalism and religion, analyzing the sociological mechanisms by which their intersection is simultaneously produced and obscured. I propose that the construction of modern nationalism follows two contradictory principles that operate simultaneously: hybridization and purification. Hybridization refers to the mixing of “religious” and “secular” practices; purification refers to the separation between “religion” and “nationalism” as two distinct ontological zones. I test these arguments empirically using the case of Zionist nationalism. As a movement that was born in Europe but traveled to the Middle East, Zionism exhibits traits of both of these seemingly contradictory principles, of hybridization and purification, and pushes them to their limits. The article concludes by pointing to an epistemological asymmetry in the literature by which the fusion of nationalism and religion tends to be underplayed in studies of the West and overplayed in studies of the East/global South.

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Talcott parsons and the “far east” at Harvard, 1941–48: Comparative institutions and national policy

This article traces the involvement of Talcott Parsons in research and teaching about Asian nations, especially China and Japan, in the period of World War II. The data indicate that, in contrast to his Eurocentric image, Parsons worked to develop a global perspective in studies on comparative institutions. This approach, inspired by the sociology of Max Weber, also addressed the practical needs of policy makers in connection with the war effort. Within Parsons’s intellectual biography, it stands between the “voluntaristic” framework of his early treatise, The Structure of Social Action (1937) and the later non-historical formalism of The Social System (1951) for which he is perhaps most famous. An understanding of this relatively unknown phase of Parsons’s work is therefore indispensable for an adequate appreciation of his career as a whole.     

The professional ideology of social pathologists transformed: The new political orthodoxy in sociology

In a landmark article published in 1943, the young C. Wright Mills roundly criticized early American sociologists who focused on the sociology of social problems. These “social pathologists,” Mills argued, were social conservatives with homogeneous viewpoints who strove to maintain the established social order. A review of recent surveys on the political attitudes of sociologists, an analysis of recent articles on social problems published by the American Sociological Association (ASA) and the Society for the Study of Social Problems, an examination of social problems textbooks, and a consideration of the proceedings of the ASA annual meetings reveal an extraordinary turnabout. An ongoing trend toward the politicization of sociology and the radicalization of the sociology of social problems has resulted in a diminished stature of the profession which jeopardizes its future.