C. Wright Mills

Mills supplies the opening move of this site and it is worth stating on its own page.

One person out of work in a city of a hundred thousand has a trouble. Fifteen million out of work is a public issue, and no amount of studying any one of them will explain it.

The move

A trouble is private, located in a person and their immediate circle, and it is answered by character, effort or therapy. An issue is structural, located in the arrangement of an institution, and no amount of character fixes it.

The sociological imagination is the discipline of telling which one you are looking at. It is harder than it sounds, because every institution on this site has an interest in your reading its outputs as troubles: the school that grades you, the employer that manages you, the app that scores you.

Most of what this project describes is the machinery that converts issues into troubles before you notice.

The Power Elite

The Power Elite (1956) describes interlocking military, corporate and political leadership as a coherent stratum, held together by shared schools, shared backgrounds and people circulating between the three, rather than by conspiracy.

The distinction matters and Mills insisted on it. No meeting is required. A common formation and a revolving door produce coordinated behaviour without coordination, which is the same structural claim that runs through the propaganda model and Foucault's capillary power.

He descends directly from Mosca, Michels and Pareto, which is the line traced in elite theory.

Serious objections

• The Power Elite was criticized from the start for underweighting conflict between the three groups it describes, and for treating a shared background as evidence of shared interest.
• Pluralist critics argued that power in the United States was more dispersed and more contested than the book allows, and that Mills selected his evidence.
• The sociological imagination is a discipline rather than a method. It tells you what question to ask and nothing about how to answer it.