Dan Geary, UC Berkeley
"C. Wright Mills and American Social Science in the 1940s"

The image of C. Wright Mills constructed in the 1950s and 1960s and still prevalent today depicts him as a maverick sociologist alienated from his disciplinea public intellectual and political radical who was the antithesis of the professional social scientist. Yet, an examination of Mills in the 1940s reveals how deeply embedded his intellectual development was in the discourse of academic social science. Mills was at the center of social scientific developments in that decade--from his interest in the sociology of knowledge and methodological reflections in the early 1940s, to his role in making Max Weber’s work a crucial source for American social scientists, to his empirical research as an associate at Columbia’s Bureau of Applied Social Research in the late 1940s. This paper will examine what the significance of such engagements for the development of Mills’s thought and for the changing nature of social science in a decade of critical transformations. It will compare and contrast Mills with leading sociologists of the 1940s both in terms of methodological approach and substantive theories of the nature of modern society, political power, and capitalism. It will also investigate how Mills reconciled his identity as a social scientist with his commitment to left-wing politics.

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