C.

Wright Mills, The Intellectual History of the

Military-Industrial Complex, and The Nature of

Sociological Paradigms

Joseph Robinson

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of

Arts with Honors in History

WILLIAMS COLLEGE

Wilbamstown, Massachuse~ts
 In Search of the Soul of the Machine

On Janua~y1 bth 1961, the departing President Dwight Eisenhower gave a farewell

address that publicized an intellectual debate whose contents would spread throughout

academia and the media during the next decade and a half. The address began like any other

with customary opening remarks, and soon its focus turned toward America's role in the

world, explaining that as "the most influential and most productive nation in the world [. . .I

we yet realize that America's leadership and prestige depend, not merely upon our

unmatched material progress, riches and mihtary strength, but on how we use our power in

the interests of world peace and human betterment." Outhning a series of noble goals - "to

foster progress in human achievement, and to enhance liberty, hgnity, and integrity among

people and among nations" - whose pursuit should be the aim of American power, the

President posited what he considered to be the obstacles standing in the way of such

pursuits, namely the Soviet Union and its "hostlle ideology - global in scope, atheistic in

character, ruthless in purpose, and insidous in method." He then went on to warn h s

listeners to use prudence when faced with both domestic and foreign crises and to avoid the

"recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the

miraculous solution to all current chfficulties." Each program, he counseled, "must be

weighed in light of a broader consideration: the need to maintain balance in and among

national programs." Eisenhower was hopeful, as "the record of many decades stands as

proof that our people and their government have, in the main, understood these truths and

have responded to them well [. . .I But threats, new in kmd and degree, constantly arise." He

went on to mention two.

The first and most important dealt with a rmlitary organization "bear[ing] little

relation to that known by any of pis] predecessors in peacetime, or indeed by the fighting
men of World War I1 or Icorea." Reacting to international circumstance, Eisenhower

explained, "we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast

proportions" and that "we annually spend on d t a r y security more that the net income of

all United States corporations." The most definitive moment of the speech followed:

This conjuncture of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the
American experience. The total lllfluence - economic, political, even spiritual - is felt in every
city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need
for t h ~ sdevelopment. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil,
resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society. In the councils oJ
government, we mxstguard against the acquisition of unwarranted inzuence, whether soaght or
unsought, b_y the military-indu~tnalcomplex.
The potential for the Qsastrous rise of misplaced
power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of tlus combination endanger our
liberties or democratic processes. [. . .] Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the
proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful
methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together. (Italics added.)

These statements were perhaps the most significant of his address, for with h s mention of

"the ~dtary-industrialcomplex," Eisenhower dramatically legitimized and publicized an

intellectual debate about the power structure of American society that had previously been

confined to a small group of academics and political theorists.

Eisenhower felt that within the government the power and influence of industry and

the d t a r y was so great as to threaten the democratic traditions of America, initially laid

forth in The Federalist Papers, specifically Federalist Number 10. His appeal to the need for

balance in and among the nation's programs is evidence of t h s belief. A four-star general,

Eisenhower's technical knowledge of strategy and weaponry placed hull beyond the

manipulation of military men in matters of d t a r y policy, allowing hxn to h t their

political influence. However, he was not impervious to the machinations of industry. Like

all admmistrations, w i t h his executive staff a relatively sinall group of indviduals - fifty-

three to be exact - were responsible for the executive decisions made in the name of the

linited States. Of these fifty-three executive directors of Eisenhower's admmistration, only

fourteen were life politicians, who had spent their careers in admmstrative government or
party politics. The remaining thirty-nine were political outsiders. "Most of these outsiders -

t h t y of thirty-nine in fact [were] quite closely h k e d , financially or professionally or both,

with the corporate world."l

To guard against the "unwarranted influence" of social institutions neither

traditionally nor constitutionally granted the authority to govern, Eisenhower put lus hopes

in "an alert and knowledgeable citizenry" that possessed the power to "compel the proper

meshmg of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense" with American goals and

virtues. These words paid homage to the rhetorical image of American democracy, but the

contents of such a phrase and the context of its statement revealed an unintentional irony.

As president, Eisenhower had spent eight years at the epicenter of America's powerful social

institutions; h s warning of the influence of industrial and d t a r y interests was grounded in

firsthand experience. Why, then, did Eisenhower wait untll h s farewell address to utter such

a warning about the very "structure of [American] society"? If Eisenhower actually felt the

dtary-industrial complex to be a threat to democratic governance, then as the supreme

political executive and a d t a r y elite, why d d he not attempt to effect any meaningful

change from within the institutional structure of American society? Perhaps Eisenhower's

public warning reflected h s belief that the fundamental changes needed to hold the d t a r y -

industrial complex in check were beyond the capabhties of one man, however powerful.

Yet his assertion that an "alert and knowledgeable" citizenry could feasibly regulate the

influence of industrial and d t a r y power seems a bit ironic, as Eisenhower h s e l f , the

most powerful of publicly elected officials, had been unable to effectively combat the

combine. Whatever Eisenhower's true feehgs, by drawing attention to an existing power

structure and its dstorting influence, his testimony legitimized debates about the lstribution

Mills, C. Wright. The Power Elite. p. 232.

of power in American society, helping to unleash a flood of research over the next fifteen

years, localized in the institutional relationships between industry, government, and the

d t a r y and their effects on American society.

Whde extremely important for several reasons, the actual contents of Eisenhower's

speech added little beyond the term "dtary-industrial complex" to an already rich

intellectual debate concerning the nature of American power. Yet after Eisenhower, a

Republican president who had done much to further the aims of business and the d t a r y ,

warned the American public about the dangers of "the dtary-industrial complex," analysis

of the institutional dynamics between the military, government, and corporate economy

gained a new sort of urgency and prestige. What would otherwise have been confined to

academic circles and dismissed publicly as a liberal thesis had been publicized and legitimated

by an outgoing Republican president.

Described by Eisenhower as a strucme that was reshaping the very fabric of

American society, the concept of the dtary-industrial complex was of obvious interest to

sociologists and political scientists, and its popularity, appeal, and relevance were amplified in

the atmosphere of the Cold War and Vietnam. Yet despite all of the intellectual energy

spent in studying and analyzing the Complex, scholars arrived at no universal conclusions

about its specifics beyond the gross empirical facts or the broadest theoretical descriptions.

Within these two extremes, an array of social theories competed for intellectual hegemony;

none won a decisive victory. Even as social scientists moved on to new projects during the

mid-to-late 1970s, the remaining theoretical competitors displayed a remarkable similarity

with the original sociological explanations of the rmlltary-industrial complex despite the

multiplication of empirical evidence. One of the questions addressed in the last chapter of

thts thesis is: Why was &us the case?

 The intellectual history of the dtary-industrial complex testifies to the fact that

recognition of a phenomenon does not necessarily lead to its explanation. Especially when

considering a topic as conceptually broad as the dtary-industrial complex, the position of

the social scientist can be compared to that of a geologist who attempts to explain the nature

and formation of a vast cavern using a flashlight for Illumination. As exploration advances,

certain identifiable features are documented, such as the presence of stalactites, stalagmites,

and various mineral deposits, but there are other realities that frustrate investigation. The

geologist encounters a deep crevasse that the flashlight cannot Illuminate; he hears what

sounds hke running water without seeing it, and lackmg c h b i n g gear or d~ggmgtools, he is

restricted to a single plane of observation. Whde the documented characteristics (and

frustrations) allow the geologist to arrive at a description of the cavern, it does not explain

the physical phenomenon in its totality, based, as it is, on isolated elements from whch an

approximation of the whole is drawn.

Human society represents this sort of cavern, or perhaps many such caverns,

connected in complicated and often inexplicable ways. To explain human society,

sociologists analyze social systems from many levels, ranging from microanalyses of

objective fact to macro analyses of such things as 'social structure' or the catch-all of

'culture.' Many of these analyses are simply descriptive, but others try to articulate theories

of action, consequence, and development. Theories that seek to explain the development of

society as a whole, rather than lesser manifestations of its evolution, often do so through

discussion of a society's power structure. Within power structure analysis, changes withm

particular institutions, namely those constituting its power structure, are seen as the chief

determinants of social evolution. Traltionally, social scientists have localized the power

capable of transforming society within three institutions, the economy, the political
administration, and the d t a r y establishment. Because production and violence and all that

they entail are usually considered the base elements of power, these institutions form the

power structure by virtue of their control over the means of production and violence.

The intellectual hstory of America's power structure analysis has included several

Ifferent paradigms. Because much of this thesis revolves around the competition among

paradgms and their theories, more needs to be said about its introduction as a guidmg

concept. A paradigm is a cogent set of theories in their conceptual, observational, and

empirical applications, whch is then appropriated by scholars to serve as the intellectual

foundation for subsequent research efforts. Most of a scholar's undergraduate and graduate

education focuses on the paradgmatic foundation of a chosen I s c i p h e . Paradgms are

inherent to all academic disciplines, and within the social sciences, they can be

conceptualized as different schools of thought. Marxism, for instance, is a sociological

parahgm. By examining the research reports of a community of scholars, it is possible to

abstract a parachgm's central assumptions and identify how they are deployed as rules

guidmg research. The practical application of these rules and assumptions is more

commonly referred to as a method.?

In his worli, rrhe Stmcture ofJcienf$c Revolzttions (1962), hstorian Thomas I<uhn argued

that the evolution of scientific paradgins was characterized by "revolutions," involving the

rejection of an existent paracbgm and its replacement by one that provided a more

convincing explanation of known I s c i p h a r y phenomena. WMe Icuhn's focus was

scientific paradigms, the basic pattern of evolution he described is inherent to all academic

Isciplines, and a focus of this thesis will be examining a particular illustration of that process

through an intellectual hstory of how existent power structure paradigms dealt with the

2 Iiuhn, Thomas. The Stmc/ure ofScienf@c Reuolutio~zs.Chp. 5

emergence of the concept of the rmlltary-industrial complex during the 1950s, 1960s, and

1970s.

Before discussing power structure paradigms, it must be noted that all social

scientific paradigms possess a few fundamental methodological and theoretical s d a r i t i e s .

Most basically, social science attempts to explain human phenomenon through an

elucidation of causal relationslvps. The task of the social scientist is to organize the apparent

chaos of social systems into a series of specific causes and effects. As patterns between

groups of causes and effects emerge, these relationships are explained by causal theories that

support the deteminay of certain forces and form the basis of larger sociological paradigms.

However, such was not always the standard form of social inquiry. Prior to the emergence

of what we now consider "social science," human society was usually explained with

reference to theology or myth. Insofar as explanation focused on lvstorical developments in

and of themselves, it was usually tied to inhvidual agency. Such lvstory was simply a

narrative of the accomplishments of Great Men.?

During the Enlightenment, theological explanations of history and society came into

question, and as secular theories slowly replaced their theological predecessors, a protean

sociological paradigm began to take shape. However, this paradigm was stdl highly

phdosophical, a fact reflected in the self-description of Enlightenment intellectuals such as

Voltaire and Gibbon aspbilosophes or hstorical phdosophers. The first step toward the

emergence of a distinctive sociological paradigm came with the work of the German

phdosopher, Georg W.F. Hegel. In The phi lo sop!^^ ofHistoy, Hegel wrote, "History.. .has

constituted the rational necessaly course of the World-Spirit - that Spirit whose nature is

always one and the same, but which unfolds this its one nature in the phenomena of the

*%pplebyet Hunt Tell~tzgthe Trzrtl~about Hz~toy.chp. 2 - "Saentific History and the Idea of Modernity."
World's existence."4 Though interested in the relationshp between hstory and the

metaphysical truth of thought, reason, and being, Hegel's arguments reversed the traditional

relationship between phdosophy and hstory, claiming that truth was revealed through

historical development. The concept of deter~ninismwas hdden in this claim and was soon

extracted and applied to social observation, marking the foundation of modern social

science.

One of the first, and certainly the most influential, distinctly sociological paradigms

emerged in the mid-nineteenth century from the works of Karl Marx. Marx appropriated

Hegel's belief in the relationshp between hstory and truth, but it led him to conclusions

dametrically opposed to those of Hegelian philosophy. Where Hegel had studied the

hstorical progression of intellectual concepts in order to extract the Truth of reason,

thought, and being, Marx rejected the assumption that Truth resided within man's rational

understanding of the world and asserted the opposite: "It is not consciousness that

determines life, but life that determines consciousness."5 Marx believed that material reality

rlefemzined inhvidual consciousness. Thus, he sought Truth in the hstorical relationshps

between human societies and their material realities, not in the evolution of subjective

understanding. This "materialist concept of history" led Marx to the conclusion that

economic factors were the key determinants of hstorical development. Marx's writings

revolutionized the social studies and established the concept of determinism, specifically

structural determinism, as the core of the sociological6 paradgm. Today, the beliefs of Marx

and Hegel are so fundamental that it is difficult to envision social science in their absence.

EIegel, Georg W. F. The Philosophy ofHirtay. p. 10.

Mars, Icarl. The German Ideology Val:1. "The Materialist Concept of History." p. 164.
Throughout this thesis, the terms "sociology" and "sociological" will often be used broadly to describe the
field of social studies in the first case and things pertaining to social studies in the second. Both should be
distinguished from the discipline of Sociology.
 The relevance of these intellectuals to a twentieth-century intellectual hstory of

sociological paradigms may seem remote, but during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, structural

determinism remained the philosophical foundation on w h c h all power structure paradigms

were based. It may seem unsurprising that stmctzral determinism would explain the

development of power stmctzres, but this assumption had profound implications for the

intellectual hstory of the rmlttary-industrial complex, whch this thesis wdl address. For the

moment, however, more must be said about power structure paradigms themselves.

Most basically, power structure paradigms are sociological and prelcated upon two

assumptions: [I] power, defined as the abllity to realize action, is an, if not the, essential

hstorical determinant, and [2] power great enough to affect or determine societal

developments is derived from institutions. Those enjoying an effective monopoly of power

collectively represent a society's power structure. Accepting these assumptions, power

structure theorists are interested in how the principal institutional repositories of power -

whether public, private, economic, political, or i d t a r y - influence or, in some cases,

determine the general lrection of social evolution and the state of contemporary society as a

whole. Among interested scholars, there is a broad consensus that the practical

manifestations of American power generally reside in and emanate from the corporate

economy, the d t a r y establishment, and the federal and, to a lesser degree, state

governments. There is much less consensus concerning the spenjc dimensions of t h s

general power structure, exact4 where power is located, how it is exercised, the relationships

between powerful institutions, and, most basically, how to even study of these questions.

Because an intellectual history of the power structure paradigms of American society

is beyond the capabilities of an undergraduate, the chronological scope of t h s thesis is

limited to the period in whch the concept of the rmlttary-industrial complex dominated
power structure analysis. As the term suggests, the "dtary-industrial complex" was used to

describe a combination of structural7 relationships between America's d t a r y establishment

and industry economy that many saw as a definitive characteristic of the United States. The

first description of these institutional relationshps appeared in 1956 with the publication of

The Power Elite by C. Wright Mdls, and after Eisenhower's address, they coalesced into the

concept of "the rnilitary-industrial complex." As the term became a political catchphrase, its

meaning evolved substantially from a description of institutional relationships into an actual

entity, vaguely defined, that was seen as a dominant element of America's power s t r u c t ~ r e . ~

Returning to The Power Elite, in adltion to its descriptions of social structure, the work's

theoretical conclusions presented a new "elitist" paradigm, explaining America's power and

leadership structures, that came into fierce competition with the previously ascendant

Marxist and pluralist paradigms.

The Power Elite and Mills' elitist paradigm wdl serve as the guilng core of the first

two chapters of t h s thesis, and while much will be said about competing paradgins and

scholars and their works, all will be discussed, implicitly or explicitly, in relation to Mdls and

his elitist paralgm. In the third chapter, its focus wdl expand to examine [I] the broader

intellectual history of the concept of the rmlitary-industrial complex, [2] the evolution and

Influence of the elitist paradigm w i h n it. The final chapter will attempt to answer some of

the larger questions that emerge from t h s history, concerning the applicabhty of ICuhn's

model of scientific revolutions to sociological paradigms and the degree to which Mills'

elitist paradigm was a success.

7The terms "structural" and "institutional" be used interchangeably.

8This shift in meaning probably began with Eisenhower's use of the definite article "the" when he described
"the dtary-industrial complex." Interestingly, this shift would have significant effects on the orientation of
military-industrial research and become a focus of theoretical dispute between tlie different power structure
paradigms.
 Chapter 1: The New Prophet

To expand on ideas presented in the introduction, humanity's scientific

understandmg of natural or social phenomena can be usefully categorized as a number of

dstinct intellectual paradgms. Individual contributions to that larger understanding can be

categorized in two ways. The first is scholarshp conducted with respect to established

paradgms that attempts to address theoretical inconsistencies and ambiguities through

empirical investigation. The second involves the rejection of an accepted paradigm and the

articulation of an alternative that more effectively explains empirical evidence by addressing

and resolving past theoretical inconsistencies. Such contributions are rare and require

particular genius. It is a claim of t h ~ sthesis that The Power Elite and Mds' elitist paradgm

represented the latter within the field of power structure analysis.

A sociologist and controversial radcal, C. Wright Mills concerned himself with what

he called the "big questions" of contemporary American society. One of h s major

accomplishments was a trilogy of works, includmg The New Men ofPower, White Collar, and

The Power Elite, in which he presented a paradgm of American society. The New Men of Power

dealt with the labor movement, blue-collar issues, and the New Deal growth of government.

White Collar explored the middle class and its relationshp to the growing corporatism of

America. The Power Elite dealt with the upper classes of American society and the character

and origin of their dominance. All the works were hghly hstorical and guided by structural

analysis. Each sought to dspel popular American myths and open the eyes of academics

and the public to the reality of American society that had emerged during the developments

of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These works were meant to be read by the
larger population, and they were meant to be provocative, full of sarcastic language and

biting polemics against mainstream culture, American society, and sociologcal theories.

The Power Elite triggered a firestorm of both criticism and agreement w i h n academia,

and Mills' elitist paradgm and its theories would be topics of debate for years to come.

Mills' essential argument was

that in America some men have enormous power denied to everyone else; that these men are,
increasingly, a self-perpetuating elite; that their power is, increasingly, unchecked and
irresponsible; and that their decision-making, based on an increasingly 'military definition of
reality' and 'crackpot realism,' is oriented to immoral ends."

In describing h s paradgm of contemporary America, M a s analyzed the historical

development of its political, economic, and d t a r y institutions and the social repercussions

of those developments. Yet, his analysis involved more than institutional analysis and

included studies of elite personality and social realities. With this approach, Mills argued

forcefully for the existence of a "power elite," holdmg the reins of power through their

positions on corporate boards and w i t h governing bureaucracies, as well as the military

establishment. ilt the time, the elitist paradgm was a departure from the two prevahng

schools of thought - pluralism and Marxism - in its elite emphasis but also in its insertion of

the milttary establishment and its elites into America's institutional power structure, which

existent paradgms restricted to economic and political institutions

Pluralism possessed a wide following throughout academic and political cominunities

and held America to be composed of coinpeting units of power that coexisted w i h an

inherent system of checks and balances. Furthermore, it claimed that these checks and

balances operated on every economic and political level and served as a regulating

mechanism against the concentration of indvidual or institutional power, ensuring that no

interest or group of interests could doininate American society. Some pluralists saw power

M b a n d , Ralph. C. K7rightiVz/ls.
"New Left Review:" May-June 1962.
as basically fragmented and dspersed throughout American society. Others accepted hgher

levels of power concentration but argued that, even among institutional elites, no one group

could consistently dominate.

To Mdls the pluralist paradgm was an ideal, based on a "false model of modern

society,"lO and the reality it described - if it had ever truly existed - was a relic of eighteenth

and nineteenth century America. Sociological paradgms had to evolve with social changes,

and pluralism was simply stuck in a moment and continued to endure out of philosophical

bias and the strength of political rhetoric. In h s own words:

The eighteenth century political theorists had in mind as the unit of power the individual citizen,
and the classic economists had in mind the sinall firm operated by an individual. Since their time,
the units of power, the relations between units, and hence the meaning of checks and balances,
have changed. l1

Pressing home his critique, Mills offered a scathing address to pluralist scholars

In short, you allow your own confused perspective to confuse what you see and, as an observer as
well as an interpreter, you are careful to remain on the most concrete levels of description you can
manage, defining the real in terms of existing detail. [. . .] The balance of power theory [. . .] is a
narrow-focus view of American politics. [. . .] It is also narrow-focus in the choice of time-spans:
the shorter the period of time in which you are interested, the more usable the balance of power
theory appears. [. . .] One continual weakness of American "social science," since it became ever
so empirical, has been its assumption that a mere enumeration of a plurality of causes is the wise
and scientific way of going about understanding modern society. l2

As to why the pluralist paradgm was not already obsolete in light of the massive

centralizations in power that had resulted from the historical developments of the nineteenth

and twentieth centuries, Mds noted that "changes in the power system of the United States

have not involved important challenges to its basic legitimations [but rather] institutional

shfts in the relative positions of the political, the economic, and the rmlltary orders."lWo

obvious events &e the French or Bolshevik revolutions had transformed the foundations of

Schneider, Eugene. The Sociology fC. Wright Mills. Monthly Review, p. 556.
l1 Whlls, C. Wright. The PowerElite. p. 266.
12 Ibid. p. 245.
13 Mills, C. Wright. The Power Elite. p. 269.
society through violent action. Much of academia had simply missed the boat, too wedded

to past paradrgms to recognize their obsolescence.

For Mds, the transformation of American society and its power structure had been a

gradual process, far removed from the popular culture and headlines that held the public's

eye. The decline of pluralist society and the emergence of the power elite were the

consequence of transforlnative domestic and international events that had altered the

structure of and institutional relationships between the corporate economy, the d t a r y

hierarchy, and the political duectorate.14 These developments were the principal focus of The

Poweer Elite.Structurally, the work was drvided into three sections. The fivst was simply the

opening chapter, The Higher Circles, whch provided a thematic sketch of the work as a

whole. The next nine chapters were devoted to analyzing the claims of The Higher Circles

from various angles: Local Society, Metropolitan 400, The Celebrities, The Very k c h , The

Chef Executives, The Warlords, The Mhtary Ascendancy, and The Political Directorate.

These chapters comprised the substantive core of the book and analyzed how social

(chapters 2-4) and institutional developments (chapters 5-9) had altered the power structure

of America. They were followed by five chapters of interpretation and argumentation: The

Theory of Balance, The Power Elite, The Mass Society, The Conservative Mood, and The

Higher Ilnmorality. The Theory of Balance was essentially an attack on liberal pluralism;

The Power Elite united the conclusions of precechg chapters into a final thesis statement;

The Mass Society drscussed the ramifications of these developments for the American public

at large; and The Conservative Mood and Higher Immorality were moral condemnations of

the ethos of thc power elite.

l4 The 'political directorate' describes the executive branches of government and administrative bureaucracies.
 The Higher Circles outlined the major themes of The Power Elite, beginning with its

central thesis:

The power elite is composed of inen wl~osepositions enable them to transcend the ordinary
environments of ordinary men and women; they are in positions to make decisions having major
consecluences. [. . .] For they are in command of the major hierarchies and organizations of
modern society. They rule the big corporations. They run the machinery of the state and claim its
prerogatives. They direct the military establishment. They occupy the strategic command posts
of the social structure, in which are now centered the effective means of the power and the wealth
and the celebrity which they enjoy.15

These statements presented three of the work's essential themes. The first involved the

nature of the members of the power elite themselves, who were described as the

extraorhary members of society by virtue of the power, wealth, and celebrity they enjoyed.

The second major theme concerned the practical meaning and origins of indvidual power,

wealth, and celebrity. For Mds these could only be understood in relation to America's

social structure and, more specifically, to the "command of the major hierarchies and

organizations of modern society." The third was the specification of these power centers

wluch he identified as "the big corporations," "the machmery of state," and "the d i a r y

establishment."

The next major theme of "The Higher Circles" was power itself, which Mills

described as centered in institutions, exercised by elites, and defined by the abhty to shape

hstory. The first assertion revealed the structural determinism guiding the analytic logic and

theoretical conclusions of The Power Elite. The second connected the abstract power of

institutions to the human actors - "the power elite" - who controlled America's institutional

power centers. The t h d connected both to a lustorical, social reality. As tools for social

analysis, institutions and elites were meaningless in isolation, for without reference to

indvidual decision-makmg, the irnmedate causal force of historical development, the

concept of institutional power centered was meaningless. To clarify the relationship

15 ~LLUS,C.Wright. The PouerElite. p. 3-4

between historical development, institutions, and elites, Mds offered, "Behind such men and

behind such events of history, linkmg the two, are the major institutions of modern

Having established these basic relationships and lus structural orientation, Mills

asserted that America's contemporary power structure and its power elite could not be

understood without reference to the hstorical development of America's social structures.

The evolution of the economy and the political system from a plurality of small competing

interests to an increasingly centralized structure, dominated by economic, military, and

political institutions, had dramatically increased the power of the latter, while reducing the

influence of religious, educational, and f a d a l institutions. Describing this centralization

and its effects, Mills stated,

As each of these domains becomes enlarged and centralized, the consequences of its activities
become greater, and its traffic with the others increases. The decisions of a handful of
corporations bear upon military and political as well as upon economic developments around the
world. The decisions of the military establishment rest upon and grievously affect political life as
well as the very level of economic activity. The decisions made within the political domain
determine economic activities and military programs. There is no longer, on the one hand, an
economy, and on the other hand, a political order containing a military establishment unimportant
to politics and to money-making. There is a political economy linked, in a thousand ways, with
military institutions and decisions. [. . .] If there is government intervention in the corporate
economy, so is there corporate intervention in the governmental process. In the structural sense,
this triangle dpower ir the source ofthe interlocking directorate that is most important@rthe
historical stmcture ~fthe present.
The fact of the interlocldng directorate is clearly revealed at each of the points of crisis of
modern capitalist society - slump, war, and boom. In each, the men of decision are led to an
awareness of the interdependence of the major institutional orders. [. . .] For gven the scope of
their consequences and decisions - and indecisions - in any one of these ramify into the others,
and hence top decisions tend either to become co-ordiilated or to lead to a commanding indecision.
[. . .] [Gliven political expectations and military commitments, can they afford to allow the key
units of the private corporate economy to break down in slump? Increasingly, they do intervene in
economic affairs, and as they do so, the controlling decisions in each order are inspected by
agents of the other two, and economic, military, and political structures are interlocked. (italics
added) l 7

'Wills, C. Wright. T/ie Power Elite. p. 3-4.

Ibid. p. 7-8.
 Having described the structural relations and functioning dynamics between

America's power centers, Mds returned to the relationship between structural determinism

and inchidual agency.

To know that the top posts of modern social structures now permit more commanding decisions is
not to know that the elite who occupy these posts are the history-makers. [. . .] D o the elite
determine the roles they enact? Or do roles that institutions make available to them deterrnitle the
power of the elite? The general answer - and no general answer is sufficient - is that in different
kmds of structures and epochs elites are quite differently related to the roles that they play. l8

The American power elite of the twentieth century was characterized by the fact that

Far from being dependent upon the structure of institutions, modern elites smash one structure and
set up another in which they then enact quite different roles. In fact such destruction and creation
of institutional structures [. . .] is just what is involved in 'great leaderslip,' or, when they seem to
turn out badly, great tyranny. [. . .] There is nothmg about history that tells us that a power elite
cannot make it. To be sure, the will of such men is always limited, but never before have the
limits been so broad, for never before have the means of power been so enormous.'9

These two passages reiterated and added considerable complexity to Mills' deterministic and

historical approach. On the one hand, Mdls criticized pluralists for a "narrow-focus" and

"narrow-time" approach to questions of power. On the other, Mdls defined the twentieth-

century American elite as capable of significantly altering "institutional structures" and of

making hstory. That "the wdl of such men is always lunited reconciled these statements, as

it implied that elite agency was only a matter of degree, "lunited" by larger institutional

structures.

The remainder of the chapter concentrated on the power elite themselves, who M a s

conceptuahed as a social class, united by similarities of personality and social milieux. Yet

even these dstinctive class features were intimately related to institutional structures and

their social realities.

p]n so far as the elite flourishes as a social class or as a set of men at command posts, it will select
and form certain types of personality, and reject others. The kind of moral and psychological
11eings men become is in large part determined by the values they experience and the
iiz.rtitzltionalroles they are allowed and expected to play. [.. .] So conceived, the elite is a set of
higher circles whose members are selected, trained and certified and permitted intimate access to

'8 Mills, C. Wright. The Power Elite. p. 24-5

19 Ibid.
 those who command the impersonal institutional hierarchies of modern society. [. . .] To
understand the elite as a social class we must examine a whole series of smaller face-to-face
milieux, the most obvious of which, historically, has been the upper-class family, but the most
important of w h c h today are the proper secondary school and the metropolitan club.20(Italics
added.)

The last sentence in the paragraph presented the subjects of the second, third, and fourth

chapters: an examination of the upper-class f a d y , the faed locality of the old upper-class,

and the increasingly important role of the metropolitan club and of celebrity in the

demarcation of the new upper-class society.

Having established his overall themes, Mds began his narrative with descriptions of

the twentieth-century evolutions of 'hgh society.' Mills presented upper-class

transformations in relation to larger structural changes, including the urbanization of

America, the spread of corporatism, the emergence of mass me&a, and the subsequent rise

of celebrity culture. Mills charted the influence of these structural changes by examining

their repercussions on slnall town demography, the preeminent status of pseudo-aristocratic

f a d e s , the d e c h e of small town society, the rise of the metropolitan high society, and the

decline in the status of the old f a d e s , of debutante culture, and the breakdown in the rigid

exclusivity of the upper classes. The emergence of celebrity culture was one of the most

obvious cultural repercussions of these social developments. Rich in sarcastic description,

moral outrage, and penetrating analysis, these chapters served as a preface to the institutional

analysis that represents the main focus of this thesis.

Chapters five through ten examined the "interloclcing hectorate" of America's

power structure froin economic, political, and d t a r y perspectives. Beginning with the

economic, in The Very Rich, The Chief Executive, and The Corporate Rich, Mds analyzed

the corporate economy and its elites, alternating focus between institutional structures and

their effects on individuals. The nature of America's political economy and the rise of the

20 Mills, C. Wright. The I'uwerElile. p. 15.

corporation within it were the foci of h s institutional analysis. On the level of the

indvidual, Mdls identified two groups, the chef executives and the very rich, as members of

the power elite and lscussed their emergence as such in relation to America's changing

political economy and the role of economic elites w i h it. To understand 'the very rich'

"we must examine their relations to modern forms of corporate property as well as to the

state; for such relations now determine the chances of men to secure big property and to

receive high income."21 The 'chief executives,' on the other hand, found themselves among

the power elite due to the fact that "The corporations are the organized centers of the

private property system: the chef executives are the organizers of that system."22 Together

these two groups comprised a 'corporate rich,' the dominant economic class w i t h modern

America. The corporate rich were distinct from a tradtional upper class due to their unique

lifestyles, wealth, privileges, exclusive access to "the ultimate powers of big property,"23 and

fundamental class interest in the preservation and expansion of the corporate economy.

Returning to the central role of the institution, Mdls attacked the claim that the

success and position of the very rich resulted from inlvidual ability. Emphasizing the

importance of hstorical opportunity, personal experience, and the degree to which the

accumulation and perpetuation of their fortunes were facihtated by social institutions, Mdls

stated,

The problem with the very rich is one example of the larger problem of how individual men are
related to institutions, and, in turn, of how both particular institutions and individual men are
related to the social structure in which they perform their roles. Although men sometimes shape
institutions, institutions always select and form men. In any given period, we must balance the
weight of the character or will or intelligence of individual men with the objective institutional
structure which allows them to exercise these traik24

21 , Wright. The PowerElile. p. 10.

L W S C.
"Ibid. p. 119.
3 Ibid. p. 142.
21 Ibid. p. 96
The institutional structure that had produced and sustained the very rich was America's

advanced industrial economy. It was bu~ltupon "a continental domain full of untapped

resources into [whch] migrated d o n s of people"25 whose growing populations caused a

steady increase in the value of land and the size of the market for both produce and labor.

Whde a necessary conltion, these requirements could not explain the existence of the vely

rich. "A compliant political authority" was necessary to sanction the accumulation of

wealth26 and to preserve the institutional relationships that defined America's political

economy, and political authorities were indeed compliant.

The greatest evidence for the cooperative ethos of the political economy was the fact

that "the very rich have used existing laws, they have circumvented and violated existing

laws, and they have had laws created and enforced for their direct benefit,"27 in most cases,

without penalty. The State also protected private property, the essence of capitalism, and

legalized "the existence of the corporation, and by further laws, interpretations of laws, and

lack of reinforcement made possible its elaboration."28 In addtion,

private industrial development [in] the United States has been much underwritten by outright gifts
out of the people's domain. State, local, and federal governinents have given land free to
railroads, paid for the cost of shipbuilding, for the transportation of important mail. Much more
free land has been given to businesses than to small independent homesteaders. [. . .] The
government has subsidized private industry by maintaining high tariff rates, and if the taxpayers
of the United States had not paid, out of their own labor, for a paved road system, Henry Ford's
astuteness and thrift would not have enabled him to become a billionaire out of the automobile
industry. 2g

Yet the most important force responsible for the contemporary state of the American

political economy were exogenous factors, specifically the great wars of the nineteenth and

twentieth centuries. In the case of World War 11,

Between 1940 and 1944, some $175 billion worth of prime supply contracts - the key to control of

25 M l s , C. Wright. The Power Ehe. p. 99

26 Ibid.
27 Ibid. p. 99.
28 Ibid.
2g 1bid. p. 100.
 the nation's means of production -were given to private corporations. A full two-thirds of this went
to the top one hundred corporations - in fact, almost one-third went to ten private corporations.
These companies then made money by selling what they had produced to the government. They were
granted priorities and allotments for materials and parts; they decided how much of these were to be
passed down to sub-contractors, as well as who and how many sub-contractors there should be. They
were allowed to expand their own facilities under extremely favorable amortization (20 per cent a
year) and tax privileges. Instead of the normal twenty or thirty years, they could write off the cost in
five. These were also generally the same corporations which operated most of the government-
owned facilities, and obtained the most favorable option to 'buy' them after the war.30

The history of cooperation between industry and government was fundamental to America's

power and leadershp structures, and the institutional ties established during the Second

World War had propelled tlus cooperation to a new level, pointing unambiguously to the

interloclsing duectorate at the center of Mdls' elitist paradigm.

Having described the structural linkage between the government and business, Mdls

turned to the s d a r i t i e s of the very rich which included social background and institutional

position. Beginning with social background, the very rich were almost universally "born into

hstinctly upper-class homes;"31 they came "from the cities, especially from the larger cities

of the East;"32 they were "more hghly educated than the common run of the population;"33

and they had attended the Ivy League schools." Such similarities resulted in old-boy

networks and a tendency toward self-perpetuation withn exclusive circles that could only be

accessed through "the accumulation of corporate advantages, based on grandfathers' and

fathers' position."3j The increasing correlation between wealth concentration and corporate

advantages among the very rich revealed another source of their unity: institutional

positions of corporate ownership and control.

Having located the sources of the economic elites' phenomenal wealth in the

cooperative nature of America's political economy and in corporate ownership or control,

30 hf~lls,C. Wright The Power Elire p. 100-1.

Ibid. p. 105
12 Ibid. p. 106
33 Ibid.
Ibid. p. 107
15 Ibid. p. 115-6.
"The Chef Executives" sought to discuss the nature of corporate control. Much of Mills'

argument in t h s chapter was a rejection of the conclusions of 'managerial theory,' a central

component of the pluralist paradgm. First articulated by Adolf Berle and Gardmer Means

in their work, The Modern Cogoration and Pm'vate Properg, managerial theory originated from

the fact that the owner-entrepreneur of the Gilded Age was no longer the driving force

within the corporate economy. "The surrender of control over their wealth by investors

ha[d] effectively broken the old property relations and ha[d] raised the problem of defining

these relationshps anew."36 Their interpretation of these new relationships was that

the separation of ownership from control meant that the modern corporation was no longer run by
individuals whose main purpose was to maximize profits. This [. . .] resulted in a relaxation of the
overwhelming drive to exploit both worker and consumer, since this drive was a consequence of
the profit n e ~ u s . 3 ~

From t h s new dynamic, they argued that a less predatory form of capitalism had emerged in

w l c h professional manager provided a higher morality to corporate activities.

The underlying logic of this argument was that "owners [are] the source of the drive

for h g h profits, a drive motivated by their desire to increase both stock value and dvidend

levels"" (Italics added). According to the theory, the stock dispersal of the twentieth century

had severed the bond between owner and manager, and as a result, the manager now

controlled the corporate economy. Accordmg to Berle and Means,

As ownership of corporate wealth has become more widely dispersed, ownership of that wealth
and control over it have come to be less and less in the same hands. Under the corporate system,
control over industrial wealth can be and is exercised with a minimum of ownershp interest.
Ownership of wealth without appreciable control, and control of wealth without appreciable
ownership, appear to be the logical outcome of corporate developinent.3'

Whereas Berle and Means had seen the independent control of managers developing

from the fragmentation of ownershp, Mills rejected thLs interpretauon, contendmg that the

36 Berle, A & Means, G The Moden? Corporatzolz and Pnvafe Properg. p 4

37 h h t z , B & Schwa1tz, hf The Powe~Structure ofklmencan Bu~znessp 18.
ih Ibld.
?"erle, A & Means, G The Modern Colporat~o~ ant/ Pnvate Properly. p 69
 legal devices, establishng and determining corporate control, had largely excluded the small

but not the larger property holders from economic power. The exclusion of small property

holders had handed corporate control and its privileges to big shareholders and executives.

While the majority of the technical day-to-day control of corporations fell to executive

managers, majority or large minority shareholders often played significant roles in

determining corporate policies. Thus the control of the professional manager was not

complete but a matter of area and degree. Moreover, even if managerial control was

independent, it had not reduced the drive for profit or produced a less predatory form of

capitalism. 40 In support of h s argument, he pointed to the k e c t correlation between

corporate success and the size of bonuses and benefits offered to professional managers.

There was no difference in the interests and motivations of owners and managers; both

benefited enormously from corporate success. Rather than envision the professional

manager as the controller and guiding soul of the corporate economy, it was more

appropriate to view chef executives as a subset of America's economic 'power elite:' "the

chief executive and the very rich are not two dstinct and clearly segregated groups. They are

both very mixed up in the corporate world of property and privilege."41 The very rich and

the chief executives depended on the success of the larger private corporate system and big

property for their wealth, power, and prestige. The two groups constituted a class of

"corporate rich," united by their interest in the perpetuation of the private corporate

economy and their place at its top. As a result of t h s class-wide interest, Mills concluded,

" t h s propertied class cannot merely push the narrow interests of each property; their

interests become engaged by the whole corporate class."Q

JOXUs, C Wnght The PowerElzfe p 129-30

-(I Ibid p 119
J2 US, C Wrtght The Power Elzte p 121
 T o understand the actions of the professional manager in relation to this "corporate

class," it was necessary to consider the economic centralization of the corporate revolution.

From every "major industrial h e [. . .] there emerges the Big Five, or the Big Three, as the

case may be: a small set of firms which shares what there is to share of the industry's profits,

and which dominates the decisions made by and for industry."43 The executives of these

corporate giants then became "industrial spokesmen," whde some became spokesmen for

the interests and outloolr; of big corporate property as a whole.44

The top corporations are not a set of [. . .] isolated giants. They have been knit together by explicit
associations within their respective industries and regions and in supra-associations [. . .] These
associations organize a unity among the managerial elite and other members of the corporate rich.
They translate narrow economic powers into industry-wide and class-wide powers; and they use
these powers, first, on tlze economic front, for example with reference to labor and its
organizations; and, second, on the political front, for exainple in their large role in the political
sphere. 45

It was in organizing industry to protect and promote these larger interests that the

professional manager was visibly a member of the corporate rich.

Not only had structural centralization elevated the corporate manager to economic

elite status, but it had also led to an interlocking hectorate within the business world that

served as "a sociological anchor of the community of interest, the unification of outlook and

policy, that prevails among the propertied class."46 The nature of its old-boy networks and

recruitment process tended to create an exclusive and self-selecting executive and corporate

culture.47 Observing the recruitment and training process through the speeches and reports

of executives confirmed that

the type of man that is required [. . .] must 'fit in' with those already at the top. This means that he
must meet the expectations of his superiors and peers; that in personal manner and political view,
in social ways and business style, lze must be hke those who are already in, and upon whose
judgments his own success rests. If it is to count in the corporate career, talent, no matter how

47 Ibid. p. 120.
" I b i . p. 121.
$5Ibid. p. 122.
" Ibtd. p. 123.
1 M s , C. Wright. The Power Eltte, p.139.
 defined, must be discovered by one's talented supenors. 48

Such standards of selection ensured a measurable degree of ideological, psychological, and

sociological affinity amongst executives, amounting to a class-consciousness unique to the

'corporate rich.'

In "The Corporate k c h " Mllls summarized the conclusions of the previous chapters

to argue for the existence of a class of corporate rich, identified by its class-wide interest in

the preservation of the corporate economy and the privileges of big property and

differentiated from other members of the upper class by their immense power and wealth,

unique lifestyle, and corporate privileges. The prerogatives of corporate rich, whether they

rested legally upon ownershp or managerial control, depended "drrectly, as well as indirectly,

[. . .] on the world of big corporations."49 The corporation had become so central to the

economy that "No one can become rich or stay rich in America today without becoming

involved, in one way or another, in the world of the corporate rich."50 Tax r e h m s

unquestionably linked the wealth of the two highest incomes brackets to corporate sources

of income.51 The extent to whch the corporate rich had been able to design legal, fmancial,

and political institutions to support their privileged position was evidence of their unique

power. Financially, several creative forms of tax evasion were available to them, including

k i n g of "accomplished lawyers and skillful accountants," the exploitation of tax loopholes

Lke "the long-term capital gain" and "the depletion allowance on oil and gas wells," "placing

money in tax-free municipal bonds," "[setting] up a trust for a grandchdd," "creating

foundations [defined as] 'any autonomous, non-profit legal entity that is set up to serve

4Vb1d. p. 141.
49 Ibld.
Ibid. p. 148.
5 1 Ibld. p. 150.
''serve the welfare of mankmd,""' or using "deferred pay contracts."52 Distinctive corporate

privileges never reported to the tax collector also differentiated the corporate rich, includmg

free medical care, payments of club fees, company lawyers and accountants available for tax,
fmancial, and legal advice, faciltties for entertaining customers, private recreational areas - golf
courses, swimming pools, gymnasiums - scholarship funds for children of executives, company
automobiles, and dining rooms for executive use.. .53

The expense account was the ultimate corporate privilege, often paying for the luxury

lifestyles of the corporate rich.

Immense political power was also a &stinpislung feature of the corporate rich and

was derived from the fact that they ran

the privately incorporated economy [. . .and...] in virtually every case of regulation that we examine
the regulating agency has tended to become a corporate outpost. To control the
productive facilities is to control not only things but the men who, not owning property, are drawn
to it in order to work. It is to constrain and to manager their life at work in the factory, on the
railroad, in the office. It is to determine the shape of the labor market, or to fight over the shape
with union or government.54

Beyond these somewhat abstract manifestations of power, "money allows the economic

power of its possessor to be translated directly into political party causes,"55 and the frequent

exercise of political power had multiplied the structural links within America's political

economy to the point where the success of economic elites and their political counterparts

were interdependent, especially during wartime:

For today the successful economic man, either as a propertied manager or a manager of property,
must influence or control those positions in the state in which decisions of consequence to his
corporate activities are made. This trend in economic men is, of course, facilitated by war, wluch
thus creates the need to continue corporate activities with political as well as the economic means.
War is of course the health of the corporate economy; during war the political economy tends to
become more unified, and moreover, the political legitimations of the most unquestionable sort -
national security itself - are gained for corporate economic activities.'"

j2 hrills, C . Wright. The Power Elite. p. 152-6.

5"bid. p. 158.
jvbid. p. 166.
5 j Ibid.
5Qhhlls, C. Wright. The Power Elite. p. 167.
 The dirmnishing distinction between the political and the economic elite was both a product

and reflection of the interloclhg directorate of America's power structure that served as the

foundation of the elitist paradigm.

In "The Warlords" and "The Mhtary Ascendancy" Mds examined the role played

by the d t a r y in the emergence of the interlochg directorate, while also discussing the

historical relations between the military and America's power structure. The first dstinction

drawn by Mds between the i d t a r y establishment and political and economic institutions

was in the nature of its power. Military power was ultimately derived from the most

essential form of power, violence, and throughout most of human history, "the man of

violence" had maintained a monopoly on power. T h s truism came to an end with the rise

of the nation-state: "Before the national state centralized and monopolized the means of

violence, power tended continually to re-create itself in small, scattered centers, and rule by

local gangs was often a going fact of the pre-national hstory of manhnd."57 WMe the

modern era was full of examples in which ~ d t a r elites

y have retaken control of state

bureaucracies, in America political rule had always fallen to civilian authorities. The

Constitution had legally established t h s relationshp, naming the President the supreme

commander of the d t a r y and granting Congress the power to control d t a r y fundng and

to authorize the use of force. Beyond legal precedents, larger economic forces and the

political c h a t e of America had historically favored the civhan devaluation of the military as

an at-times necessary evil though always a burden.58 While wars had catapulted leaders as

disparate as George Washmgton, Andrew Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant, and 'Theodore

Roosevelt into political office, the d t a r y establishment possessed little political influence.

Its economic influence was also rninlrnal as thanks to the system of public armories and

57 Ibid. p 173.
jQ!!ills, C.Wright. 13e Power Elzte. p. 176
 shipyards. While private contracting for mhtary needs did occur sporadically, the mhtary

establishment was almost exclusively a public institution, and its greatest irnrnedate

economic impact on American society came from its engineering corps, whch by 1925 had

"disbursed twelve percent of the total o r h a r y expencbtures of governmentY'59in the

construction of roads, bridges, tunnels, canals, irrigation systems, and land reclamation. The

d t a r y elites themselves were a motley crew of I n I a n fighters, rough riders, professional

improvisers, and marksmen, who viewed politics with a suspicious Isdain, never published

books, and enjoyed little prestige outside of i d t a r y circles comparable to great politicians or

industrial barons. As a result, the mhtary and its elites had historically been subordmant and

Istinct from the economic and political elites and institutions that had previously

monopolized American power.

These trahtional relationshps unraveled during the Second World War. No other

confict had ever necessitated such massive quantities of materiel, and fLUlng the demand

required extensive coorhation between mhtary planners and industrial suppliers, who were

brought together w i h committees and organizations established by the federal

government. The military demands of World War I1 came to shape and to pace the

corporate economy, effecting the structural integration of sipficant portions of the

corporate economy and the mhtary bureaucracy." The result was the evolution of

American capitalism into a d t a r y capitalism.

What the main drift of the twentieth century has revealed is that as the economy has become
concentrated and incorporated into great hierarchies, the d t a r y has become enlarged and
decisive to the shape of the entire economic structure; and, moreover, the economic and military
have become structurally and deeply interrelated, as the economy has become a seemingly permanent
war ecoiloiny.

5'' Ibid. p. 212.

"1 Mills, C. \Vr~ght.The Power Elite. p. 212-3
Ibid. p. 215.
 In addttion to t h s massive increase in economic power, the relationshp between the

d t a r y establishment and political institutions changed significantly. The combination of

available weapons technology, America's emergence as a world power, and American-Soviet

antagonisms had opened America to the threat of a catastrophic attack for the first time in

its history. Tlvs perpetual threat had fundamentally transformed the political climate of the

United States, as international relations became as important, if not more so, than domestic

issues. However, this change was accompanied by a total absence of political institutions

and international policy precedents concerning security-related objectives. The result was a

tremendous vacuum of political power, fded by neither Congress nor the executive

administration, into whch the burgeoning d t a r y establishment naturally expanded.

Consequently, the d t a r y became a, if not the, dominant force within international relations

and foreign policy. The result was that international relations were increasingly seen through

a " d t a r y definition of reality" that created "an 'emergency' without foreseeable end."62

The prevalence of t h s "rmlltary defLnition of reality" was stark evidence for the ascendance

of the military w i h n the folds of the power elite.

Mds called this process the '"politicalization' of the h g h dtary"63 and pointed to

its syinbiotic effects, claiming "even if [rmlltary elites] are not desirous of political power,

power essentially political in nature [.. .] has been thrust upon them by civhan default."hl

The political acceptance of the militaly definition of reality was fachtated by its political

expediency.

From the standpoint of a party politician, a well-trained general or admiral is an excellent

legtimator of policies, for his careful use often makes it possible to lift policy 'above politics,'
which is to say above political debate and into the realm of administration. [. . .] Politicians thus
dehult upon their proper job of debating policy, hlding behind a s ~ ~ p p o s emilitary
d expertise; and
political administrators default upon their proper job of creating a real civdian career service. Out

"Ibid. p 185.
Ibid. p. 199.
" Mills, C. Wiight. The Power Elite. p. 200.
 of both of these civilian defaults, the professional military gain their ascendancy.65

As politics got into the army, the army got into politics, and these new structural

relationshps added another defining feature to the 'interlocking duectorate' of America's

power structure.

T o support his claims for d t a r y ascendance, Mllls presented various manifestations

of mhtary power, the first of which concerned scientific and technological development.

Once seated in the economy, research and development had increasingly become a province

of the d t a r y . On the eve of the Second World War,

some $40 million - the bulk of it from industry - was spent for basic scientific research; [while]
$227 inillion was spent on applied research and 'product development and engineering.' [. . .] By
1954, the government was spending about $2 bilhon on research (twenty times the prewar rate);
and 85 per cent of it was for 'national security.66

Whde much was conducted in private fachties, universities were also central to the process.

Because programs of military training and research were both prestigious and financially

sound, universities, lackmg sufficient financial support from the civilian government, had

turned to the rmlttary for support to the point where "some universities Fad become]

financial branches of the rmlttary establishment, receiving three or four times as much

money from the rmlttary as from all other sources combined."67 A second source of rmlitary

power came from the influence of its extensive public relations:

The content of this great effort reveals its fundamental purpose: to define the reality of
international relatioils in a military way, to portray the armed forces in a manner attractive to
civilians, and thus to emphasize the need for espansion of military facilities. The aim is to build
the prestige of the military establishment and to create respect for its personnel, and thus prepare
the public for military-approved policies, and to make Congress ready and willing to pay for them.
There is also, of course, the intention of readying the p~iblicfor the advent of war.68

To acheve these ends, the mhtary had extensive means at their &sposal, includ~ngTV

spots, all forms of meda advertisements, free r a l o airtime, as well as an enormous public

" Ibid. p. 200-1.

66Ibid. p. 216.
"Mills, C. Wr~ght.The Power Eke. p. 217
Ibid. p. 220
relations campaign in which all information was reviewed and censored before being leaked

"to the press and to the three or four dozen newsmen housed in the newsroom of the

Pentagon."69 In addition, many d t a r y elites employed public-relations officials. "In 1948,

General MacArthur's command included one hundred thirty-five army men and forty

civilians assigned to publicity. Eisenhower, when Chief of Staff, had forty-four d t a r y and

one hundred thirteen civilians."70 For Mdls, the results were disappointingly effective

because

In all of pluralist America, there is no interest - there is no possible combination of interests - that
has anywhere near the time, the money, the manpower, to present a point of view on the issues
involved that can effectively compete wit11 the views presented day in and day out by the warlords and
those they employ.
This means that there is n o free and wider debate of military policy or of policies of military
relevance [. . .and.. .] the military manipulation of civilian opinion and the rmlitary invasion of the
c i d a n mind are now important ways in which the power of the warlords is steadily exerted.
The extent of the military publicity, and the absence of opposition to it, also means that it is not
merely t h s proposal or that point of view that is being pushed. In the absence of contrasting
views, the very l g h e s t form of propaganda warfare can be fought: the propaganda for a definition
of reality within which only certain limited viewpoints are possible. What is promulgated and
reinforced is the i d t a r y metaphysics - the cast of mind that defines international reality as
basically military. The publicists of t l ~ emilitary ascendancy need not really work to indoctrinate
with this metaphysics those who count: they have already accepted it.7l

This acceptance of the d t a r y metaphysics led the American public to accept the economic

shift toward a d t a r y capitalism, while garnering support for the domestic and international

policies of the power elite.

The next section of The Power Elite,"The Political Directorate" and "The Theory of

Balance," described the changing power structure of America's political economy. W i t h

the political economy there had been several historical alternations between the dominance

of economic and political elites, but the institutional structural of contemporary America had

definitely led to economic dominance. The explanation of this dominance lay in the

centralization of economic power, following the Civil War, which had provoked a parallel

" Ibid.
Ibid. p. 221.
" Ibid. p. 221-2.
 centralization of political power at the expense of the great mass of independent

shopkeepers and farmers who had, u n d that moment, largely realized the Jeffersonian ideal

of the American Republic. During the Gilded Age, these new economic elites simply

hjacked American democracy under a flood of corruption that slowed perceptibly during

the Progressive Era. Yet because most political constituencies were essentially economic

interests, economic centralization meant that there were fewer groups w i h each political

constituency whose interests were often highly unified. As a result, political representatives

had become more attuned to the needs of their constituency to the point of eventually

adopting those interests as the fundamental goals of government. MLUSdescribed t h s

process as "the governmentalization of the old lobby."

T h s "governmentalization of the old lobby" was evident in the shfting origins of

the political elite, who were increasing "political outsiders" and hkely to assume political

office through appointment. "Political outsiders" were indviduals who had spent the

majority of their professional lives outside the political realm, serving in the area of the

private sector that they were usually appointed to a h s t e r . In contrast to these outsiders

were "political insiders" who fell into two categories: the "party politician" and the "political

bureaucrat." In final analysis, "today the men at the political top are much less likely to be

bureaucrats, and rather less Uely to be party politicians than political outsiders."72 In the

Eisenhower administration fourteen percent of its members had never participated in

politics in any professional capacity; a full three fourths were political outsiders.73 As a

group, the members of the Eisenhower administration who were in command of the

political bectorate were the legal, managerial, and financial members of the corporate elite.74

7' Mills, C. Wright. The Pouler Ebte p. 228

71 Ibid. p. 230-2.
'"bid. p. 235.
 The "governmentalization" was also a partial cause and illustration of the

suborhation of the legislative to the executive branch of government and with it the

relegation of the Congress to the "middle levels of power." The governmentalization's

causality was only partial because this process was also linked to the financial and political

realities of office, as well as to the internationalization of America's political responsibhties

Financially, "The simple facts of the modern campaign clearly tie the Congressman, [.. .] to

the sources of needed contributions, which are, sensibly enough, usually looked upon as

investments from which a return is expected."75 Politically,

Most professional politicians represent an astutely balanced variety of local interests, and such
rather small freedom to act in political decisions as they have derives from that fact: if they are
fortunate they can juggle and play off these varied local interests against one another, but perhaps
more frequently they come to straddle the issues in order to avoid decision. [. ..I Inside the
Congress [. . .] the politician finds a tangle of interests; and he also finds that power is organized
according to [.. .] seniority. Accordingly, the politician's chance to reach a position of power
within the Congress often rests on his ability to stay in office for a long and uninterrupted period,
and to do that, he cannot antagonize the important elements in h s c ~ n s t i t u e n c y . ~ ~

Hence, the successful Congressman, "seated in his sovereign locality,"77 rarely entered into

national decision-makmg, necessarily wedded to a provincial perspective, and evaluated

policy issues in the terms of their effect on local constituencies. This disparity between the

increasingly national and international scope of government policy and local purview of the

Congressman had ceded substantial power to the executive whch could be seen in the fact

that even the considerable powers wielded by key Congressmen were increasingly shared

with other types of political actors. Congressional control of legislation was increasingly

subject to the "decisive mohfication by the administrator,"7R whde the power to investigate

increasingly involved intelhgence agencies. 'The only sure way for the professional politician

to gain access to the upper reaches of power was to

75 Ibid. p. 250-1.
'"bid. p. 251-2.
77 Ibid p. 254.
78 hfills, C. Wright. The Power Elite. p. 251.
 team up with the administrator who heads an agency, a commission, or a department. [. . .] In so far
as the politician enters into the continuous policy-making of the modern political state, he does so
[. . .] by entering a clique that is in a position to exert influence upon and through the command
posts of the executive administration, or by not investigating areas sensitive to certain clique
interest^.'^

The c u h n a t i o n of such trends was that the upper levels of political power were tied to the

interlocking hectorate of interstate and international power centers, and as the scope of

decision-makmg expanded to a national level, the Congress, wedded to localities and their

constituencies was increasingly relegated to the "middle levels of power.''

Having thoroughly established the structural evidence for an interlochng directorate

and this hectorate's effects on America's leadershp structure and the emergence of an elite

class-conscious, in "The Power Elite" Mds synthesized previous conclusions into an explicit

statement of h s elitist paradigm. The core of this synthesis was his institutional analysis of

America's social structure. Beginning with the political realm hectorate, Mds stated that

"Political institutions in the United States have never formed a centralized and autonomous

domain of power; they have been enlarged and centralized only reluctantly in slow response

to the public consequence of the corporate economy."80 During the New Deal, the federal

government had grown substantially to deal with the emergency of the Great Depression,

and "economic elites, whch [. . .] had fought against the growth of 'government' [. . .]

belatedly attempted to join it on the highest levels." With the expansion of executive power

during the World War 11, these elites came "to control and to use for their own purposes the

New Deal institutions whose creation they had so bitterly fought,"x1 and the corporation's

man gained political eminence. The ascendance of the executive branch and the corporate

man within it relegated Congress to the middle levels of power.

70 Ibid. p. 258.
"1 hlills, C. Wright. The Power Elite. p. 272
81 Ibid. p. 272-3.
 The d t a r y ascendance was the best evidence for the supremacy of the power elite

paradrgm because Marxist and pluralist paradrgms did not drscuss d t a r y power in any

meaningful way, yet the American d t a r y was undoubtedly a part of the interlockmg

hectorate of America's power structure. Evidence for tlvs fact came from the prevalence

of "the d t a r y metaphysics" and the seemingly perpetual foreign threat that had placed a

premium on the d t a r y and their needs: Because "virtually all political and economic

actions are now judged in terms of d t a r y definitions of reality [. . .] the hgher warlords

have ascended to a firm position w i t h the power elite."82 In a country whose political

institutions were long accustomed to domestic clash and balance, this new international

political reality was without precedent, and the country lacked "formal democratic

mechanisms" to handle international affairs. It was in this vacuum that the power elite,

especially its military elements, had grown.83

The structural connection of the corporate economy to both the i d t a r y

establishment and purely political institutions was the foundation of the interlockmg

hectorate. Corporate-dtary relations rested on the transformation of the economy into

both "a permanent-war economy and a private-corporation economy."84 With t h s shift "the

most important relation of the big corporation to the state rests on the coincidence of

interests between d t a r y and corporate needs, as defined by warlords and corporate rich

[and] further subordrnates the role of the merely political men."a5 Corporate-political

relations had a long hstory of cooperation, but the enormous centralization of economic

power, the increased institutional ties developed during World War 11, "the

governmentalization of the old lobby," and the fact that the d t a r y needs of the state were

8' Ibid.
X"bid.
8-L Mills, C. Wright. The Power Elite. p. 276
" Ibid. p. 276.
provided by the corporate economy had made economic institutions the center of the

institutional matrix that was the interloclcing hectorate. Given this interlock and the

increased centralization of power and leadershp structures it represented, a power elite now

possessed practical control of American society, and its development was increasingly

subject to their power.

To support &us conclusion, Mdls located the power elite within the "command

posts" of interlockmg hectorate, identifying the personal and official relations between

institutions and cadres of elite leadershp. As leadershp structure of the interlockmg

hectorate became more centralized, a degree of interchangeability of personnel within the

high circles of c o m a n d had emerged and occurred "most frequently at the points of their

coinciding interest, as between regulatory agency and the regulated industry; contracting

agency and contractor."86 To unify these institutions legal and fmancial experts were needed,

and as a result, "the power elite also includes men of the higher legal and fmancial type, [. . .]

professional go-betweens of economic, political, and d t a r y affairs. The corporate lawyer is

a key link between [these orders]; the investment banker is [their] key organizer. . . "87 Such

indviduals had been indspensable to the formation of the interlocking directorate.

Additionally, Mds argued that the dstinctive institutional setting of the power elite

had cultivated important social and psychological affinities that were further evidence of

their existence." Beyond various socioeconomic, educational, and religious s d a r i t i e s ,

The most important set of facts about a circle of men is the criteria of admission, of praise, of
honor, of promotion that prevails among them; if these are similar within a circle, then they will
tend as personalities to become s l d a r . [. . .] This points to the basic, psychologcal meaning of
'class consciousness.' Nowhere in America is there as great a 'class consciousness' as among the
elite. Nowhere is it organized as effectively as among the power elite.8g

8"bid. p. 288.
H7 rVhIls, C. Wright. The Pouer Eli~e.
p. 289.
Ibid. p. 278.
iig Ibid. p. 281-3.
It was from the social and professional realities of these institutional settings that the "class

consciousness" of the power elite emerged.

Having completed his arguments concerning the institutional structure of the

interlockmg directorate and the lstinctive features of the power elite, in "The Mass Society"

Mds lscussed how structural developments had affected the American populace,

particularly the extent of its democratic participation. Mills' main assertion was that "the

American public" was evolving into a "mass society," a shift that had fachtated the

emergence of a power elite and one that was being accelerated under their rule.

To frame lus argument, Mills presented the salient features of a democratic public

compared with those of a mass society. A democratic public would contain the "possibhties

of answering back, of organizing autonomous organs of public opinion, [and] of realizing

opinion in action."" Actions would then be realized through democratic institutions. On

the other hand, a mass society could be characterized by lopsided ratio of "giver of opinion

to receivers [in which] one spokesman tallis impersonally through a network of

communication to d o n s of listeners and viewers."Q1The possibhty of response to the

givers of opinion would be severely h t e d , as well as abhty of public opinion to effectively

influence decisions of consequence. In addition, the "institutional authority" would

penetrate the public and l m t its degree of genuine auton~my.'~

To determine where along the continuum of "public" to 'mass" a particular society

fell, it was helpful to examine its d o n h a n t modes of communication. In a community of

publics, "Qscussion is the ascendant means of communications, and the mass rnela, if they

exist, simply enlarge and animate discussion, l m h g oneprimaypublic with the lscussions of

Ibid. p. 298.
biills, C. Wright. The Power Elite. p. 302.
Ibid. p. 303.
another." In contrast, withn a mass society, a formal m e l a would dominate, and publics

would become mere "media marlcets," exposed to the contents of mass mela." Accordmg

to Mds, the competition of opinions central to the democratic public had disappeared as

mass m e l a monopolized the means of communication, an important by-product of

corporate centralization. Moreover, Mds believed that these communication monopolies

were incredibly powerful manipulators by virtue of their ability to shape the terms of debate.

The media display an apparent variety and competition, but on closer view they seem to compete
more in terms of variation on a few standardized themes than of clasling issues. The freedom to
raise issues effectively seems more and more to be confined to those interests that have ready and
contiilual access to these media.g4

In adltion to this media monopoly, the evolution of voluntary associations during

the twentieth century had also reduced the extent to whch the American public could affect

society by translating public opinion into social actions. Lilce so many others, this evolution

was tied to the structural centralization of economic and political power. T o retain any

effectiveness against such institutional adversaries, the scale of voluntary institutions had

increased. Yet the repercussion of this enlargement was that the voluntary association

became inaccessible to individuals who desired to shape the policies of the organization to

which they belonged. Thus, such organizations no longer served the purpose for whch they

were designed: to g v e the inhvidual a voice w i t h the larger community.

The next essential element of a liberal public was access to a political education, and

while many thought tlvs had a democratizing effect, Mills lsparaged such conclusions

describing the transformation of education from a liberal to a mass education. Initially,

education had been primarily political and was intended to prepare citizens for democratic

participation. During the twentieth century, it had become increasingly vocational, and its

primary purpose had become job advancement rather than educated democratic

93 Ibid. p. 304.
94 Ibid. p. 313.
 participation. In absence of an "education of values" that could provide people with "those

cultural and political and technical sensibilities that would make them genuine members of a

genuinely liberal public," the individual was unable to envision h s or her personal problems

as problems of the community or to see the possibility of social action, based on personal

community assessment. For Mills,

educational institutions [. . .] have become mere elevators of occupational and social ascent, and,
on all levels, have become politically timid. Moreover, in the hands of 'professional educators,'
many schools have come to operate on an ideology of 'life adjustment' that encourages a happy
acceptance of mass ways of life rather than the struggle for individual and public transcendence.g5

A final limitation to the exercise of the democratic power was the structural

evolution of America into a "metropolitan society." The defining features of the metropolis

involved "segregating men and women into narrowed routines and environments, caus[ing]

them to lose any firm sense of their integrity as a public."" In these isolated d e u x ,

individuals became increasingly susceptible to manipulation because their lunited knowledge

of their larger cominunity necessitated a reliance on mass media for such information. In

such a situation, mass media enjoyed enormous influence through their ability to shape

opinion, creating powerful stereotypes of the unknown. The result was that "man [. . .I does

not gain a transcending view from these media [. . .] He cannot detach himself in order to

observe, much less to evaluate, what he is experiencing, much less what he is not

experiencing. Rather than that internal discussion we call reflection, he is accompanied

through lus life-experience with a sort of unconscious, echoing rnonologue."~7

For Mills, the combination of all these effects - the rise of mass media and its

monopolization of opinion, the disablement of voluntary associations, the transition from a

liberal to mass education, and the isolating effects of metropolitan society - had reduced the

" Afills, C. Wnght. 'l%ePower Elzte p. 319.

" Ibtd. p. 320.
97 Mills, C. Wnght. ?%iePou~erElzfe.p. 322.
 American public as the independent political force it once was. In its transition toward a

mass society, it had become increasingly susceptible to manipulation and manipulated they

had been. One of the obvious indications of this manipulation by the power elite was the

widely accepted "assumption that the security of the nation supposedly rests upon great

secrecy of plan and intent. [. . .] With the wide secrecy covering their operations and

decisions, the power elite can mask their intentions, operations, and further consolidation."98

In such an environment, the public chd not even have the facts on w h c h to base judgment;

such secrecy was, therefore, an enormous blow to American democracy and would

accelerate the transformation of the American public into a mass society, increasing the

already awesome power of America's elites.

As we have seen, the elitist paradgm of America's power structure was based on the

structural developments that had resulted in the centralization of economic, political, and

d t a r y power, ultimately culrmnating in an interloclng directorate of institutional power

that enabled a dsproportionately small cabal of elites to make decisions of national and

international consequence. The result of these factors was that &IS new power structure

"encroached upon the old balances and have now relegated them to the middle levels of

power."" Increasingly, America was ruled by and for the benefit of a power elite,

unaccountable to democratic review and control.

By examining The l'owel- Elite as a research product of Mds' parachgm, the central

assu~nptionsof that paradgm and their transformation into a methodological approach are

evident. Its fundamental assumption was that social structures shaped society and,

therefore, that their explanation would reveal the state of society and at least a probable

course for its future development. Whde in&viduals were important, they were molded by

"8 Ibid. p. 293-4.

"9 hlills, C.Wnght The Power Eltte. p. 296
the specific institutional miheu in whch they existed, and it was only in relation to these

d e u x that inhvidual power could have any meaning. All of the worli's central questions -

Who has power in America? Where does that power come from? How is it exercised?-

were answered in relation to institutions. Power resided in institutions. People were shaped

by institutions. The class-consciousness of the elites - from the recruitment and

indoctrination of aspiring elites to the old-boy networks that perpetuated their dominance -

was linked to their collective institutional formation, as well as the wealth, privilege, status,

and celebrity afforded to them by institutional position. The powerful maintained their

position through laws that protected the institutional sources of their power, especially

private property. In short, every hstinctive feature of the power elite was a product of the

institutional structure of America.

Wlde institutions were the foundation of h s paradgm, h s approach to their study

was hghly hstorical. T h s broad hstorical perspective represented the second definitive

feature of Mills' paralgm. Contemporary institutional realities were meaningless in isolation

from the stages of their historical development. Only by examining the process of their

evolution could one derive accurate theories of causality and the repercussive effects of

social developments. History revealed the real and the actual. Accordmg to Mills, the

fundamental failure of Marxism and pluralism as social theories resulted from the fact that

the realities they 'described' were ideals masyueradvlg as fact. Disciples of these schools

simply allowed their own confused perspective to confuse what they observed and

concluded about American society.""' Historical specificity had to be the basis of any

parahgm that hoped to describe a n y t h g approximating the truth. In their formalization as

paralgms, Marxism and pluralism had lost the theoretical elasticity needed to explain

""' LWs, C. IVright. 17he Power Elzte. p. 245.

unpredcted hstorical developments. For these reasons, the parakgm presented in The Power

Elite represented an effort to move beyond antiquated modes of social analysis and

understandmg. Whether or not it was successful is open to debate, but it certainly forced

both pluralists and Marxists to reexamine their p a r a h p a t i c assumptions and corresponding

theories.

The most immediate reactions to The Power Elite were angry rejections of Mills'

parahgm, based in part on lus forceful rejections of conventional sociological theory and

belittlement of the scholars who believed them. Whde Mds' caustic form and fippant

dismissals engendered significant resentment and alienated him from many of h s colleagues,

it had the desired effect -its irreverence could not be ignored ltke other polite polemics.

Chapter 2: And the Chorus Speaks

The intellectual seed MLUs had planted quickly grew in all directions. From one

direction came a chorus of criticism, from the other triumphant praise. Some simply saw it

as another hstoriographical moment in the development of sociology.

Due to the work's scathing criticism of American democracy, it elicited emotional

responses from readers of all political perspectives. MLUs had thoroughly attacked 'The

Great American Celebration' of the 1950s on which so many political conscrvatives rested

their laurels, and right-wing critics avoided the task of establishing any real objective

criticism and instead invoked their reliable trump card, labeling Mills a communist in an
attempt to l s t o r t h s message and deflect its political ramifications with characteristic ad

horninurn attacks. On the other hand, liberals condemned lum as a cynic or polemicist who

sought to sell books with angry moralizing and claims that America's democratic institutions

were devoid of any real power. Like their conservative counterparts, many of these

responses also lacked real, objective criticism. Finally, his work was attacked from the far

left by Marxists, who agreed with his general thesis but thought it had not gone far enough

in its condemnations of America's status quo.

While l a c h g the excessive emotionality of political responses, academic criticism

could also be classified along ideological grounds and came primarily from liberal and ralcal

scholars, who attacked both the theories and method of Mds' paradigm. Many saw the

theoretical scope of The Power Elite as problematic, ascribing to it claims of universality and

then unearthing counter-examples in whch the interests of the power elite had failed to win

the day. In the paradigm's absence of power attributions, another group of critics attempted

to assign relative weight to institutions and elites and debated whether the power elite was

"monolithic" or "pluralist." Others attacked the psuedo-ambiguous criteria for membership

withn the power elite; where was the line between elite and power elite? The more

empirically minded the social scientist, the more the book was condemned because its

theoretical conclusions could not be einpirically tested and placed the burden of empirical

proof or lsproof on its critics.

All critics of The I'ower Elite and the elitist paralgm had competmg theories about
Amerlcan society and its power structure, and Qsagreements ranged from reconcilable

methodological and interpretive difference to serious theoretical Qsputes, resulting from

fundamentally opposed assumptions about soclal causality. All critics had sometlung to say

about Mds' choice and evaluation of empirical evidence, and some faulted hxn for h s failure
 to adhere to conventional methods of scientific empiricism. Yet among so much dsparity,

virtually all criticism originated from and revolved around the theories, assumptions, and

methods of two competing paradigms: Marxism and pluralism. In the following pages, a

range of critiques wdl be presented and analyzed in relation to their fundamental connection

to one of these two sociological paradigms.

The response to The Powe/erElite, "A Critique of the Ruling Elite Model," published in

1958 by Robert A. Dahl, was representative of the genre of empirically based criticism that

faulted Mdls for his paradigm's lack of scientific empiricism. In the thwd paragraph of the

essay, Dahl arrived at the source of his criticism, stating:

whatever else it may be, a theory that cannot even in principle be controverted by empirical
evidence is not a scientific theory. The least we can demand of any r u h g elite theory that
purports to be more than metaphysical or polemical doctrine is, first, that the burden of proof be
on the proponents of the theory and not on its critics; and, second, that there be clear criteria
accordmg to which tlze theory could be

An obvious empiricist in his valorization of evidence and "scientific theory," Dahl was also a

pluralist. He claimed that the only way to prove the existence of a power elite was through

an empirical examination of the key decisions that Mills claimed were determined by h s elite.

Yet an empirical examination of the decision-makmg process posed several problems. "The

hypothetical ruling elite [must be] a well-defined group," their interests must be identified as

well as a series of decisions pitting the preferences of this elite against other interests, and

finally, the empirical results of those decisions must show that the elites' goals "regularly

prevail." A strict empiricist, Dahl felt that there was too much gray area to carry out such a

test with the degree of objective accuracy required to make claims about the truth of the

elitist paradigm. For example, how often must the preferences of the elite prevail for them

to qualify as a ruling elite? Seven times out of ten? In adhtion, how could one adequately

l(I1 Dahl, Robert. ''ACntlque of the Ruhng Ehte hfodel." p. 463

 define elite preferences or, even more basically, define the power elite with sufficient

accuracy to discover their preferences?

In light of these obstacles, Dahl dsmissed The Power Elite as nothmg more than a

"metaphysical or polemical doctrine"lo2because it failed to examine "a series of concrete

cases where key decisions are made." Dahl did "not see how anyone can suppose that he

has established the dominance of a specific group in a community or a nation without basing

his analysis on the careful examination of a series of concrete decisions."*03 A scientific

empiricist and a dsciple of the pluralist paralggm, Dahl's condemnation of The PowerElite

was superficial, grounded in a methodological bias that dogmatically equated 'truth' with

conclusions derived solely from a testable, scientific method. Consequently, Dahl and

commentators f i e hun rejected Mds' paradgm because it fell beyond the capabhty of their

chosen methodology, scientific empiricism, to prove or dsprove. Such was their standard of

judgment, and The Power EElite had failed to meet it. In his own words, M d s forcefully

responded to such criticisms, condemning such intellectuals as

how-nothings who refuse to say anything, or at least really to believe anything, about modern
society unless it has been through the fine little mill of The Statistical Ritual. It's usual to say that
what they produce is true but unirnportant.'04

Some degree of empirical criticisms, whether explicitly or implicitly engaged by

critics, pervaded most responses to The Power Elite, yet more sophsticated criticisms of The

Power Elite largely confronted its contents and conclusions, debated Mds' interpretations

rather than simply dsmissing his theory out of philosoplvcal bias. Among t h s category of

critics were both Marxists and pluralists, and their criticisms took forms dstinctive to both

of these paradgins.

Dahl, Robert. ''21 Critique of the Ruling Elite Model." p. 463.

l'"
Ibid. p. 466.
lo3
10"fill~, C. Wright. "Comment on Criticism." Dirsent, winter, 1957.
 The main pluralist criticism originated from competing paradigmatic conceptions of

power. The elitist paradigm defined power as the abihty to shape events, located it in

institutions, and declared the powerful to be institutional leaders; thus institutional leaders

had at least partial control of society and its development. Pluralists I d not dspute Mds'

the definition of power, that power resided in institutions, or that it had been centralized.

What they disagreed with was the conclusion that these trends led to the emergence of an

enormously powerful elite. To pluralists, power was only meaningful in its exercise. In

order to conclude a n y t h g about the power or leaderslvp structures of America, the exercise

of power had to be analyzed through an examination of decision-making and policy

formation. Mds' failure to account for what the power elite did with its power, how it was

exerked, and in whose interests had led him. not only to an impoverished view of power but also

to the wrong conclusions. As a result, pluralists often critiqued The Power Elite for its

assertion that the power elite possessed the ability to influence "big decisions"l05 and

subsequent failure to examine any decision-makmg process or to even identify the interests

that had benefited. To lsprove the elitist paradigm, they examined the decisions cited by

Mdls to show that the power elite had been subject to a variety of pressures and constraints,

which for pluralists amounted to other forms of power not considered in The Power Elite.

The pluralist paradigm, embraced by so many intellectuals during the 1950s, had

been presented in several works, but David Eesman's The Loneb Crowd (1950) was one of its

most convincing presentations. Riesman and Mills were antagonistic toward one another,

and a principal goal of The Power Elite had been to repulate his theory of American society.

Wfiam Icornhauser's 1961 essay, "Power Elite or Veto Groups," attempted to distill the

"'5 Mills named five decisions in The Power Elite on which he rested h s conclusion: the decision to drop the
atomic bomb, to enter \WYIII, to fight the Korean War, to avoid intervention at Dienbienphu, and to deploy
US troops in Europe in support of NATO.
 major theoretical disagreements between the two paradigms by comparing and contrasting

the works of kesman and Mdls in regards to five major categories: The Structure of Power,

Changes in the Structure of Power, Operation of the Structure of Power, Bases of the

Structure of Power, and Consequences of the Structure of Power. At the beginning of the

essay, Icornhauser outlined the main differences objectively, but the second portion of the

paper revealed h s pluralist bias, as he discussed the authors' conceptualization of power.

According to Icornhauser, Mdls viewed power as luerarchcal, and his work "emphasizes the

dzferences between units according to their power."l06 In contrast, fiesman saw "all units [. . .]

subject to constraints that shape and lunit their use of power."307 A classic pluralist,

Icornhauser criticized The Power Elite for its superficial treatment of power:

A major advance in the study of power is made by going beyond a formal conceptioil of power, in
which those who have the authority to make decisions are assumed to possess the effective means
of power and the will to use it. Nor can it be assumed that those not in authority lack the power to
determine public policy. The identification of effective sources of power require analysis of how
decisian-makersare themselves subject to variow k i n d af constraints. Major sources of
constraints include (1) opposing elites and active publics; and (2) cultural values and associated
psychological receptivities [sic] and resistances to power.")x

He then went on to critique MLUSfor h s assumption of unity among the power elite and for

arguing "that both sources of constraint are inoperative on the hghest levels of power." For

Icornhauser, Mdls' relegation of the competing interests of the American political system to

the middle levels of power and his claim that the existence of a power elite was visible in the

deterinination of foreign policy decisions were unsubstantiated because "he fails to put lus

argument to a decisive or meaningful test: he does not examine the pattern of decisions to

show that foreign policy not only is made 63/ few people [. . .], but that it is made@r their
parti~zlarintere~h-.~'lO')
For Ieornhauser, the absence of a decision-malsing analysis and

"'6ICornhauser, William. '"I-'ower Elite" or "Veto Groups."' Included in Ctll~umlandSocialCbaru~~ter.

p. 262.
107Ibid.
"IXIbid. p. 262-3.

ICornhauser, William. "'Power Elite" or "Veto Groups."' Included in Culttlraloud Socia/CL~ara~.ter.

p. 262-3.
 dscussion of the concrete interests of the power elite were serious failures that undermined

the elitist parahgm.

ICornhauser's criticisms found an echo in Dennis Wrong's essay, "Power in

America." Whde conceding that Mdls' account of who held the power in American society

was "broadly acceptable," he too addressed the fact that Mdls had failed to dustrate exactly

"what the elite does with its power, or wls_yit does some t h g s and not others."llO L k e

I<ornhauser, Wrong believed that this led Mllls to an inadequate definition of power because

he "never specifies precisely what are the interests on the basis of wlvch the power elite

decides policy."lll Wrong pointed to the fact that Mills often spoke of the "coincidence of

interest among economic, political, and d t a r y organizations" without ever explicitly

identifying them. He suggested, "What Mills fails to state outright, but is, I t h n k hmting at,

is that big business has joined with big politicians and the generals and adrmrals to maintain a

'permanent war economy."'ll2 To Wrong, t h s conclusion was totally unacceptable, as he

attributed America's new ~ d t a r posture

y to the exogenous realities of the Cold War. He

believed that Mill's failure to account for the role of the Soviet Union in the composition of

America's power structure led Mdls to "an irresistible determinism [.. .] that sees changes in

American society as being virtually self-generated by the 'internal dynamics' of

insfitutions."11?

These final claims were unjustified on a number of levels, based as they were on

Wrong's faulty assumptions of what Mdls had defined as the interests of h s power elite and

their degree of omniscience. Mills explicitly denied the omniscience of the power elite

throughout the work, referring to &chard Hofstadter's remark, "There is a great hfference

"(1 Wrong, Dennis. "Power in America." Cornmentoy,September, 1956.

Ibid.
112 Ibid.
""rang, Dennis. "Power in America." Cornme~ztay,September, 1956.
between locating conspiracies in hstory and saying that history is, in effect, a

conspiracy.. ."I14 Whde Mdls dtd believe in the existence of a coincidence of interest

between institutions, he never presented them as explicit or the universal motivation behmd

decision-mahg. At times, decisions were intentionally made to the benefit of the

permanent war economy, but he never claimed that the evolution of American capitalism

into a mihtary capitalisin had resulted from a series of conscious, coordinated decisions.

As far as Wrong's characterization of Mdls as an intellectual who "sees changes in

American society as being virtually self-generated by the 'internal dynamics' of institutions,"

this statement was simply untrue. Although Mills did thmk that institutional dynamics were

the principal determinant of social development, this was not equivalent to seeing "changes

in American society as being virtually self-generated by the 'internal dynamics' of

institutions." Furthermore, Mdls repeatedly identified World War I1 and the Cold War as

the definitive events that had fachtated the ascendance of h s power elite. Mdls attributed

evolutions in America's power structure prior to World War I1 to the interaction between pre-

existing power structures and momentous events, as in the case of the Great Depression and

Roosevelt's New Deal, the Civil War and the subsequent corporate revolution, and WWII

and the Cold War and the interlocking hectorate. Wrong had missed the nuanced

relationship between events and institutions that pervaded The l'ower Elite. Mills would not

deny that Soviet action affected American foreign and domestic developments, but to say

the exogenous factors had deterinined America's structural development was to ignore the

fact that responses to internatlonal developments were, to a large degree, condttioned by the

d t a r y metaphysics that d o m a t e d foreign policy, the specific psychology of the power

li4 Hofstadter, &chard. clted p. 293 m The Power Ebte

 elite, the capabhties of the corporate economy, etc. Wrong had simply misinterpreted The

Poweer Elite,negating the many of his criticisms.

A final example of pluralist evaluation, Talcott Parsons' essay, "The Distribution of

Power in American Society" (1957), raised a f a d a r blend of empirical and theoretical

criticism. Beginning with the empirical, he stated that the evidence presented in The Poweer

Elite "cannot suffice for a full empirical groundmg of interpretive conclusions [and that]

many of the crucial empirical questions arise on a level at which available operational

procedures are not of much or any use."ll5 While echoing the complaints of Robert Dahl,

Parsons' more sophisticated argument l d not stop there, engagng in many theoretical

criticisms. Given the fact that Mds had reduced "Parsons' carefully argued analytical theory

of the Social Sy~fem

to a few trivial commonsense points,"ll6 the extent of Parsons' twenty-

seven page critique undoubtedly reflected this professional antagonism.

Parsons' main disagreements came over the "empirical generalizations and [. . .]

theoretical background" of M1lls7paradigm. He attacked the ambiguous differentiation of

the power elite from others enjoying high prestige and Mills' ambiguous use of class and

upper-class. rZ managerialist, he lsagreed with the economic power that Mds attributed to

the very rich. He tools: issue with Mills' characterization of the weakness of the political

driectorate, suggesting the opposite with the statement, "In a complex society the primary

locus of power lies in the political system."ll7 Parsons believed that for purposes of

institutional power analyses, when dealing with the political system, it was imperative to

establish "the degree of differentiation of the political system from other systems; and its

' ' 3 Parsons, Talcott. "The Distribution of Power in ,Imerican Society." Included in .Ytm~.tnreand Process in Modern
Societies. p. 119.
""ldridge, John. C IF7nght niIi/Is. p. 7 .
117 Parsons, Talcott. "The Distribution of Power in American Society." Included in Strw~fure arzd Process in Modenz
Societies. p. 212.
own internal structure7"l18whch Mills had failed to do with any degree of empiricism.

Where M a s saw the political hectorate as dominated by the representatives of the

corporate economy, controlling the regulatory agencies of the New Deal, Parsons argued

that "the main focus of the development of our political system has been controlof economic

organization and processes," that "there has been a genuine growth of autonomous

governmental power [. . .] and that one major aspect of this has been the relatively effective

control of the business system."*l"

Parsons attributed Mas7faulty interpretation of the political system to h s "hasty

tendency to generalize from very recent short-run developments to the long-run prospects

of the structure of society."l20 To the contrary, Parsons believed that "American political

leadership [. . .] is not settled in terms of long-run dominance of a business-rmlltary

coalition"l21 and, furthermore, that "it [is] extremely dubious that even the partial correctness

of h s interpretation of a current situation w d prove to be a sound indicator of what is going

to be expected over such longer periods as a generation or more."l22

Beyond these theoretical ksagreements, Parsons' article culrmnated with a critique of

the elitist para&gm7sconception of power. By restricting his power analysis to only "who has

power and what sectoralinterests he is serving with h s power,"l2? Mills had failed to

appreciate "how power comes to be generated or in what communal rather than sectoral

interests are served."l24 Parsons saw the result as a highly selective, superficial treatment of

the conception of power and prone to "exaggerate the empirical importance of power by

""bid. p. 213.
""bid. p. 211.
'20 Ibid. p. 216.
'21 Ibid.
Ibid. p. 218.
'23 Parsons, 'Talcott. "The Distribution of Power in American Society." I n c l ~ ~ d in
e dStructare and Process in Modern
Societies. p. 221.
124 Ibid.
alleging that it is only power whch "really" determines what happens in a society."l25 The

merit of this point was reduced by Parsons' failure to substantiate this criticism by offering

a 9 social determinant of equal or greater importance than power.

At the time, Parsons' theoretical hsagreements constituted a legitimate response to

Mills' work, but hstory had proved the "long-run dominance of a business-military

coalition" to be a fairly accurate description of American history since the 1950s; at any rate,

politicians are certainly not the dominant forces, as Parsons believed. Within ten years of

the publication of Parsons' article, debates about the dimensions and empirical

characteristics of the "dtary-industrial complex" would completely eclipse criticisms of

Mds and prove Parsons' interpretation to be "extremely dubious in even [its] partial

Similar to pluralists, Marxists also took issue with Mills' conceptualization of power

as essentially institutional in origin. For them, power was only meaningful when related to

property and associated with a r h g class, the latter of whch Mills had rejected in a

footnote in The Poweer Elite. All Marxist critiques responded to this rejection, asserting that

adequate structural and personnel analyses of power had to be oriented from the perspective

of property and socio-economic class. This approach would have enabled Mills to establish

a set of elite interests and to counter pluralist claims by showing that leaders from other

socio-economic classes might have reacted chfferently in certain situations encountered and

decided by the power elite. He could then have supported his elitist parachgm with historical

evidence that dustrated a continuous triumph of elite interests.

'25 Parsons, 'I'alcott. "The Distribution of Power in ~imericanSociety." Included in Structure and 1'roas.r in Modern
Sone2ie.r. p. 221.
126
Ibid. p. 218.
 The first of these critics, Robert S. Lynd set the tone for the genre in h s essay

"Power in the United States." The primary focus of Lynd's critique involved Mds'

conception of power, which he described as resichg in institutions with elite power

conhtional on theirposition within instit~tions.Three institutions were relevant to the power

structure of America; thus the power elite was the sum of those institutional elites,

c o n t r o h g society through a loose and adaptable unity. For Lynd t h s localization of power

w i t h institutions was superficial and inadequate, for Mds had failed to see the guiding

principle b e h d all of America's institutions: capitalism. The basis of the capitalist system,

and thus the basis of all power withn it, was private property. To determine social power

required an analysis of the role of property in the formation of power and to malie

conclusions about America's power structure required an assessment of the Big Three in

relation to their property holdmg. To claim that a power w i t h a capitalist system was a

conspiracy of elites rather than the result of a larger structural system that always favored

property was simply to confuse the realities of power and was motivated by Mills' desire "to

reserve [a] dramatic role for his elites."l27 In addition, such an analysis failed to answer why

institutional elites agreed.

Lynd's answer was that "the same influential class.. .spreads across all institutions

and controls them in a colnmon general duection."l2"ynd &sparaged the work's lacli of

class analysis, charging that the power elite was simply a r u h g class despite Mds' attempts

to chstinguish the former from the latter. While he sympathized with the basis of Mds'

rejection of the term 'ruling class' - its loaded meaning, creating the concept of 'the power

elite' d ~ not
d hspose of the upper class. Lynd saw Mills' emphasis on the "class

127 Lynd, Robert S. "Power in the United States." Reprinted in Hoyt Ballard and William Domhoff s C.Wnghf
A4iI1r and The Power E/ife.p. 11 2.
12%yild, Robert S. "Power in the United States." Reprinted in I-Ioyt Ballard and William Domhoff s C.IF'asht
Mills and The Power Ehe. p 110.
consciousness" as an attempt to avoid explaining their unity through a traltional social and

structural class analysis. In attempting to create an elite independent of an upper-ruling

class, Mdls had confused the matter, attributing characteristics "generally associated with

class membership and interest" to non-class factors.

Lynd's final criticism involved Mds failure to assign relative power to his Big Three.

Pointing to two categories that he viewed as contradictory, Lynd wondered how Mllls could

describe the autonomy of the three institutions, while describing their unification in an

"interloclsing directorate" that was the basis of the power elite. Lynd derided Mllls for these

incongruenciesl29and the work's lack of definitive institutional assessment: "how much big

business control is enough to give it preponderant control?"130Concludmg his critique, Lynd

summed up h s main problem with The Power Elite:

The book reads as though it were written by two people: one with a relatively sure grasp of the
realities of a capitalist society, and the other bewitched by the plausible appeal of a book of elites;
and that the two never got together, but the man at work on elites succeeded in blurring and
impairing what the other had to say.131

Paul M. Sweezy's essay, Poweer El& or Ruling Class?(1956),raised sirmlar issues.

Sweezy characterized Mdls' general conclusions like others and identified two separate

methods w i t h the work: "the first approach is via social class. . .the second approach is via

what Mdls. . .calls the 'major institutional orders,' the 'major herarchies,' [or] the 'big three

domains."'*32 Whde accepting the worth of the first approach, Sweezy contested the second,

for it assumed that there were dstinct spheres of social life, each with its own institutional

structure and elites. Attaclsing the "idea of more or less autonomous orders," he turned

Mllls' own evidence against these claitns. Mdls had undermined the idea of a specifically

political elite in lus description of a political directorate doininated by political outsiders,

I b ~ dp 113
"" Ibld
Ibld p 115
Iiqweezy, Paul M Power Ehte or hchng C/a~s?
The hfonthly Review, p 142
representing corporate and d t a r y interests. Having dismissed the autonomy of the

political domain, Sweezy debunked the autonomy of the d t a r y establishment.

Summarizing Mds' evidence for this phenomena, he stated

Mills relies much less on facts that on a sort of unstated syllogism to back up his warlord-military
ascendancy [that] might be forinulated as follows: the major outltnes of American policy...are
drawn in terns of a "military definition of world reality" which has been accepted by the power
elite as a whole; this military defLnition of reality.. .must be the product of the professional
military inind; ergo the warlords now occupy a decisive position within the power elite.133

To Sweezy, &us was a problem because Mds "clearly wants to prove" that the rise of the

warlords was "the outcome of internalforces operating in the d t a r y domain."l34 To him

"the increasing d t a r i z a t i o n of American life is the result of external forces,"l" an

explanation incompatible with those of The Power Elite. These inner-textual contradctions

resulted in Mds' confused approach that alternated between elite and class analysis.

Sweezy thought that "the uppermost class in the United States is, and long has been,

made up of the corporate rich who directly pull the economic levers,"l36 and political and

mtlitary institutions were now and had always been dominated by economic elites. To

support his claim of economic elite dominance he described the historical domination of

government by economic elites, recounting virtually the identical developments described by

Mds from the perspective of economic dominance. Before the Depression, they stayed out

of government, but since the economic breakdown of the 1930s,"the Big Boys have

increasingly talien over the key positions themselves."l37 World War I1 was a godsend

because it enabled economic elites to avoid addressing the economic problems of capitalism.

Since its completion, "they have accepted, nay created and sold through all the media of

mass communications, a 'mhtary definition of reality' as the ideological-political

Ibid, p 144
134 Ibid
'35 Ibld
13Vbid p 145
137 Sweezy, Paul &I Power E h s or Iblzng Class? The Monthly Review, p 145
underpinning of the war-preparations economy, whch remains crucial to the whole profit-

making mechanism on whch their wealth and power rest."138 From h s perspective, the

warlords have "no fundamental value or purposes" apart from those of their corporate

colleagues.

Having thoroughly lsmissed the autonomy of political and rmlltary elites, Sweezy

concluded that Mds' theory of three sectional elites, coming together to form a power elite,

simply &d not add up. Instead, "what we have in the United States is a mling clad' whch

could only be understood in relation to the whole system of monopoly capitalism. He felt

that most of Mills' facts and a large part of h s theory actually supported the notion of a

r u h g class, which "is why his book, for all its weaknesses, is such a vital and powerful

document."l39

A final Marxist example, in his essay, "Power in America," Herbert Aptheker first

major criticism of Mdls was h s assertion that the American populace was a mass public,

devoid of any real power. Like many pluralists, he pointed to the decision concerning the

defense of Dienbienphu, citing evidence from Sir Anthony Eden's memoirs, Vice President

Nixon's speech, and State Department publications that all pointed to major influence public

opinion had had on that outcome. Aptheker also lsputed Mills' assertion that the masses of

American people were powerless and apathetic, pointing to voter turnout in Congressional

and presidential elections and how voting lstricts could affect the platforms of their elected

representatives. Summing up h s criticism, he stated

We are not here arguing the h i t a t i o n s of the two-party system, or the deep reality of political
demagoguery which permeates that system. We are arguing that the two major parties must and
do react, in varying degrees, to public opinion, whch does in fact exist; we are arguing that public
opinion is articulate, does have power, and has demonstrated that power, in spite of the two-party
system, throughout the l s t o r y of tlie United States.140

'?"bid. p. 147.
1791bid.p. 150.
'a' ,iptheker, Herbert. The World ofC. IVnght Mzlls. p. 28.
Aptheker then pointed to the incongruence in Mills' assertion that political involvement by

intellectual, artists, and scholars could affect the course of American development; if Mills

saw these individuals as having a potential impact, why then d d he envision the other

hundred and sixty &on America's as powerless?

Aptheker's next criticism was fa~mhar:The Power Elite's the lack of class analysis.

Attempting to define his conception of Marxism, Aptheker stated that Marxism was not

simple economic determinism, that it "does not deny a plurality of causation; it focuses upon

what it holds to be primary causation, ultimately decisive, and holds the material foundations

of any social order to be the relationships of production."l41 Citing Mills' own insistence that

social studies go "beyond a mere enumeration of causes" and a "weighmg" of descriptive

data "in such a way as to understand how they fit together," he faulted Mills for f a h g to

take up lus own challenge in The Power Elite. Aptheker declared that property relations were

the ultimate determinant of power and that "in assigning relative weight, and in determining

the basic, in dstinguishing between origin and significance, Marxism offers an illuminating

structural critique."ll2 Furthermore, Mills h s e l f had acknowledged the existence the

"highest concentration of economic power in recorded history" but had failed to fully grasp

the sipficance of t h s fact. In addtion, the work lacked a fuller treatment of financiers,

whch Mds had connected to the power elite in only three sentences. Attributmg t h s

absence to an ignorance of Lenin's writings, Aptheker explained that Leninist theories would

also have allowed MLUSto come to grips with the "imperialist character of the U.S. power

ehte."l-(i While acknowledging that l%e Power Elite was not a study of foreign policy, he

thought that, to some degree, the America elite could not be separated from "its overseas

141 Ibid. p. 31.

142 Aptheker, Herbert. The World ofC. E7nghtMzlls. p. 33
l l 3 Ibid. p. 36.
connections and interests and its external sources of strength."l44 These failures lunited the

depth of Mllls' analysis and could have been avoided had he given appropriate attention to

the Marxist-Leninist outlook.

Whde some of Apthelser's criticisms were valid, particularly those concerning Mills'

descriptions of the apathy of the masses, h s arguments for the power of the American

public was less convincing. Lilie many pluralist critics, Apthelser mentioned the influence of

public opinion in the decision over Dienbienphu as proof of the masses' power, but in doing

so, he conceded the point that Mllls was trying to make with h s examples: that decisions of

great consequence were made by few inlviduals. For Mllls, the fact that those inchiduals

were influenced by public opinion l d not undermine elite paralgm; the abhty to decide

was stdl the power elites'. They coxZd have chosen to disregard public opinion had they seen

fit to do so. The second weakness of Aptheker's criticisms was that aside from the decision

over Dienbienphu, he confined hts counterexamples to electoral politics, which Mills &d not

believe possessed power comparable to that of the power elite. In effect, Aptheker

disagreed with Mllls' characterization of the middle levels of power, seeing them as in fact

possessing real power, but he failed to refute any of the arguments Mllls had put forward for

the decline of the legislative politician. Had Aptheker addressed these points, he would have

strengthened his criticisms.

Together these essays revealed three main h e s of criticisms: one that was primarily

methodological, concerning the work's lack of scientific empiricism and two that were

motivated from the fundamental paralgmatic lfferences of pluralism, Marxism, and elitism.
 As we have seen, the main pluralist criticism originated their conception of power.

To pluralists, power was only meaningful in its exercise; thus in order to conclude a n y h g

about the power or leadershp structures of America, the exercise of power had to be

analyzed through an examination of decision-maliing and policy formation. Mds' failure to

account for what the power elite did with its power, how it was exerhed, and in whose interests

had led h m to not only an impoverished view of power but also to the wrong conclusions.

To support these arguments, when they, in fact I d , pluralists examined the big decisions

cited in The Power Elite and presented the variety of pressures and influences that had served

to constrain the supposed power elite. For pluralists, these constraints amounted to power

sources that could not be simply ignored as Mds had done.

At first glance, pluralist criticisins seem to possess a great deal of merit, and their

decision-making analysis seems like an appropriate method for analyzing power, as it

supplies the researcher with a method for testing whether or not there are, in fact, elites with

enormous power that effectively decided decisions of great consequence for America in

support of their own interests. Insofar as The Power Elite is concerned, Mills' emphasis on

the origins of power and h s avoidance of its exercise did dwlinish the empirical strength of

his conclusions. However, in attacking Mdls for not analyzing the decisions of the power

elite in order to determine the extent of their actual power, on some level, pluralists

conceded to Mills his main point for choosing the examples he cited: that decisions of

enormous public consequence had been made by a few inhviduals.

As for the decision-makmg methodological approach, this also had a certain,

concrete appeal, but, in the words of Raymond A. Bauer, who participated in a 1962

decision-making study of tariff policy, it treated

the process involving the formation of a particular decision as a closed system lvhich can for
practical purposes be isolated for analysis. Regrettably this cannot be done. [. . .] One of the
 fallacies of treating the policy process as decision-making is that it assumes that someone is aware
of the problem, [. . .] and that the issue has a clear-cut b e p n i n g and end.145

To solve t h s impossibility, Bauer suggested that "an envelope of events and issues" must be

s t u l e d in addtion to the decision-mahg process itself. Yet, even attempting to study t h s

"envelope of events and issues" involves a great deal of ambiguity, for how could one ever

actually know all of the factors that influenced the decision makers? It seems impossible to

definitively say, "Ths was why a decision was made. Its resolution was in the interest of

T h s Group, and the decision makers were constrained by These Factors, related to T h s

Envelope of Events and Issues." To make such assertions based on actuality rather that a

good deal of speculation and deduction, one would have to identify [I] all relevant actors, [2]

their personal motivations, ideologies, loyalties, pasts, and future aspirations, [3] their

political constituencies, [4] the larger political environment (domestic or international) in

whch the decision took place, and [5] relevant circumstances like W I I or 9/11. This

seems largely impossible, as even the pluralist, Robert Dahl, made clear. It is simply more

practical to construct theory from what was actually decided and its repercussions rather

than the somewhat subjective conclusions of a decision-mahg analysis.

Beyond this weakness, the pluralist approach to the study of power is also

fundamentally ahstorical and artificially divorces a phenomenon from its temporal and

structural contexts for purposes of analysis. It is like examining the foliage of a tree and

deriving some larger explanation of the tree from the fact that its leaves grew and fell off.

To be certain, these are important, but what about the trunk, branches, and seasonal

changes? Mills' hstorical and structural approach considered the trunk, branches, and

seasonal shfts that affected society rather than constructing a social theory solely from the

actions of inlviduals within these larger contexts. Such an approach offers little in the way

'45 Bauer, Raymond. "Social Psychology and the Study of Foreign Pohcy." Amencat1 Ps_vcbologz.rt. p. 937
of predction, for its focus is always imme&ate and always on human actors. It was for

these reasons that Mills criticized the pluralist method as a "narrow-focus view of politics

[and] narrow-focus in the choice of time-spans."l46

Although Marxists critiques presented substantially different theoretical and

methodological criticisms than their pluralist foils, at the root of their disagreement with the

elitist paradgm was its conceptualization of power. For Marxists power ultimately lay in

property; the powerful were those who controlled property and, through it, the means of

production. Just as the pluralist defvlition led them to a particular methodological approach,

the Marxist paradigm and its assumptions led its disciples to an equally particular approach.

Assuming that power was ultimately economic and rooted in property, it became necessary

to identify all sources of social power, determine the extent of their property holdings and

wealth, and then rank their power, so conceived, accordmg to their degree of control over

the means of production and other economic forces. Applied to individuals or groups, &us

conceptualization of power led to a class analysis in whch all meaningful social distinctions

were described in relation to control over the material forces. Because Mds &d not

understand that power was essentially economic and derived from property, he had failed to

engage in a class analysis, to assign relative weight to the institutions of the interlockmg

directorate, and to see the r u h g class that dominated America.

Mdls rejected the Marxist paradgm because he did not believe in the ultimate

determinacy of economic forces. As a result, they adopted neither the Marxist definition of

power as property-based nor its methodological approach of categorizing individuals,

groups, and institutions according to their property holdings. For Mills, this obsession with

economic factors lvnited social explanation.

'JQtills, C. Wright. The Power Elite. p. 245

 In many ways, Mills did construct his argument in the Marxist vein, and he certainly

borrowed Marx's structural deterininism and much of h s vocabulary, describing the "means

of production," violence, and communication. He described economic elites as a class of

corporate rich and related all of the distinctive features of that class to the ownershp or

control of economic institutions. Beyond economic elites, he discussed the class-conscio~sness

of the power elite. Insofar as h s structural analysis is concerned, economic institutions were

the core of the interlocking directorate. Mills pointed to the emergence of the corporate

economy and the corporate revolution as the foundation of America's contemporary power

structure. Centralization in economic power had resulted in a sllnilar centralization of

political power; it had enabled "the governmentalization of the old lobby;" it had elevated

governance to the national level where economic elites entered the executive branch as

political outsiders; it had led to media consolidation whose manipulative effects had

fachtated the ascension of the power elite; and it had led the private corporate economy to

supply the military needs of World War I1 and the Cold War that had essentially transformed

American capitalism into a i d t a r y capitalism. In short, virtually every structural

development Mills described was related, either implicitly or explicitly, to developments in

the corporate economy. In "The Power Elite," he even stated, "Political institutions in the

United States have never formed a centralized and autonomous domain of power; they have

been enlarged and centralized only reluctantly in slow response to the public consequences

of the corporate economy."l47 In short, Mills obviously I d not deny the enormous

importance of economic factors, and in h s late work, The Marxisfs, published posthumously

in 1962, he would describe hullself as a "plain Marxist."

lfl Mlls, C. Wright. The Power Ekte. p. 272.

 However, despite the fact that Marxism had obviously had a tremendous influence

on Mills, he rejected the packaged whole that Marxists argued to be the only real way of

understanlng society because it focus was too narrow. Even if economic factors were the

primary determinants of historical development, even if economic elites were more powerful

that other types of elite, and even if property was the ultimate form of power, none of these

thmgs precluded the existence of other forms of power. Violence was a form of power quite

distinct from property control. The abhty of m e l a monopolization to manipulate the

American public was a form of power. The abhty of politicians to effect laws with real

consequences for people was a form of power. If a Marxist wished to argue that all of these

forms of power could be theoretically linked to the means of production and property, Mllls

saw an abstract lstinction as irrelevant. Wfiam Icornhauser characterized Mllls' view of

power as hierarchcal and his work "emphasizing the dzfeerences between units accordmg to

their power,"l48 and whde this was true, Marxists carried their emphasis of lfference to an

extreme that was both pointless and practically improvable. Compared with Marxists, Mllls

actually had certain affinities with pluralists in his conception of power as differentiated

accorchng to its actual use.

Where Sweezy and Lynd had criticized the autonomy of the institutions and elites

with the interlockmg hectorate, arguing that all were subordinate to economic factors, such

arguments were absent of all practical value. The leadership structures of these institutions

were interloclied, but the political or military man existed in a different world than the

corporate executive; he engaged in different activities; he encountered different inlviduals

and institutional and social constraints. Autonomy is self-rule; d t a r y and political elites

were undoubtedly self-ruled, as economic ehtes were not forcing their wlll upon the rest of

148 I<ori~hauser,William "Power Ehte or Veto Groups " Included m Czllttlre andSo~zalCbara~~er.
p 262
the population. To make these theoretical distinctions between group dominance was

simply irrelevant and did not undermine the elitist parachgm. Mds' point was that there

were several groups of elites within American society that exercisedpowerin dzferentforms; all

were powerful, and powerful to an incredible extent, as a result of the institutional structure

of society, w h c h Mds described as the interlocking hectorate.

The narrowness of the Marxist definition of power and class structure and its

inevitable conclusion of a ruling class led Mds to reject in lvs footnote in "The Power

Elite." He rejected the term "ruling class" as a "badly loaded phrase [that] contains the

theory that an economic class rules politically" because it chd not allow enough autonomy to

the political and rmlitary orders and their agents.149 Insofar as simple class categorizations,

economic factors based on property ownerslvp were not sufficient, for there were other

distinctive class features. Revealing Weber's influence, Mds saw 'status,' 'party,' 'lifestyles,'

'life chances,' and class-consciousness all as important differentials withn larger class

categories. The power elite could be usefully distinguished from other groups by all the

features to which Mds continually referred throughout The PowerElite. Furthermore,

criticisms from both Marxists and pluralists of his failure to specif$ the interests of the

power elite were also unfounded, as Mds identified the interests of the corporate rich as the

preservation and increased success of the corporate economy and the interest of all of the

power elites m self-perpetuation.

The main weakness with the Marxist paradigm and its Isciples' critiques of ThePower
Elzte stem from its parachgmatic formality in which the central concepts of economic
deterninism, power, and class are all narrowly defined and integrated into a specific

methodological approach. Their main criticisms of hlills and his work were all, in some way,

&fills, C.LVrigllt. The Poujer Elite. p. 277

related to the theoretical and methodological rigidity of the Marxist paradigm. As we have

seen, the shmlarities between the Marxist and elitist paradigms are strildng.

The final category of criticism was empirical in orientation. For empiricists, a theory

as grand as that proposed in The Power Elite was simply improvable and thus of little value to

sociological understanding. The problems posed by an empirical analysis of a social

phenomenon as complex as the institutional structure of America were substantial and

inherent witkn the project. In the words of Talcott Parsons:

In the nature of the case, to produce such a study is a very difficult enterprise. However
operationally useful precise data may be.. .they cannot suffice for a full empirical grounding of
interpretive conclusions.. .because many of the crucial empirical questions arise on a level at
which available operational procedures are not of much or any use.150

Robert Dahl and others completely rejected the elitist parahgm on these grounds, but as we

have seen, neither the elitist nor pluralist parahgms could stand up to a rigorous empirical

test. In its s d a r i t i e s to the elitist parahgin, Marxism would suffer the same fate. Must we

then resign ourselves only to analysis of empirically provable phenomena? If so, social

science will contribute little to academia. Given the empirical difficulties inherent to

"proving" any of these parahgms, it seems that another standard must be found to judge

their merit, for there is surely something to be learn in social science and some way to

distinguish good from bad scholarship. It seems more appropriate to judge such a broad

theory by the merit of its empirical evidence, the strength of its argumentative logic, and

most importantly by its abhty to predict lvstorical development.

The difficulties posed by the role of scientific empiricism w i t h the social sciences

would remain a central feature of the intellectual history of the ditary-industrial complex.

In the end, it would be a decisive reason why, by the end of the 1970s, there remained so

little theoretical consensus about the military-industrial complex, let alone America's larger

" Included in Sfmchre and Proiess zn

15" Parsons, Talcott "The D~stributlonof Power m Amencan Soc~ety
~UodernSoiref~es.p 199
power structure. But we have jumped ahead of ourselves. Let us first turn to the

subsequent evolution of the elitist paradgm, and the revolutionizing effects of the

introduction of the concept of the dtary-industrial complex within the field of power

structure analysis.

Chapter 3: From Theory to . . .Theory

'Tmth emerges more readz''+om error than from conf~sion."-Francis Bacon

After its publication and the avalanche of criticism it invoked, the influence of The

Power Elite continued to spread throughout academic circles. Its most influential

components came in its structural descriptions of America, includmg the permanent rmlitary

economy and interlocking duectorate. Soon widely accepted as facts, dsagreements over

their theoretical implications came to dominate power structure analysis, and with

Eisenhower's farewell address, these descriptions coalesced into the "dtary-industrial

complex." Some of Mds' interpretative theories about the functioning dynamics between

the institutions, especially personnel exchanges between institutions, old-boy networks, and

the political use of d t a r y expertise as a legitimating force became the foci of empirical

analyses over the course of the 1960s and early 1970s. The elitist paradgm also attracted a

large following and remained one of the three principal interpretations of America's

leadership structure, even as the sociological moment of dtary-industrial complex faded.

As we have seen, the first stage in the evolution of the elitist paradgm was marked

by debates between elitists, pluralists, and Marxists, concerning the truth, untruth, and
shortcomings of The Pozver Elite. The major ideological and methodological dfferences

between these factions were o u t h e d in the last chapter and remained the major

paradgmatic dfferences within analyses and interpretations of the dtary-industrial

complex.

Mills' immediate influence on the development of power structure analysis could be

seen not only in what was appropriated from The Power Elite but also from what it had failed

to dscuss. Where his initial paradgin had lacked convincing, empirical proof, critics and

disciples ahke produced studes addressing these deficiencies in an effort to examine theory

against empirical evidence. Marxists reformulated Mds' conclusions w i t h their own

paradgm and set about attempting to assess the property holdmg of the institutions, to

assign relative weight among them, and to study the power elite through class analysis.

Pluralists attempted to undermine the elitist paradgm through decision-making analyses. In

both cases, the permanent war economy, rmlitary metaphysics, interlocking hectorate, or

some derivation of the previous concepts were the popular research topics, but the objective

of such scholarshp was primarily to provide more evidence for paradigmatic disputes.

The titles of such works, the frequency of their direct references to Mds or h s

paradgm, and the variety of meda sources addressing the book dustrates its influence on

the intellectual hstory of power structures. On April 22,1956, The New York Times Book

Review ran one of the first articles dscussing the work, entitled "Are the Blind Leadmg the

B h d ? " by the renowned social commentator, A. A. Berle. As we have seen, his The iVodev-n

Coqol-ation and Pm'wte Proper9 (1932) was one of the first works to present 'managerial

theory.' At the time of his review, Berle was a well-respected corporate lawyer and political

advisor on Latin American Affairs. His article was highly comphentary of The Power Elite,
and the source of the review and the prestige of its reviewer did much to promote the work

as one of insight and intellectual merit.

Other journals, including The Nation, Month4 Review, The N e w LeftReview, The American

PoliticalScience Review, World Politics, Commentay, Mainstream, Partisan Review, The Progressive, The

rlmerican Journal of Sociology, The Reporter, Dissent, and Encounter all carried articles about The

Power Elite. While most of these sources were lesser academic publications, The Americdn

Journal of Sociology, The American PoliticalScience Review, and Month4 Review were of repute, and

whether critical or adulatory, the appearance of multiple articles, respondmg to a single work,

guaranteed the latter's promotion throughout the intellectual community.

Many of the direct responses to The Power Elite appeared during 1956 primarily in

academic journals. While concentrated in 1956, reviews continued through 1958. Those

reviews analyzed in the precedmg chapter and others spanned &us period, b e p n i n g in May

1956 with Robert S. Lynd's Power in the United Staries and Wdham Lee Miller's Queen Ants and

Cadillacs. These were followed in June by Richard Rovere's The Interlocking Overlappen, in July

by Marcus Cunliffe American Trends and P h k p Rieff s Socialis~nand Sociology. September, 1956

was full of critiques, includmg Dennis Wrong's essay, Power in America, Paul M. Sweezy's

essay, Power Elite or Rzlling Class?, and Herbert Aptheker's essay, l'ower in /Imerica. Eugene V.

Walters' account, The Power Elite: Two Views, emerged in the fall of 1956. Talcott Parsons'

essay, The Distribzttio;czq"Power in American Society was published in October 1957, whde Robert

A. Dahl's work A Cm'tiqz/e of the Ruling Elite Model and Daniel Bell's The Power Elite Reconsidered

followed in June and November of 1958 respectively. 'I'he works of Parsons, Aptheker,

Sweezy, Rovere, and Bell would all later be incorporated into full-length books or reprinted

in collections of their work. Another wave of publications celebrating and a t t a c h g The

Power Elite and Mds' other works followed his death in 1962, caused by a second heart

attack.

Eisenhower's farewell address can be seen as beginning the second stage, as

scholarship shfted away from paradigmatic hsputes to the empirical task of researching the

various structural relationshps of the dtary-industrial complex. While all accepted a

vaguely defined mhtaiy-industrial complex, Marxism and pluralism were force to integrate

t h s reality within their theoretical explanations of American society. Unsurprisingly,

pluralists attempted to show that its influence was really minimal, merely one of the many

interest groups, contributing to the balance of countervadmg power. Elitists and Marxists

generally viewed the military-industrial complex as possessing a enormous amount of power

and, not having to defend their paradigm lrke pluralists, attempted to say somethmg

meaningful about the effects of that power.

Paradigmatic polemics still appeared of course, but the primary focus of most

scholarship was the domestic repercussions of the rmlitary-industrial complex, specifically

the origins and repercussions of the "permanent war economy" and the role of the

"interlocking hectorate" in its establishment and maintenance. Fred Cook's The Wafare

State (1 962), J. M. Swomley's The Militav Establirhment (1964), and Tristram Coffin's The

Armed Socz'eg (1964) are all examples of such works, published during the early 1960s. Whde

appropriating much of Mas' description as the springboard of their analysis, these works did

not attempt as sweeping a description of American society as Mills, focusing instead on

dtary-industrial hkages and the interlochng duectorate.ljl In addtion to these central

concepts of The PoweerElite, the "rdtary metaphysics" and the often-described "crackpot

'5' Given the length h i t a t i o n of this paper, I am not going to discuss the contents of works related to the
military-industrial complex, as most is simply mountains of einpirical evidence concerning the specific of the
larger trends discussed in The Power Elite. However, their general theme or p a r a d p a t i c orientation wdl be
mentioned, according to when they are presented in the narrative.
 realism" were also the foci of a few works. Published in 1964 by Anatol Rapoport, a

specialist in game and systems theory at the University of Michigan, Strategy and Conscience

represented an excellent examination of this 'realism,' identifying many of the assumptions

underlying America's Cold War foreign policy.

Rapoport agreed with Mills' description of the "military-metaphysics," asserting that

Cold War foreign policy was drafted, debated, and presented to executive and Congressional

leadership by mhtary strategists. In determining strategy, these theorists employed

theoretical models for the rational decisions of nation-states in w h c h the course of actions

they pursued would be that whch maximized utility. All actions were then assigned a

specific uthty dependmg on the priority of their outcomes and the certainty, risk, or partially

controllabhty of aclveving those outcomes. To Rapoport, the problem with such an

approach was that the utdity of outcomes or, even more fundamentally, the actions that

would produce those outcomes were d~fficultto determine for the United States and almost

impossible for the Soviet Union. To compensate, simplifications of Soviet motivations were

necessary, and the ''result of this pressure for simplification in strategc thinking is the

tendency to represent conacts as zero-sum gaines."lj* By approachmg policy formation

from &IS perspective, especially when those involved were almost exclusively of or

employed by the mktary, one was led to the central assumption of zero-sum theory: that

"whatever one player can do to hurt the other he will do."l53 This necessitated a strategy of

deterrence. For Rapoport, to base strategic thinking on this assumption was unproductive

because it amounted to a conceptual "zero-sum trap." T h s trap resulted from the fact that

in the realm of international politics, where two superpowers pursued dominating strategies,

a zero-sum game was strategically indstinguishable from a prisoner's ddemma, in whch

li2 Rapoport, Anatol Strutegy and Connzence p 105

Ibtd p 106
both parties ended up with a worse outcome by pursuing 'strategic' behavior than that whch

would have resulted from 'non-strategic' behavior.154

The cause of this Cold War prisoner's ddemrna could be traced to the zero-sum

assumptions that came into play when assigning udtty to potential Soviet action. In doing

so, policy-makers attributed "to the other preferences for those courses of action which are

most devastating to ourselves. The fact that the other does not as a rule carry those actions

out is attributed almost exclusively to the effectiveness of deterrence."155 W i h the zero-

sum game, a nuclear surprise attack was the enemy's most favorable choice because it

represented the "winning move," for there would be no United States left to retaliate.

Because "winning" the game was the ultimate objective, all other strategic actions were

considered in relation to this "winning move." However, the prisoner's dilemma inherent to

these arguments was that the context of winning involved some form of nuclear war. For

Rapoport, t h s cast all of 'strategic' foreign policy into the realm of Mds' "crackpot realism."

Pursuing purely 'rational' analysis, strategists had obscured the destructive reality of the

situation under the guise scientific detachment.

While detachment is a source of supreme strength in the investigation of nature, it may be

debilitating if it is carried over bodily from natural science to areas purporting to deal with human
behavior. For what in natural science had been an emancipation from anthropomorphism becomes
in the formalism of strategic thinking simply an obtuseness in psychologcd matters. It ought to
be a truism that if it is inappropriate to attribute human characteristics to inanimate matter or to
lower animals, it is equally inappropliate to ignore human characteristics wlien dealmg with
human beings.156

Beyond concepts directly related to The Power Elite, a range of other phenomena was

analyzed in the outpouring of scholarshp that addressed the objective features of the

dtary-industrial complex, includmg: the relationshps between the defense corporations,

the procurement process, top rmlitary brass, and Congressional leadershp, as well as the

ljJIbld. p. 107.
Anatol. S'trate~and Co~.rciena.p. 107
l 5 j Rapoport,
ljqbid. p. 109.
larger effects of private sector defense spending on the economy as a whole, foreign policy,

and the media's role amid so much development. With the escalation and prolongation of

America's involvement in Vietnam, the mhtary-industrial complex literature experienced

another subtle evolution, as studies shfted "from societal considerations to mditary-

industrial collusion and the dominance of d t a r y officers in the national political

systems."157

Comparing the titles of works from the seven or eight years following the

publication of The Power Elite with those froin the end of the 1960s and early 1970s clearly

dustrates this shift. From Power Elite or Veto Groups and A Critique ofthe Rzlling Elite Model, by

1969 and 1970, a deluge of works were published with such titles as "How to Control the

Military" 0.I<. Galbraith, 1969), The Economy oJ'Death &chard Barnet, 1969), I'entagon

Capitalism (Seymour Melman, 1970), The Pentagon Propaganda Machine (Senator Robert

Fulbright, 1970), and Reportfrom the Wasteland (Senator William Proxmire, 1970). These

works all testified to the "considerable independent political power"l58 that the uniformed

military had acquired. In his The Militay-lndustmalComplex, Sidney Lens pointed to the

Pentagon as "the fountainhead" of American Imperialism. Galbraith asserted, "In my view

the Services, not their industrial suppliers, are the prime wielders of.. .power."l5Gome of

these works emphasized the d t a r y ' s control over the dtary-industrial complex; others

reversed the causality, stressing industrial control. An example of the latter was Paul Baran

and Paul M. Slveezy's, Mo?zopobCapitalisrz, which made the central point that the d t a r y

establishment sewed the capitalist purpose of maintaining prosperity at home whde fighting

socialism abroad. David Horowitz argued that "The locus of power and interest (of the

f. p. viii.
t ~ a / A Rea~sesrmen
Sarkesian, Sam. The Milifay - I ~ c I ~ ~ rComplex:
' j q a r n e t , fichard. The Ecorzomy ofDeath. p. 8 1 .
I5%albraith, J. I<. Hozv to Controlthe Military. p. 10.
 r u h g class) is the giant corporations and financial institutions w h c h dominate the American

economy, and moreover, the economy of the entire Western world."l60 Thoroughly

reflective of the Marxist mold, Wdham Appleman Williams claimed that the Cold War

antedated the military-industrial complex, viewing both as organic developments from the

naturally expansive nature of capitalism in global conflict with socialism.161 Others strove to

document how the corporate elite controlled those aspects of government and the rmlltary

establishment essential to capitalist interests. Yet, regardless of wlvch form of institutional

determinism scholars supported, all of their arguments operated within Mills' structural

parachgm and borrowed one or more of h s economic, d t a r y , and political deterministic

perspectives.

As research continued, it was clear that the dtary-industrial complex had a

significant effect on American society. However, it was much easier to identify the general

nature of the phenomenon then it was to provide realistic analysis of its specifics. The

rmlltary-industrial complex - however conceptualized - was so enormous that its

distinguishable components were dfficult to untangle. It was almost impossible to

objectively prove anything beyond its most basic features. By the end of the 1960s, there

was little consensus among scholars beyond their acknowledgement of the complex, to a

greater or lesser degree, as an entity with identifiable goals, interests, and motivations that

could only be understood in relation to the nature and scope of the U.S. defense effort.162

Even some of these assumptions were criticized, and in the face of such fundamental

attacks, many acadeiiics sought to formalize the complex's empirical relationships, as

empirical evidence was the only universal standard that could hope to reconcile such

la' Horowitz, David. Colporai501~s and the Cold War. p. 11.

'" \V&ams, \Villiam A. Roots $the iVloder~1America/z Empire.
Wolf, Charles. "Military-Iildustrial Simplicities, Complexities and Realities."
dvergent interpretations. For the most part, these analyses operated on one of two levels.

The flrst, a problem approach, focused on specific issues or various components of the

mhtary establishment in the context of the total U.S. defense effort. The goal was to

produce objective issue studies, designed to identify and clarify the boundaries and

interrelationships between the mdttary and industry.163 The second was a sub-systems

approach that studed the defense establishment in relation to the larger political system in

an attempt to identify the values and specific interests of the dtary.164 The main focus of

these s t u l e s was to describe the decision-mahg process of the military establishment, its

sources of power, and its influence or control over other political subsets such as the

Congress or federal bureaucracy in order to determine the relative degree of control of the

dtary-industrial complex over the entire political system.165

However, in spite of the mounting evidence, scholars could rarely agree over what it

meant. Unlike the natural sciences in whch more evidence increased the Mcehhood of

theoretical consensus among scholars, the opposite seemed to be the case with the mhtary-

industrial complex, as paradigmatic disagreements solidified as the facts multiplied. To

understand this trend, we must examine how each paradgm was able to reconcile its

assumptions and theories with the existence of the mktary-industrial complex.

In the case of pluralism, the process of reconchtion was remarkable. As described

in David kesman's The Lonely Crowd (1950) and J. I<. Galbraith's Americatz Capitalism (1952),

the pluralist paradigm held that America contained a vast plurality of interests that amounted

to the structural equivalent of "infinite power sources." The relationshp between t h s

'" Examples include: Stanley Lieberson's "An Empirical Study of MiLitary-Industrial Linkages" or Albert D.
Biderman's "Retired Military Withn and Without the hlthtary-Industrial Complex."
Exatnples include: Charles Wolfs "Wlitary-Industrial Simplicities, Complexities and Realities" or Seymour
Melman's "Alternative Strategies and Budgets for Wfditary Security."
Sarkesian, Sam. The Mi/itay-Industrial Complex: A Reas.ressmezt. p. viii.
plurality of economic and political interests was one of "countervahg power," resulting in a

relative state of equhbrium. The Power Elite contained fundamental and comprehensive

repuhations of the pluralist paradigm, eliciting strong reactions from its followers.

However, despite the fact that pluralist theories had neither prehcted nor were capable of

explaining the emergence of a rmlitary-industrial complex, their influence persisted

throughout the dtary-industrial complex literature.

To reconcile the failure of their model - if they even saw it as such - pluralists

simply revised their countervahg power structure to include a mhtary-industrial complex!

To do so, they defined the Complex in broad terms, including an assortment of corporate,

d t a r y , academic, labor, and governmental interests in a state of countervahg competition.

To explain the rmlitarization of America, pluralists pointed to the Cold War, the threat of

communism abroad, and Vietnam. These exogenons forces were responsible for the

emergence of groups with an interest in armament and mhtarization, as the internal dynamics

of America's social structure, in and of themselves, would not have lead to such a

development. However, once established within America's institutional structure, these

groups were subject to the countervahng dynamics characteristic of American plurality.166

In defense of their paradigm, the first concept that pluralists attacked was that the

mhtary-industrial complex was an entigl" with specific interests and motivations.

Undermining &IS conclusion was essential because if the Complex was, in fact, an entity its

power would be enormous and safe from the countervaihng mechanics of America's power

structure. Defining the Complex in broad terms was then essential, for it enabled pluralists

to Illustrate its internal confhcts through dsagreements between the Services, their thinli

l" For examples of these arguments see 'Ialcott Parsons' essay, The D~stnbzrfrowofpower zn Amert~anSo~tep;
Damel Bell's The Power Ehte hcon~tdered,Richard Rovere's The Interlocktng Over/appers, Wilham Proxmre's Repod
/rum the TF'aJfe/and, and Aaron Friedberg's In the Shadow ofthe Gurrrson Stale,
"PvIoi~olith~c Structure" was the sociological substitute for entlty
tanks, supposedly hawkish politicians, and defense corporations. Whde all constituents of

the rmlitary-industrial complex, these institutions and individuals possessed lvergent

interests and were often in direct confhct. Since this was the case, the dtary-industrial

complex was obviously not a "monolithic structure," controlled by an elite, but rather a

subset of America's countervahg institutional structure.

T o support these conclusions, pluralists examined the economic and political

dimensions of the dtary-industrial complex withm the middle levels of power. In this

analytical setting, pluralists based their conclusions on short-term trends, refusing to step

back to consider events in relation to deep-seated structural developments. Empirically,

their studies often approached the ldtary-industrial complex w i t h narrow parameters,

both structurally and temporally, attempting to empiricize various elements of the complex,

such as the correlation between Congressional lstricts involved in defense production and

the hawhshness of their Congressmen's voting records168 or the relative dependence of

industrial suppliers on defense contracts.169 Because the causality and empirical complexity

of these relationshps inevitably precluded a definitive interpretation of the facts, pluralists

concluded one of two things. Either they simply interpreted the ambiguous evidence as

supporting the pluralist paradigm or they interpreted ambiguity as proof of the pluralist

paradigm because it disproved of the elitist and Marxist paralgms that needed to provide

concrete evidence for the unity a hypothesized elite or ruling class. In both cases, the

ambiguity, resulting from the narrow empirical and temporal scopes of their empirical

method, allowed pluralists to reconcile their paralgm with the existence of a mditary-

industrial complex despite its failure to predict such a development.

'aCobb, Stephen. "The Uluted States Senate and the Impact of Defense Spending Contracts."
Icurth, James R. "Aerospace Production Lines and Ainencan Defense Spendiilg."
 Like pluralists, Marxists also had little trouble synthesizing the emergence and

existence of a dtary-industrial complex within their paradigm. In their view the Complex

was thoroughly controlled by economic elites, who dominated both the government and

mditary. Political dominance by economic elites was part of the definition of bourgeois

capitalism, whereas the economic dominance of the d t a r y had resulted from the structural

ties formed during the Second World War, America's emergence as a global superpower, and

the enormous increase in security responsibhties that arose from the Cold War. Whether

the ~dtary-industrialcomplex was an inevitable product of capitalism or less inevitable

rulmg-class machations was debated by Marxists. However, all were in agreement that it

corrected the inherent contradictions of capitalist overproduction by stabhzing the domestic

market with vast d t a r y expenditures and fachtating the imperialist economic expansion

abroad that was needed to support the ever-growing and ever-consuming modern capitalist

economy.l7" Thus was the emergence and existence of a dtary-industrial complex

incorporated w i t h the Marxism paradigm.

In short, the rmlltary-industrial complex was such a complicated phenomenon that

academics could simply define "the dtary-industrial complex" however they chose and

approach its study from a variety of analytical levels. The result was that Marxists examined

the evidence and found a r u h g economic class; pluralists, countervahng power centers; and

elitists, a r u h g elite. Given its conceptual breadth and the vast amount of empirical

evidence, none of the competing paradigms could defLnitely disprove the others' claims. As

the debate continued, scholars began to recognize the effects of t h s intellectual bias, leadmg

Edward Levine to condemn both "power ehte" (and, implicitly, its Marxist permutation) and

'7" For examples of tliese interpretations see: Aptheker, Herbert. Power itz America; Baran, Paul et Sxveezy, Paul
M. Monopob Capltali~.m;Wdhams, William ,4. Roots 4 t h kloderrz Anzericdn Empire; Horowitz, David. Co~oratiotzs
arzd the Cold IVa"ar,Sweezy, Paul M . Power Elite or k l i ~ C'lassl;
g Lynd, Robert S. Power itz the UniteilStates,and Lens,
Sydney. The Militay-Irzdustrial Complex.
"pluralist" interpretations of the dtary-industrial complex because they &d "not tell how

to conduct research, but rather how to interpret whatever results we obtain."l71

As self-contained sets of assumptions, methods, and theories, the pluralist, Marxist,

and elitist paradrgms not only determined how any given scholar would examine and

interpret the empirical evidence, but they also determined the concepts that were assumed to

be relevant to the explanation of the dtary-industrial complex. The most fundamental

sundarity of the three ascendant paradrgms was their emphasis on structural determinism.

Throughout all of the rmlltary-industrial complex literature, three basic forms of structural

determinism - economic, d t a r y , and politicall72- were at the base of theoretical arguments

about the rmlitary-industrial complex. In addition all mihtary-industrial analysis was oriented

toward addressing the following issues: [I] its institutional and inhvidual members, [2]

defining its institutional and personnel lmkages, [3] the interests and motivations of its

members, [4] the nature and form of its power, [5] whether its structure was "monolithc" or

"pluralistic," and [6] how it affected foreign policy, the domestic economy, and American

democracy. Each paradrgm held that empirical research within the first three categories

would provide answers to the questions of the remaining categories. Thus, casual

explanations of the military-industrial complex, and all that it entailed, were defined in terms

of institutional structure, indrviduals, action, and power.

As we have already seen, the drsparities between paradigms came from the

assumptions about the nature of power and the causal relationships between entities, actions,

and power held by each school. These philosophcal distinctions ultimately differentiated

the ascendant sociological paradgms, and once adopted, a scholar's analysis and

'7lLevine, Edward. "Methodologcal Problems in Research on the Military-Industrial Complex." included in

Testing the The09 ofthe ~Miliiry-IltdustriaIComplex. p. 291.
t7"c~nomic determinism for Marxism; political determinism for pluralism; and economic, mihtary, and
political determinism for the elitist paradigm.
interpretation of the military-industrial complex was largely determined the assumptions,

methodology, and existent theories of h s or her chosen paradigm. This sort of ideological

determinism precluded any consensus, or even progress toward consensus, concerning the

central questions of the mtlitary-industrial complex. Many academics, frustrated by the

circularity of the debate, attempted to move beyond what they saw as the lunltations of the

ascendant paradigms. In their essay, "The Concept of a Militauy-Industrial Complex"

(1971), Jerome Slater and Terry Nardm voiced such an opinion, urging a rejection of the

whole "framework of assumptions within which discussion of American d t a r i s m and the

rmlitary-industrial complex has been largely carried While acknowledgmg the

usefulness of the existence of dtary-industrial research, they questioned whether

motivations, membership, and power were the key issues that needed to be addressed to

understand the rmlitary-industrial complex. To them, the fact that the ascendant paradigms

had offered little more than traditional explanations and ideologcal polemics was reason

enough to reject the "framework of assumptions" on w h c h those explanations were based.

In his work, The Ethics 4tbe Nec~opolis,Max L. Stackhouse also questioned the

"framework of assumptions," particularly the abfity of structural determinisms to explain

the dtary-industrial complex. Examining much of the military-industrial complex

literature, Staclihouse concluded that the general orientation of the works concentrated on

institutional structures, personnel relationships, economic dependence, and s d a r features.

For hLm,the "strictly political and economic definitions of the Complex are inadequate7'"4

because there could be no economic or political institutions in the absence of ideological

values. Most dtary-industrial complex theorists discussed ideology but treated it only as

Nardin 8c Slater. "The Concept of a blihtary-Industrial Complex." p. 49

'74 Stackhouse, Max. The Ethics ofthe Nempolir, p. 72.
 somedung to legitimate or be manipulated by institutions and their elites. T o Stackhouse,

such structural determinism was fundamentally reductionist, as there was confusion

as to whether the core values of the society are defined by and ideologically invoked by the
"interests" to protect the core institutions which give them control or whether the core institutions
are defined by and given shape by core values, or whether there is a more subtle relationship
between the two. . . '75

Institutions and inhviduals had goals and purposes, and these goals and purposes were

defined by values and "often determined the responses of men and institutions to specific

social pressures just as much as the pressures themselves."l76

Stackhouse agreed that political, d t a r y , and economic institutions and their elites

played central role in the functioning of the complex, but he argued that these levels of

analysis could only produce superficial interpretation without reference to the influence of

social ideology. Accorchngly, Staclouse defined the complex not as a particular

institutional structure, controlled by a r u h g class or elites, but rather as a social matrix of

institutions with "impersonal sets of formal and informal governing role, rules, and relations,

through whch real hfferentiation occurs."l77 In the midst of so much "differentiation,"

pluralist, Marxist, or elitist theories could always be supported and contested, but by stepping

farther back, one could truly understand the depth of the complex:

The Military-Industrial Complex can be defmed as a specific set of impersonal, interlocking

institutional structures, rooted in the history of urban industrial society and in the specific conflicts
in America's emergence as a world power. It is governed by generalized value patterns that
transcend ordinary political ideology; it is undergirded by a matrix of personal, contractual, and
fiscal linkages, and it is centered in the relationships of the Department of Defense to major
corporation^.^^^

Stackhouse went on to argue that these "generalized value patterns" were the most

important features of the complex because a social phenomenon as vast and complex as the

dtary-industrial complex took on a set of values that was subsequently organized in an

'75 Stackhouse, Mas. The Ethics qfthe Necropolir. p. 39

'7"bid. p. 73-4.
'77 Ibid. p. 70.
'7Vbid. p. 71.
enduring system. WMe many asserted that these values were simply the product of social

forces, Stackhouse responded that an equally convincing argument could be made that social

forces were themselves shaped by previously held values.'7g At least in the case of the

mihtary-industrial complex this was the case because "People come and go; policies are made

and remade; organizational charts are revised weekly.. .yet a whole set of assumptions,

purposes, and goals remains relatively stable."ls0

The theories and assumptions behind the conclusions of The Ethics of the Necropolis
represented an effort to establish a new sociological paradigm, integrating ideology and

culture within the traditional canon of causal determinants. Stackhouse argued that the

structuralist devaluation of ideological and cultural factors had no empirical basis but was

rather a paradigmatic bias, traceable to Marx, that relegated these forces to mere reflections

of social structure. What such parahgms failed to realize was that ideology and culture

produced certain values that exercised a powerful influence on all facets of human life once

internalized by inhviduals and institutions. Had Staclshouse been able to study the

intellectual history of the mihtary-industrial complex, he could have strengthened h s

criticism of structuralist paradigms by pointing to the fact that their disciples' explanations of

the dtary-industrial complex were, in many ways, predetermined by paradigmatic

assumptions. There is no small irony in the fact that ideologically determined conclusions

would neglect to address the power of ideology.

Yet, despite the obvious logic of h s argument, Staclshouse was one of a small

minority, shouting into the wind. The orientation of research efforts continued along

trahtion h e s , and structural determinism remained the central logic of explanatory theories.

By the mid-1970s, with consensus st111 lacking, academics moved on to other projects, whiIe

"9 Stackhouse, &fax. The Ethics o f t h e Nen-@oh.p. 74

1x0 Ibid. p. 74.
the emotional appeal of "the mtlitary-industrial complex" as a political slogan waned with

overuse and the end of the Vietnam War. Today, the concept is only of interest to academic

specialists, and in a political age of accepted militarism, it has lost all of its once impressive

emotional force.
 Chapter Four: Reflections on Confusion

There are several possible explanations for why the mhtaqr-industrial research of the

1960s and 1970s failed to produce consensus, but it is the opinion of the writer that the

most accurate answers lie in the nature of social science itself, in its relationshp to

empiricism, and in the relationship between sociological paradgms and truth. The following

pages w d attempt to explore these fundamental problems and present a few basic solutions.

However, to begin let us return to the theme of this thesis: the sociological paradgm.

In 1956 as The Power Elite was going to print, there were two sociological paradgms

that dominated the field of power structure analysis: Marxism and pluralism. After its

publication, there were three.

The Power Elite contained scathing refutations of the pluralist paradigm, whde
implicitly rejecting Marxism, especially its " r h g class." The lluweerE
lite attempted to go
beyond these paradigms, appropriating significant elements of pluralism and Marxism, whde

rejecting their formalized wholes and philosophical rigidty. That the proletariat had not

risen up in revolution and that liberal pluralism was simply not an accurate description of

contemporary American society pointed to the need for a new theory.

For Mllls of one the main reasons that these sociological parahgms had remained

dominant for so long was their connection to the political plvlosophes of socialism and

liberalism. Widespread belief in these philosophies had lent credence to their defunct social

theories. In The M~~t'ist~s,

published posthumously, Mills connected these theories to their

philosophcal foundations, arguing that both philosophes were dated and bore the

trademarks of a hstorical period that was coming to an end; that the reality on whch they

were based was either passed or had not come to pass; that the social institutions designed to

insure the triumph of their ideals had failed in their charge; and that their ideological force
had faded into rhetoric. Whde Mds offered no alternative political phdosophy in The

Marxists, the body of his works articulated a theoretical explanation of American society.

Understanding the reality of the present included not only power, class, and leadershp

structures but also the philosophical beliefs that dominated ideology. This understanding

was the first step in the search for a new political phdosophy that more accurately reflected

the actual and possible rather than the mythic.

T o ground h s dscussion of these phdosophes in their real-world manifestations,

hlds offered the following statements:

Political philosopl~iesare intellectual and moral creations; they contain high ideals, easy slogans,
dubious facts, crude propaganda, sophisticated theories. Their adherents select some facts and
ignore others, urge the acceptance of ideals, the inevitability of events, argue with this theory and
debunk that one.I8l

To make sense of such an intellectual jumble, Mds suggested that they be broken down into

four constituent elements. First, a political phdosophy was an ideology "in terms of whch

certain institutions and practices are justified and others attacked; it provides the phrases in

which demands are raised, criticisms made, exhortations delivered, proclamations formulated

and, at times, policies deterrnined."l" Second, it was an ethic and a statement of ideals, used

to judge indviduals, events, and movements, in adhtion to supplying goals and guidehes

for aspirations and policies. Thud, a political phdosophy designated "agencie.r of actions,

means of reform, revolution, or consenrations. It contains strategies and programs that

embody both ends and means."l" Finally, it articulated theories of

man, society, and history, or at least assumptions about how a society is made up and how it
works; about what is held to be its most important elements and how these elements are typically
related [. . .] It suggests the methods of study appropriate to its theories. From these theories and
with these methods, expectations are derived.184

Auls,
IX1 C.Wright. The Marxtsts. p. 12
'82 Ibid.
'83 Ibid.
'84 Ibid. p. 13.
 The relevance of these dstinctions for our dscussion is that the origins of all

sociological paradigms are pMosophica1. As mentioned in the preceding chapter, Marxism,

pluralism, and elitism all shared the assumptions that structural forces were the ultimate

determinants of historical development and that their understandmg required an

exanination of the causal relationsbps between institutions, power, individuals, and action.

That was the extent of their sidarities, for the unique plulosophical chsposition of each

paradigm led to vastly disparate social theories and disagreements.

From the point of view of an academic interested in the truth of society, or some

facet thereof, the problem with social theories h l i e d to political phdosophes is that in the

context of a comprehensive statement of ideals, ideologies, and designated agencies, such

theories are especially enduring for a number of psychological reasons. As an ethic, they

provide a set of ideals that their believers wish to see flourish and a standard of judgment for

contemporary political realities. After a political education (or indoctrination depending on

one's perspective) and the continued reinforcement of these values through media exposure

and political participation, these philosophies become a defLning component of an

individual's psyche, engendering intense emotional attachment to their assumptions. In

addtion, when political phrlosophies actually provide the legitimation for a national

government, they become "the spirit of the nation" and are imbued with the awesome force

of nationalism. Given all of these factors that provide immense psychological support for a

particular belief or systems of beliefs, an academic argument to the contrary, no matter how

well supported by evidence, is unhkely to sway deeply-entrenched personal opinion.

The potential strength of these philosophcal biases is a major irnpedunent to

objective sociological analysis, and the intellectual hstory of the mtlitary industrial complex

is a case study of t h s fact. Such bias often frustrates sociological consensus and represents a
serious obstacle to the progressive development of sociological understandmg. However,

the truth of social paradigms and their phdosophcal assumptions are not solely a matter of

subjective judgment; this is only the case in the short run. History provides the sociologist

with objective facts, and while the pace of sociological progress is no greater than the

passage of time and necessarily h t e d by the strength of philosophical bias, there is st111

progress. It is from history that the laws of social evolution must be derived. Historical

transitions, hke the one described in The I'ower Elite, must be the focus of study, and the

generalized relationships between social institutions and culture must be established.

Surveying the intellectual history of the dtary-industrial complex from our

privileged perspective, a few thngs can be known today that were contested then. Pluralism

is simply wrong; Marxism errs in the extremity of its economic determinism and rigidty of

its social model; and the elitist paradgm remains a useful description of American society

despite some of its weaknesses. There is some sort of a dtary-industrial complex in

America. The d t a r y metaphysics remains the language of foreign policy and the rhetoric

of political canddates, playing a deciding role in the last presidential election. The Cold War

has become a War of Terror; the IGemIin has evolved into Osama Bin Laden, Sadaam

Hussein, IOrn Jong 11, and the Iraqi insurgents. The federal government is the nexus of

America's interlockmg hectorate. The American economy is a permanent mditary

economy. Despite unquestioned global hegemony, an absence of national competitors, the

collapse of the Soviet Union, and the end of the Cold War, defense spending exceededfour

hundred billion do//ars for each of the last four years. Accorhng to the estimates of the

Department of Defense, the American d t a r y is twenty years more advanced than its

closest competitor, yet astronomical spendng continues. Weapon and vehicle prototypes

continue to enjoy enormous fundmg even though the models that they are designed to
 replace are unquestionably superior to those of any conceivable enemy. The government

subsidzes the failures and instability of capitalism, having supported the securities market

after the Saving and Loan bailouts of the 1980s, the Mexican, Brazhan, and Argentinean

governments during their debt crises from 1982-86, and weathering the crash of the 1990s

bull market and the massive frauds of Enron and WorldCom with enormous tax cuts and

the lowest interest rates in h ~ t o r y . "In

~ absolute terms, wealth stratification is more

pronounced in contemporary American than at any other time in hstory and greater than

any other country in the ~ o r l d . "A~S for the interests of the corporate rich in the

preservation of the corporate-capitalist system, they have undoubtedly triumphed, for

corporations arc now protected by a growing bill of rights, enjoying significant Fourteenth,

First, and Fifth Amendment protections and the almost universal support of the Supreme

Court.'87 Globahzation has only accelerated their dominance, added by NAFTA, the WTO,

and other international agreements. The American economy is greater than the next seven

largest national econoinies in the world combined; California's alone is one of the ten largest

in the world. In fact, comparing corporate revenues to government taxes, over half of the

world's hundred largest economies are corporations, the majority American.

Politically, d t a r y endeavors remain political expedient, as the last five years of

governance and George Bush's victory in the 2004 election have shown. T h s md~tarism

against "the terrorists" has provided the legitimation for an unprecedented expansion of

executive power, as well as a number of questionable legal practices, principally Guantanamo

Bay. As for Mds' "crackpot realism" and the power elite's "higher immorality," the

American government continues to support authoritarian, repressive regimes abroad for

I" Phllhps, Kevin Wealth and Demo~ruty p 105

186 Phillips, Kevin Weulth and Demacruty "Serious hloney" and "hLdlenma1 Plutographlcs " p 88-138
'" Nace, Ted Gung ojAmencu p 16-7
political especlence. In 2003, as our principal ally in the War on Terror, Pahstan received

more American foreign aid than any other country in the world. The fact is somehow

overlooked that the presence of terrorists within Pakistan is probably related to the nature of

its military dictatorship. Adltionally, in the midst of our War on Terror, Pahstan's leading

scientist and an official national hero was discovered to have been responsible for the sale of

nuclear weapon system parts and construction designs to Libya, Iran, and North Korea for

which he was promptly pardoned. Despite the fact that nuclear proliferation is certainly a

greater threat to American national security than terrorists hiQng in the mountains of

Pakistan and Afghanistan, these events effected no change in our generous patronage of the

Pahstani government.

As far as American society's transition to a "mass society," examining the means of

coinmunication as Mdls suggested, we find that as of 2000, szx mecba conglomerates

dominated the mass mecla of America. A section-by-section study revealed: in film

production, six films received over 90 percent of revenues; in book publishng, seven firms

dominated; in cable television, three firms owned all or part of 56 percent of the channels; in

music, five corporate groups have taken 87 percent of the market; in radio Clear Channel

Cornmunicatlons owned more than 1200 local radio stations in 2002.1H"~hereis little doubt

that we are now further from a democratlc public than in 1950s.

In Mdls' descriptions of the Eisenhower administration, one could easily replace the

names with the members of the Bush administration; they are certainly all members of the

power elite. All have ma$r corporate holdngs in oil and defense industries, and many mere

intimately involved with Enron before its scandalous c ~ l l a p s e . 'Enron

~ ~ was a principal

IXWace,Ted. Gangs of America. p. 2'16.

1 8 W ~ c Ted.
e, Ca~<<s by I<cvin Phillips
qfd4meri',u.Also see flmerizan Dj~l~uJlty
 corporate donor to George Bush's 2000 presidential campaign.'" Dick Cheney was the

CEO of Halhburton before lus ascendance to the vice presidency; Condolezza Rice was a

board member of ExxonMobile; Donald Rumsfeld was the CEO of G.D. Searle &

Company, a leadmg pharmaceutical company during the 1980s and early 1990s before h s

installation as the Secretary of ~efense.'" One investigator of the relationslup between the

Bush f a i d y and defense industries described it as "a seamless web." In short, there is equal,

if not sipficantly more, evidence for a dtary-industrial complex and a power-elite

leaderslp structure during the current Bush Administration than any other period of

American history.

C. Wright M a s was correct in his interpretation of 1950s American society because

he rejected formalized theoretical models, appropriated assumptions and methodologies that

lstorical developments had supported, and approached the analysis of American society

from a fundamentally hstorical perspective. His insistence on studying society within a

broad temporal framework with attention to the historical specificity of social structures and

the deterministic force of institutional structures was inherited from Marx. True to his

approach, Mills made no claims concerning the universality of the power elite, stating the

opposite: "For every epoch and for every social structure, we must work out an answer to

the question of the power elite."192

Another reason for the continued relevance of the elitist paradigm is that it emerged

in response to the last major structural transition w i t h American society. W e the Civil

bghts, feminist, and other counter-culture movements did rock the boat during the 1960s

and 1970s, the political action they inspired never threatened the power structure of

'"0 Phillips, Kevin. Americarz Dynasty.

'"I AIalm, James. The &.re afthe Vudatzs. p. 165
'" hhlls, C . Wright. The Power Ehe. p. 23.
 America. Since its publication, the trends described in The Power Elite have only accelerated.

On the other hand, Marxism was a product of mid-nineteenth century Victorian England.

Democratic pluralism was the utopian ideal of eighteenth century intellectuals, and whatever

actuality it may have described dtsappeared from American society after the Civil War.

Given the superiority of the elitist paralgm to its sociological competitors, why I d

its emergence not result in consensus among power structure theorists? Throughout the

intellectual l s t o r y of the rmlltary-industrial complex, djsagreement remained the status quo

despite the presence of a clearly superior paradjgm. During the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s,

such longstandjng lsagreement was inconceivable w i t h the physical sciences, a fact w l c h

merits further consideration.

Discussing the development of scientific paradjgms, Thomas I<uhn described two

alternating stages: a pre-paralgm period and one of paradigmatic ascendance. Their main

distinguishing feature involved the degree to which a scientific community was concerned

with the basic assumptions of scientific knowledge, which Icuhn described as "principles" or

"rules." During a period of ascendance, scientific communities were unconcerned with their

basic assumptions, becoming concerned only "whenever paradigms or models are felt to be

insecure."l93 During a pre-paradtgm period the reverse was true, as research was "regularly

marked by frequent and deep debates over legitimate methods, problems, and standards of

solutions, though these serve rather to define schools rather than to produce agreement."lg4

Applying these djstinctions to the field of power structure analysis during the 1950s,

l960s, and 1970s, one must define it as a "pre-paradgm" period. Debates over "methods,

problems, and standards of solutions" were indeed deep, defining schools rather than

producing agreement. However, if we h k briefly about the larger intellectual history of

ICuhn, Thomas. The Stm~fureof,henf.@ &vo/utions. p.47.

'"3
LwIbid. p. 47-8.
Sociology, it seems clear that there has never been a period of paradgmatic ascendance. No

universally accepted frameworl.; of assumptions, theories, and methods has ever defined the

field of Sociology. Instead, it has been defined by competing "paradig~ns"which shared

certain continuities but also vast dfference. Insofar as I<uhn7stheory of scientific

development is a useful description of social sciences, it is only the case within a much

narrower intellectual context. The notion of a Social Science Paradgm is simply ridculous,

given the failure of any specific social science - e x c l u h g perhaps Economics - to produce a

dsciplinary Paradgm. The great paradox of the intellectual hstory of the rnilitary-industrial

complex was the fact that increased empirical research actually led to less consensus, and

toward the mid-seventies many intellectuals, including Staclilhouse, Slater, and Nardin,

rejected of all of the principal paradigmatic explanations of the rmlitary-industrial complex.

To understand such a counterintuitive trend, it is useful to consider the

fundamentally dfferent ways in which sociological and scientific theories are legitimated.

The process of legitimation involves (or would involve if it ever happened in Sociology) a

collecti e judgment of truth by the community of scholars defining an academic I s c i p h e .

However, it is t h s concept of "truth" whch is the root of the difference between the

physical and social sciences, for the social sciences possess neither standards of truth nor

methods of legitimation equivalent to those of the physical sciences.

The meaning of the word 'truth' seems unambiguous. It is a judgment, asserting that

a phenomenon is a reflection of reality. In trying to determine the 'truth' of a sociological

argument, the element of judgment leads to substantial complications. In the case of

sociological theory, such judgments are inherently subjective. T o say a particular theory is

'true' is frequently a proclamation of a personal belief. In the case of the dtary-industrial

complex, the elitist paradgm was 'true' for an elitist, partially 'true' to a Marxist, and false to
a pluralist. In other realms of interpretation, the 'truth' of situations is frequently

unambiguous. When a man is dying from a bullet wound, one would conclude that he was

shot. That the man was shot is true, but more importantly, it is also a fact. Whde often used

interchangeably, there is an important difference between 'truth' and 'fact' in that facts are

necessarily true whereas 'truth' is not necessarily fact. There is nothing subjective about a

fact. It simply is. Yet knowing that a fact is is not of particular use to a social scientist, for

such facts are plain for everyone to see. Social science becomes a meaningful concept when

groups of connected or hypothetically connected facts, involving humans, are considered as

units. In this case, the task of the social scientist is to explain the causal relations of facts,

wbch is done through complicated explanations, involving numerous facts, coinmonly

referred to as theories. The fundamental obstacle, preventing the emergence of a

Sociological Paradigm, is the absence of agreement over social causakg.

Lackmg causal consensus - the most fundamental component of scientific judgment

- social theories can never be rationalized into a Paradigm. Marxists assert that economic

forces are causally determinant; pluralists, political factors; Stackhouse, culture and ideology;

and nothmg is resolved. All offer convincing arguments for their positions, supported by

substantial empirical 'evidence,' but agreement remains lusted by subjective causal beliefs.

When there is no agreement over the causal relationsbps between facts, increasing the

amount of facts can often serve to cloud rather than dluminate the truth. 'The intellectual

history of the dtary-industrial complex is a case in point. In certain areas of study,

scientific empiricism is simply incapable of reveahg truth, and in such cases, the social

scientist must recognize this fact and avoid invokmg it as a standard of truth.

The only force capable of revealing the truth of social causality is the passage of time

and the record of social causality left in its wake - history. History is the only phenomenon
capable of determining the truth of phdosophical causal beliefs and must be the basis of any

sociological theory interested in describing truth. As social scientists, we must guard against

dogmatic faith in phdosophical belief. Such faiths are, of course, necessary and unavoidable,

but one must always remain open to the possibhty that one's own assumptions are wrong.

That t h s is more often the exception than the rule is evident in the history of the d t a r y -

industrial complex.
 Bibliography

Appleby, J., Lynn Hunt, et al. Telling the Tmth About History. New York: Norton, 1994.

Aptheker, H. The World ofC. Wright Mills. New York: Marzani and Munsell, 1960.

Ballard, H. and Wllliam Domhoff. C. WmjhtMiIIs and The Power Elite. Boston: Beacon
Press, 1968.

Baran, P. and Paul Sweezy. Monopob Capital. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1963.

Barnet, hchard J. The Economji ofDeath. New York: Atheneum, 1969.

Bauer, Raymond. "Social Psychology and the Study of Foreign Policy." Americdn
Pychologist, Vol. 18, October 1966, p. 937.

Bauer, R., 1,ewis Anthony Dexter, et al. American Business and Trade Poliq.
New York, Atherton Press, 1963.

Beetham, David. The Legitimation ofPowe/er.Highlands: Humanities Press, 1991.

Bell, Daniel. "The Power Elite Reconsidered." The American Journal ofSociology.
November 1958 p. 238-50, reprinted in The End ofIdeology. New York: The Free
Press, 1960.

Berle, A. A. "Are the B h d Leadmg the B h d ? " The New York Times Book Review. April
22, 1956.

Berle, A. A. Gardner Means. The Modem Corporation and Privute Properg. New York:
Commerce Clearing House, 1932.

Biderman, Albert D. "Retired Mhtary Withn and Without the Mhtary-Industrial

Complex." Presented at the Arms Control and F o r e i p Policy Center, University
of Chcago, December 3-4,1971.

Burnham, James. The Managerial Re~~olution.New York: John Day Company, 1941

Coffin, Tristram. The Armed Socieij. Baltimore: Penguin, 1964.

Cobb, Stephen. "The United States Senate and the Impact of Defense Spending
Contracts." Included in Testing the Theory $the Militaly-Indz/strial
Complex. Lexington: Lexington, 1972, p. 197-224.

C o o h g , Benjamin ed. War, Business, andflmeticun Sociep. Port Washington: Icenniliat,

1977.

Cook, Fred. The Wafcre State. New Yorli: M a c d a n , 1962.

Cunliffe, Marcus. "American Trends." Encounter, July, 1 956.

Dahl, Robert A. "A Critique of the IiuIing Elite Model." The Amem'can Politi~-alSaknce
Review, 52, No. 2, June, 1958, p. 463-9.

Domhoff, G. Wdliam. Who Rzlles America? Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1967.

Domhoff, G. Wdliam."The Power Elite and Its Critics." Included in C. Wmgbt Mills and
Tbe Power Elite. Boston: Beacon Press, 1968, p. 251-278.

Eisenhower, Dwight. "Farewell Address." Presented to the American Public on January

16, 1961.

Eldridge, -john. C. Wnght Mills. New York: Tavistock Publications, 1983.

Friedberg, Aaron L. In the Shadow ofthe Garrison State. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2000.

Galbraith, J. I<. American Capitalism: The Concept ofCountemtaihng Power. W h t e

Plans: M.E. Sharpe, 1952.

Galbraith, J.K. How to Control the Military. New York: Signet, 1969.

Gandy, D. Ross. M u m Qj. I3istory. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979.

I-Ia-yden,T. and Marc Pksuk. "Is there a Mktary-Industrial Complex W h c h Prevents

Peaces?" In The Tn$le Revolution: S o d Problems in Depth. eds. Robert
Perrucci and Marc Pksuk.

ICeller, Suzanne. Bgond the Rzlliny Class. New York: Random I-Iouse, 1963.

I<ornhauser, W. "'Power Elite' or 'Veto Groups'." Included in Cultztre and Social

Chamcter. New Yorl.;: The Free Press, 1961, p. 252-267.

Icuhn, Thomas. The Stmcture g'S~.ientificRevolutions. Chcago: University of Chcago

Press, 1962.

I<urth, James R. "Aerospace Producuon Lines axid American Defense Spendmg."

Included m Testing the Tl~eotyo j the Mzlztuy-I~zd.~.,t?^~u/
Cb/@/ex.Lexmgton:
Lexington, 1972. p. 135-156.

Lens, Sidney. The Mzlita1y-Itlc1'/r'.rtndl(;b/@lex. Phlladelpha: United Church Press, 1970.

1,ex-me, E."hfethodologtcal Problems in Research on the Mhtary-Industrial Complex."

Included m G ~ f ~fhen gTheoy Jyfhe h1ilzt~~ry-Inciz/~fria/
Complex. Lesmgton:
li,exington, 1972. p. 29 1-308.

Lieberson, Stanley. "An Empirical Study of Mihtary-Industrial Linkages." Presented at

 the Arms Center for Policy Study at University of Chicago, at Arins Control
December 3-4, 1971.

Lynd, Robert S. "Power in the United States." The Nation, May 12, 1956. Reprinted in
Hoyt Ballard and William Doinhoff s C. Wrght Mills and The Power Elite.
Boston: Beacon Press, 1968, p. 103-115.

Madison, James. Federalist Number 10.

Mann, James. Rzse of the Vulcans. New York: Viking, 2004.

Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manzjkrto. New York: Monthly
Review Press, 1998.

Marx, I<arl. The Geman Ideology, Vol. I . "The Materialist Concept of History." cited in
The Portable KarlMarx. ed. Eugene I<amenka. New York: Penguin Books, 1983.

Melman, Seymour. Pentagon Capitalism: The PoliticalEconony ofWar. New York:

McGraw-Hill, 1970.

Melman, Seymour. "Alternative Strategies and Budgets for Military Security." Presented
at the Arms Control and Foreign Policy Center, University of Chicago, December 3-
4, 1971.

Miliband, Ralph. "C. Wright Mills." Month4 Review, Vol. 14, September 1962, p. 260-6.

Mdler, William L. "Queen Ants and Cadillacs." The Reporter, May 31, 1956.

Mills, C. Wright. The Power Elite. New York: Oxford UP, 1956.

Mills, C. Wright. The Mamirts. New York: Delta Books, 1962.

Mills, C. Wright. "Commentary of Criticism." Dissent, Winter, 1957

Mintz, Beth and Michael Schwartz. The Power Stmctz~reOJ'AzzericanBusiness.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.

Moskos, Charles. "The Military-Industrial Complex: Theoretical Antecedents and

Conceptual Contradictions." Included in The Military-Indu.rtrial Complex: A
Reassessnzent. Beverly Hills: Sage, 1972.

Nace, Ted. Gangs ofAmerica. San Francisco: Berrett-I<oehler Publishers, 2003.

Nardn, T. and Jerome Slater. "The Concept of the Militaq-Industrial Complex."

Included in Testing the Theoy of the Military-IndztstmalComplex. Lexington: Lexington,
1972. p. 27-60.

Parsons, 'l'alcott. "The Distribution of Power in America." World l'oliti~~,October, 1957

 reprinted in Stmcture and Process in Modem Sohties. New York: The Free
Press, 1960, p. 199-225.

Phdlips, Kevin. Wealth and Democmcy. New Yorli: Broadway Books, 2002.

Proxmire, Wdham. Repod from the Wasteland: America 's Milita ry-IndustrialComplex.
New York: Praeger Press, 1970.

Rapoport, Anatol. Strategy and Conscience. New York: Harper & Row Press, 1964.

heff, Phdip. "Socialism and Sociology." Partisan Review, Summer, 1956. Reprinted in
Hoyt Ballard and Wdham Domhoff s C. Wright Mills and The Power Elite.
Boston: Beacon Press, 1968, p. 167-72.

Rosen, Steven ed. Testing the Theory ofthe Military-Industrial Complex. Lexington:
Lexington Books, 1972.

Rovere, Richard. "The Interlocking Overlappers." The Progressive,June, 1956.

Reprinted in The American Establishment. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and
World, 1962.

Sarliesian, Sam ed. The kliltary-IndustriaI Complex: A Reassess;lnerzt. Beverly Hds:

Sage Publications, 1972.

Schneider, Eugene V. "The Sociology of C. Wright Mds." Month4 Review, Vol. 14,
February 1963, p. 553-62.

Stackhouse, Max L. The Ethics afthe Necropolis. Boston: Beacon Press, 1971.

Sweezy, Paul M. "Power Elite or Ruling Class?" Month4 Review, Vol. 8, September
1956, p. 138-50.

Swornley, J.M. The M l i t d y Establishment. Boston: Beacon Press, 1964.

Wolf, Charles Jr. "Military-Industrial Simplicities, Complexities and Realities."

Presented at the Arms Control and Foreign Policy Center, University of Chcago,
December 3-4, 1971.

Wrong, Dennis E-I."Power in America." Comntentay, September, 1956. Included in Hoyt

Ballard and Wdham Dornhoff s C. Wmgbt Mills and The l3ower Elite. Boston:
Beacon Press, 1968, p. 88-94.