ON INJUSTICE AND PERSONAL TROUBLE
Every man who is faced with the possibility of a calamity inevitably plants himself upon the bedrock of his individual character. For one man this may be an idea; for another, his faith; for a third it may be love of family. Some there are who have no such bedrock, who find themselves standing on quicksand. The whole outer life, with all its terrors, may avalanche upon them, burying them inexorably.Anna Seghers, The Seventh Cross
[42] Mills provided this epigram and the following citation for it: "(Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1942), 72."
I. Fate as Injustice
Tovarich, suppose you encounter something that seems to you like fate as injustice. Say there is a man, better than you in every way, who is impoverished while you are rich and mainly because he happened to be born in a different country than you were. That's fate as injustice. What to do? Well, there are four possibilities:
You can go blasé and call your feeling romantic, and forget about it. This just doesn't seem possible for me.
You can go saintly. Give up all your worldly possessions and aims; sacrifice yourself for others, anybody, in order to realize yourself. This does seem rather ineffective, and moreover probably selfish. Anyway my guilt is not the sort to be relieved that way. Tolstoyism is out for me.
You can rationalize unjust fate and see it as after all not unjust fate, but in some higher and perhaps unknown sense, justice itself. Then you can bow down to it. I've never gotten satisfaction or relief from such sacrifice of the intellect. What to do, then?
You can go radical politically and personally; you can use your mind and your sensibilities to try to make fate less unjust. Of course, this is the choice I have made. Isn't it the moral root of socialism? Isn't this a good definition of a "radical": one who refuses to accept
― 254 ―injustice as fate and whose refusal takes active political and cultural forms? For the sociological meaning of fate has to do with the types of biography that arise from the very structure of a society. And politics and culture of a radical kind have to do with modifications of a society and so with the control of fate, as history and as biography.Those to whom fate has been kind—as it has been to me, generally speaking—have the chance to treat their own characters radically, just as politically they would treat the structure of a society radically. Well, I am not just writing or whistling in the dark. I believe this, and I've gotten hold of some skills that make it quite possible to survive almost anything. These skills I can use and am using wherever I am, and for long periods I can use them just as well alone as with friends, no matter how pleasant being with friends might be. This brings me, Tovarich, to something about being in personal trouble.
II. Personal Trouble
Listen Tovarich, I know in these letters I've been cheating you; I've not told you all about my private life, my women and all of that. But I can't tell you about all that … after all, this is probably going to be—I hope it's going to be—a very public letter indeed. Anyway, it's just a tale of monstrous tragedies, Tovarich. (I'll tell you what, if you answer my public letters, maybe we'll write some private ones too. I'll release the stuff on women and children to you privately; or better still, when we meet—in Peking?—I'll tell you all about women and such. But we mustn't lie, Tovarich, no more than we can help.) What's important anyway is not the details of one's past—although one should become aware of them—but how one interprets them, what rules for the present and the future one draws from them. I can't resist telling you one such set of rules: what to do when you're in personal trouble.
When you're in trouble, it's as if you're sitting at a huge table with many little piles of notes on it, as if for the chapters of a book. Every day or so the major themes of the book mysteriously shift so that you've got to sort everything out in a different way. Too many decisions all at once, with too many elements you've got no control over; that's what being in trouble is. The decisions and the re-decisions, the tentativeness of anything you do, of all action, gradually wears you down. Questions no longer prod thought; thronging up on you, they clog reason itself.
The process wouldn't be so bad if you were getting somewhere—if it really was a book, for instance. For that's what writing a book is; no matter how complicated all the questions are, no matter how many times you have to decide again, still you come to have more and more control over more and more aspects of it. That's why to write is to get out of trouble, for the trick is to sort it all out in such a way as to be able to work on one part of it at a time, with the whole merely a vague and helpful outline.
To write is to get on top of it all. Writing, at least the thing about writing I'm talking about now, is another name for the creating and the maintaining of a more or less orderly mind of your own, and so a sense of your own identity. When you're writing, you've got a plan, and the changing of it is more or less in your own hands; but when you're in trouble, you are overwhelmed by events and issues you have no control over. To be in trouble is to be in the grip of fate but not to be able to get any melodramatic pleasure out if it. To be in trouble is not to be able to plan.
To cope with trouble, you've just got to keep on trying "to write"—trying all the time to find an outline of the whole that's stable enough, that's comprehensive enough to permit you to reason about one part of it at a time.
I've only been in personal trouble three or four times, but I'm an old pro at trouble. In trouble I feel like an old man—not a tough old man, but still a survivor. As they say in Austria: "Bend but don't break." Or as I say: "Set up a new file." Plan 9 has collapsed; set up Plan 10. I used to think old George Mead's slogan, "We don't know where we're going, but we're on our way," pretty weak stuff, but it's not. It's the theme song of being in trouble but not being dead.
That's how it has been with me, or how it seems, but how about you? Tovarich, I know it's hard to tell the truth about yourself and your ideas. Look how in these letters I disguise so much of what I think and feel; how elaborately and awkwardly I go about it. But I'm going to try to help you. Let us proceed as if Bertolt Brecht's little maxim were true, that truth is concrete.
In the fall of 1957, when Mills was still on leave from Columbia University, he wanted to dispel some false rumors circulating there concerning his professional plans. As the next letters show, there were also other, more philosophical issues at stake.
To Lewis and Rose Coser, from Innsbruck, Austria, dated October 29, 1957
Dear Lew and Rose:
Thanks for your letter and the information in it. I think you are mistaken about Columbia, but no matter. Anyway, you mustn't think I'm sitting around here in the mountains building little paranoid castles. The world's too big for that, and I am at work. "The Social Sciences: a Cultural Critique" is now in draft, with only a few gaps to check when I get back. Early in the spring I'll mimeograph it for criticism. Quite frankly, I've high hopes for it; it's the first thing I've ever written "about" the social sciences of any length; and since I keep it quite close to practice in the craft, it has, I think a certain freshness and lack of pretension. The Politics and Culture book is about half done,
[43] An unpublished manuscript.
although it won't yet focus just right. There are just too damned many themes written into it too closely, and I've not got the guts ruthlessly to cut it.The autumn Dissent came the other day. It's really excellent—broader and more assured in tone somehow. You and Irv [Irving Howe] ought to be quite proud of how it's grown, and I don't mean only circulation. I particularly like to see books handled critically but also without any smart-aleck bullshit. I think books is what you ought to strengthen, and you ought to include a lot of English stuff coming out. A hell of a lot of people will read a magazine just for the book section if it's really good. Like in the old New Republic, and the New Statesman today.
Don't you see Bendix—or is he away? You don't mention his name. I've always thought he was a pretty good man; don't you think so? Tell Leo [Lowenthal] I'm mad at him; he didn't answer my letter of last Aug. sent via Paul Massing … or didn't he get it?
[…]
Take care,
Wright
To Ralph Miliband and Norman Birnbaum, from Innsbruck, Austria (c/o American Express), dated November 22, 1957
[one:] Forgive my delay in writing and also the rude fact that I write you both at once; the carbon goes to toss up. My excuse is that for 10 days now I've been doing nothing but write long, two page, single spaced letters with carbons to various people about the Columbia situation. I've had to "save" two instructors, Litwak and Siegel, and ward off other predatory silliness […] mounted by Lazarsfeld.
By no means is this sociological brawl at Columbia finished; by no means should it be assumed, as Norman apparently does, that I will lose. On the contrary, this round I think I have won; at least I've strengthened my position considerably and more importantly have broadened to confrontation: administratively by getting it squarely before Dean Barzun and Dean Chamberlain (my college dean); and intellectually by making it turn on something worth fighting about—the cultural crisis of the social studies and the problem of a proper liberal arts education. Until now I have not really fought these people in American sociology; I've ignored them and done my own work; but they've been fooling around behind the scenes and now I declare war: I am going to expose their essential bankruptcy; perhaps with a little circuit of the Ivy League schools; certainly with my book on the social studies, mimeographed drafts of which I shall, if I may, get to you by March.
"I don't hate nobody," he said. "I'm just tired of the bullshit." He said it slowly so they'd all hear it good. Then he swung a couple of chairs into the bar, one following the other like one smash; knocking the bottom off a whiskey bottle, … [he] moved in close.
Two: Seriously, all that is easy—and can readily be taken, as I do, as a sort of relaxation from serious work. […] I've booked a flight and will fly to NYC on Dec. 27th. Who will be on it with me is not yet certain.
Three: For a long time now I've been designing The House. Probably it's my favorite occupation. Although I haven't got my drafting tools here, I picked it up again the other day, using squared paper. That's just as good, of course. I am working on a module basis: four foot square, with the total layout on the classic Leica size negative 2 by 3. The model I've got just right now is 16 by 24 and two story;
Why don't you all come and spend Christmas in Tyrol?
W. M.
Mills returned to New York and Columbia in late December.
To Ralph Miliband, from New York City, dated December 23, 1957
Dear Ralph:
[…]
Terrible hard schedule this spring: Feb. 27 Toronto; March … last week of Hillman lectures; three lectures in April, Chicago, U. of Ill., Colgate; and two in May. Plus book deadlines and regular teaching load. But what the hell, I accepted them, and what with the mail
[44] The cover story of The Nation had been Mills's "Program for Peace," which presented a fourteen-point proposal including the abandonment of the production of nuclear weapons, the recognition of China and all other "Communist-type states," and the development of worldwide educational and cultural-exchange programs. The Nation 185, no. 19 (7 December 1957): 419–24.
One woman bought 5,000 reprints for her own personal distribution. Crazy I guess. And a millionaire toy manufacturer wants me to design toys that will realize craftsmanship as laid out in White Collar. What a country. What an epoch.It's not a buzz saw, boy, it's a bowl. Put both hands in.
as ever,
M
ole mills
To Hans Gerth, from New York City, dated December 27, 1957
Dear Gerth,
Forgive me this short note, but I only want to let you know that I have finally arrived in New York City—alone—and that I am well established at […] W. 114th Street; the University kindly held this charming little apartment for me, right back of the University library.
Ruth is […] in Innsbruck. […] We shall probably be separated at her wish upon her return. […]
[45] Ruth obtained a divorce from Mills in May of 1959 after living apart from him for almost two years.
The future is extremely uncertain, but as of now I have so much work to do I can't think about it.
In late March I am to deliver the Sidney Hillman lectures, "On War and Peace."
[46] Mills presented the basic outline of his book The Causes of World War Three in his Sidney Hillman Award Lectures at Howard University, Washington, D.C., in March 1958.
Because of this if you happen to see my piece in the Nation of 7 December[47] "Program for Peace."
I'd be very grateful for your comments pointing out any arrogant foolishness that may well be in it. I wrote it before leaving and it may well be an expression of hysteria on myAs ever,
Mills
After Mills's return to the States in December 1957, he had lunch with Irving Howe, who had been a political friend for almost ten years. Howe remembers discussing the political situation in eastern Europe—listening to Mills's emphatic opinions about the changes he expected—and feeling a personal and political alienation from Mills.
[48] Irving Howe, A Margin of Hope: An Intellectual Autobiography (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982), 244–45.
Meanwhile, Mills was corresponding frequently with Ralph Miliband.
To Ralph Miliband, from New York City, dated New Year's Eve (December 31, 1957)
Dear Ralph:
new year's eve 10:30. Enclosed is a print of the Nation piece for which you ask.
[49] This must have been "Program for Peace."
In view of the Hillman lectures being on war and peace, I'd be grateful for as full a reaction as your time and patience allows. Perhaps this, straightened up a bit and filled out, might do as tail chapter of the book to be made out of the lectures … a little book of perhaps 5 chapters.[50] The finished book had four parts and twenty-five chapters: The Causes of World War Three (New York: Simon and Schuster and Ballantine Books, 1958, 1960). In 1985 M. E. Sharpe reprinted the 1960 edition.
I give only three lectures and shall of course not use this again. I think I told you of the Toronto speech 27 Feb: to the evangelical board of the United Churches of Canada. On Religion and War, or Moral Insensibility. I've been drafting it and it's going to be real cute. I turn the whole thing against them and speak to them as a Heathen, calling them You Christians and throwing all the old righteousness of the Hebrew prophets at them mixed up with my angle towards war and peace.[51] See "A Pagan Sermon to the Christian Clergy," The Nation 186, no. 10 (8 March 1958): 199–202.
This will also be a fill-out chapter in the little book. Got to get down to the Hillman lectures as such soon.Yes, of course I know Lukacs' Studies in European Realism. He is great on Balzac, who is indeed himself great. He can be read over and over again, at different stages in one's own life. A real classic that is. But I am not going to buy the big set we looked at. Just too much money and I've no time to read him well for the next year. Got to get educated on a lot of stuff I've not yet looked into.
A word of advice, if I may, about the fascism piece.
[52] Perhaps this article was Miliband's "The Politics of Contemporary Capitalism" in New Reasoner 5 (summer 1958): 39–52. Its first section is entitled "Fascism and Liberal Democracy."
Bill Miller who is, technically speaking, the most skilled writer I know, says, "Anything but anything can be put into two volumes or into one paragraph." It is always best to begin with an idea in 12 or so pages: numbered points by paragraph, a sort of propositional framing of the thing: lead sentence in each paragraph—a numbered proposition. Split the proposition into two parts. Part One: assertions, descriptions, narrative, the what-is-to-be-explained. Part Two: the explanation. Then if needed, Part Three: the meaning or implications for this and for that. I know that is a very unEnglish kind of writing, but no matter; it is the way to get ideas down in an open form, permitting their shaping in any number of ways. So don't take the fascism notion too big at first; get it down clean. Taking it too big is too easy a way not to do it at all. Nowadays men with ideas are too badly needed to have to work them all out in detail. Let others do that. State the damned ideas.[…]
As ever,
M
To Ralph Miliband, from New York City, dated January 26, 1958
Dear Ralph:
Of course you do not write flippantly. I told you how it was: you decide to live or you decide to die, and I've decided to live. The only questions are: Can you? And how do you want to?
[…]
I've gotten a small grant from Columbia and have hired a typist and another woman who is copyediting The Social Sciences for mimeographing and forcing me to rewrite. She is Mrs. Jarrico, the wife of a blacklisted Hollywood scriptwriter. She's a swell old gal and happens to be a fan of mine, in fact her whole circle is. I expect to get some really professional advice on style and such matters. (In fact, I am blocking out rather loosely now a play-novel-movie script called "Unmailed Letters to a Fey Tiger" which isn't so damn bad.)
I am getting work done—no new writing yet and no reading but periodicals.
[…] Slowly I get on top of it all. In some crazy, unknown way that can be neither explained nor denied, I am going to win out. Questions for you: 1. Where is Polish stuff? 2. Please let me know at once when the Br J of S [ British Journal of Sociology] is actually going to be out with my piece in it. (It would be very much O.K. with me if they killed it!)… The point is I want to use it in a few speeches around and can't do so after it's published. Inquire discreetly and as not from me please. The speeches are scheduled for a month or so away and I'll have to find something else if they print before that.
I share your indignation about the quiet and the noisy Americans you describe, but I don't think it worthwhile to waste energy about it in small ways: analyze the world and locate them as a piece of shit within it. I am glad and skeptical about your apartment. The limeys are thru boy. No style of daily life left in them; they're all knotted up in the soft coils of useless tradition. In the end you'll have to come to America or go to Russia (joke).
Write soon.
yours,
M.
The following letter mentions two essays on peace published in The Nation: Mills's "Program for Peace"
[53] See letters written in December 1957.
and his fiery piece entitled "A Pagan Sermon to the Christian Clergy." In his pagan sermon Mills railed against moral insensibility to human destruction and the preparation for it, saying, "The brotherhood of man is now less[54] The Nation 186, no. 10 (8 March 1958): 199–202.
The article provoked "a flood" of letters—most of which were positive, judging by the sampling printed in the magazine—and so many requests for copies that The Nation found it necessary to order reprints.[55] The Nation 186, no. 12 (22 March 1958): 247.
To Mr. Lee Grove, editor, Trade Department, Oxford University Press, from New York City, dated March 16, 1958
Dear Lee:
As you know, I've been fooling with three lectures on war which I must deliver at Howard University the last week in March. I have also done two essays for The Nation, 7 December '57 and 8 March '58, on the subject. Ian Ballantine, who is a longtime friend of mine, read these essays and has suggested that a softcover book—I'd call it a pamphlet—be put together from it all. It would be about 40,000 words in total; he could get galleys to reviewers ten days after manuscript was received (on or about April 20th, perhaps a bit later, depending on my personal situation); and publish it sixty days after manuscript. He would run a 100,000 [copy] first printing.
Oxford, as far as I know, is not set up to do this quickie sort of thing, which is rather like the old "Penguin specials," with which Ian
The money involved does not amount to anything. However, it's not money but readers that interest me on this topic. The thing would be a blast, a sermon, a warning, a demand, a squeal. I'd like to go ahead with it, so I would like an exception to be made in Oxford's option on my books in this one case.
I want you to know that this has nothing to do with my overall and long-term relations with Oxford. Long ago Ian and I had that settled. He knows he cannot pry me from Oxford, and as my friend he does not want to do so. He knows and I know that Oxford and I are good for each other. This item, however, obviously isn't for Oxford. The fun of it is to get it out fast, to distribute the hell out of it all at once, and so maybe raise a little impolite hell.
Yours for peace and freedom,
Wright
C. Wright Mills
Oxford University Press agreed to Mills's request, and Ballantine Books published The Causes of World War Three in mass-market paperback in 1958;
[56] Simon and Schuster published it in hardcover and trade softcover the same year.
it was a commercial success. The "pamphlet," as Mills called it, was featured in a display arranged by SANE, a nuclear disarmament advocacy group, at the Pacific International Exposition in August–September 1961, Vancouver, B.C., Canada; it was the only book sold there.The fact that The Causes of World War Three (and Listen, Yankee, 1960) sold in great numbers to a general audience increased Mills's popularity; and his popularity tended to increase his isolation from colleagues and some friends or former friends, who thought he should be writing for a more intellectual audience. Among his defenders, Jamison and Eyerman point out that Mills's isolation from his professional colleagues and his refusal to be drawn into mainstream work preserved his critical voice and allowed him "to become a spokesman for the next generation, seeking a way out of the wasteland and keeping alive the task set out in The Sociological Imagination."
[57] Jamison and Eyerman, Seeds of the Sixties, 46.
This next letter mentions Yaroslava Surmach, who later became Mills's wife. The eldest child of Ukrainian immigrants who founded a Ukrainian book and music store,
[58] Yaroslava later illustrated twenty-five books, including The Mitten: An Old Ukrainian Folktale, retold by Alvin Tresselt, adapted from the version by E. Rachev (New York: Lothrop, Lee, and Shepard, 1964); Helen Kay, An Egg Is for Wishing (New York: Abelard-Schuman, 1966); and Tusya and the Pot of Gold: From an Old Ukrainian Folktale, retold and illustrated by Yaroslava (New York: Atheneum, 1973).
Mills wrote to his parents about Yaroslava, "I am building up a new life and I think I may well have found the woman with whom to build it: an artist, professionally and as well down to her fingertips." He wrote that he loved her thoroughly and had "never been old enough to value love of this sort so well."
[59] Letter to Mills's parents, dated February 1, 1958.
She was almost thirty-three years old and Mills was almost forty-two when he wrote the next letter.
To Ralph Miliband, from New York City, dated May 1, 1958
Dear Ralph:
You may very well be right that the first three chapters ought to go in the back of the book [The Sociological Imagination]. At any rate it is one of those ideas that deserves a hard try; I'll spend a week playing with a draft that way. I want you to know that I am aware that much hard work is still to be done on this manuscript. Such a reordering may be just the thing to make the doing of it more pleasant and more profitable. I am most grateful to you. By the way I agree that 1 and 2 are the weakest chapters. Know also that the more detailed comment you give me I shall use fully.
Since returning to the US I have also written a little book which goes to the publisher next week. It is only 50,000 words or so and will be a softcover original at 50 cents, published by Ian Ballantine, called reflections on war;
[60] The Causes of World War Three.
it incorporates the Washington lectures, [the] Sidney Hillman series, I mean, and the Nation articles … all redone and fitted together. I'll send you a copy of course; should be out in about 2 months.[…]
I have been a little ill, with heart nonsense; and I am very tired. This summer I shall try to take it easy and just redo the social science book. I wish I had a good title for it. The present one is no good. It is after all sociology not social science and it is not exactly an autopsy. I want the whole thing to be more positive.
Yaroslava and I have ups and downs, but on the whole it goes very well. She is one damned good craftswoman in wool, oil-paint, silver, wood, paper (paper sculpture) and she has just made me a great mobile of a school of fish, which really is delightful.
The lectures in London are all set now, for the week of 12 to 18th Jan. next, I think.
[61] "On Reason and Freedom." Read to the London School of Economics and Politics and broadcast by the British Broadcasting Corporation, February 1959.
Then on to Moscow for a week. Do you happen to know anything about a hotel there called, I think it is, the Bristol?I got my motorcycle today, and this evening Y and I prowled the Wall Street district, in fact all the docks and the lower East Side. She knows where all the districts are: here is a whole street full of leather, here is one for yarn, another for buttons and equipment for making, mending, destroying buttons. Fabulous, really.
In general, since I last wrote to you, I've been in pretty good shape but with bad spells and missing a lot of classes, what with the heart and out of town lectures. But it doesn't matter really. Slowly, very slowly I am afraid, I get on top of it all. Two years from now (who knows?) maybe it will all be a vague memory, or even half forgotten.
Take care, as ever, and many, many thanks!
W
Wright
To Richard Hofstadter, from New York City, dated July 10, 1958
Dear Dick:
I am immensely grateful to you for your careful reading of the manuscript and your forthright comment. I have now taken into account all of your detailed criticism and corrections.
[62] In the acknowledgments of The Sociological Imagination, Mills thanked Hofstadter and thirty-one other colleagues and friends for criticizing the manuscript in whole or in part.
As I readChapter one is almost new: it defines in a good euphoric way the sociological imagination (which will be the title for the book) and the milieu vs. structural distinction; then a brief note on peculiarities of sociological tradition. Chapter two is liberal practicality with a new lead section, which is a kind of little sociology of knowledge of the social sciences but not called that. Then come illib practicali, grand theory and abstract empiricism and bureaucratic ethos: edited in detail and with more positive stuff thrown in as contrast. This is 7 chapters, but I think none of them more than 30 pages. I'll try to shorten them more still. Chapter 8 is more or less new: it is a summing up and a new beginning. Remember the list of for and against at the tail of the old manuscript that you liked, a sort of balance sheet. Well I elaborate that into a chapter and do so in terms of a sort of definition of "the classic social science tradition" or what have the sociological greats got? [Chapter] 9 is called Biography and History and consists of the old chapter two but pointed up to the two big problems of history making (the fourth epoch) and individuality (the cheerful robot); again this is positive for social science. [Chapter] 9 is the politics (pretty much like the old chapter 10 but shorter); and 10 is the craft…the letter thing but God help me again rewritten.
Either in 7 or in 10 or perhaps in a little appendix, I am running an annotated bibliography of great books, past and present: these are the core of the real thing, or so I claim. When I get that in shape I'll send it to you; maybe also the new chapter one.
You've worked hard enough to have the right to see that your reading has made a difference, and to read some decently put stuff! About the chapter you didn't like at all, industrial relations, I won't talk of that now as I am still thinking about it and working on it hard. You may be right. Although I read that to the boys themselves when I was VP of the industrial relations association and they gave it a big hand indeed. True it was in another version then. But we'll see. Anyway can't I save much by just saying up front and again in the back of the chapter that I am not concerned with their consultantship but only with their theory?
[…] I would very much like to ride up to the Cape for a weekend with you sometime but I don't know whether I can make it before August sometime. I think of swinging through Vt. to see Dave Riesman, with whom I've been having an enormous sort of correspondence.
[63] Concerning Riesman's comments and criticisms of the manuscript of The Sociological Imagination.
I've always liked Dave personally.… […] Katie does marvelously.I was in Aspen, Colorado, for the International Design Conference a week or so ago and had a fine time with designers, architects, city planners, artists and other disgruntled types.
[64] Mills's speech at this conference was published as "The Man in the Middle" in Industrial Design (November 1958): 70–75.
I still think I ought to have been an architect. But since it's too late I am going to theorize for them! God they are a confused but good willing lot. They now confront all the problems the political intellectual grappled with in the thirties; amazing really.But again thanks very much indeed for your time and effort on the manuscript; it has helped immensely.
yours,
M
To Hans Gerth, from New York City, dated December 2, 1958
Dear Gerth:
I have read your fine paper, given in Seattle, which you sent me, and I am very moved and encouraged by your generous remarks on WC and PE. They are not that good, my friend. Anyway, we are quite alone among American sociologists in thinking them perhaps worth reading. See for example Mr. Bell's debater's points in current J S [American Journal of Sociology], which of course I shall not answer.
[65] Daniel Bell's negative review of The Power Elite appeared in the November 1958 issue of the American Journal of Sociology. Bell later reprinted the review in his book, The End of Ideology (New York: Free Press, 1960).
Oxford has just gone to press with The Sociological Imagination (an earlier version of which in mimeo I think I sent you last spring or summer). Now I work hard on the lectures for Warsaw and London. I really am up a creek in Warsaw: I don't really know these people and don't want to get them into trouble, but of course I must state things as I see them. So I am trying to treat them as if they were in Chicago or an audience in LA and yet reach them.
[…]
Yours as ever,
CWM
In Gerth's answer to this letter, he invited Mills to take a vacation in Wisconsin and to plan on writing a book together with him at that time. Gerth wrote that after reading one chapter of The Causes of World War Three he thought it wasn't as informative as White Collar or The Power Elite, and that he didn't like the title.
To Tom Bottomore, from New York City, dated December 9, 1958
Dear Tom Bottomore:
Believe me, I'd love to give another paper while in London, but I just can't. In the six days I'm to be there, I must deliver 4 formal papers (on which I now work) and cooperate with Secker and Warburg's nonsense; they publish upon my arrival The Causes of World War Three. Then I go thru the same thing in Warsaw the very next week. On top of that, I am already bone-tired from lecture touring this fall to raise some money.
I do hope that you understand, that you know I really would like to if I could, and so forgive me.
Please also try to arrange time that you and I can have a good talk over a bottle of wine some evening.
Yours sincerely,
Wright
To Mr. Russell Johnson, Peace Secretary, American Friends Service Committee, from New York City, December 15, 1958
Dear Mr. Johnson:
I'd like very much to be with you in Boston in April but I cannot. My job is writing books: that is my action. (Sometimes I lecture publicly because I must for the money in it—my minimum fee as of now is $500 and expenses.) If I go out speaking as I am asked to do I could not do my proper, and I believe—for me—more important work. Meetings and speeches: that is your job. If I can help you in this by my books I am very glad indeed, for that is a major reason why I wrote the last one
[66] The Causes of World War Three.
and the ones before that. But I have now to complete the next book and the one after that.I'd like to do everything, but I can't. Accordingly I hope you will understand and, should my position inconvenience you, forgive me.
With very best wishes,
C. Wright Mills
Professor of Sociology
In the spring of 1959, Dissent published two opposing reviews of The Causes of World War Three. The first, by the pacifist A. J. Muste, stated that "Mills has written a sound, brilliant and most timely political tract. In using the latter term I do not mean to put it into a minor category but to praise it as being in a great tradition of books which are of high intellectual quality but which also propose a program and sound a call for action. That an American sociologist of Mills's standing who is also an unusually well informed and sophisticated analyst of political events should publish such a book is an event in the world struggle against war."
The opposing review was written by Irving Howe, who wrote that he believed Mills's sense of urgency "has led to the analytic carelessness and moral disequilibrium of Mills' pamphlet. Many of his specific proposals are fine, many of his specific observations valid; but the mode or style of thought to which he has recently turned seems to me unacceptable for the democratic left."
[67] "C. Wright Mills' Program: Two Views," Dissent 6, no. 2 (spring 1959): 189 and 191.
Mills replied by writing a pointed "Dear Irving" letter, which Dissent published along with Howe's tense reply. Mills asked exactly how Irving Howe's position toward
[68] Irving Howe, A Margin of Hope, 244–45.
In the spring of 1959 Mills was occupied by other major events aside from arguments about his latest book. That spring he began building a new home in Rockland County, New York—with Yaroslava Surmach, helping to design the house and acting as the general contractor as well as contributing his manual labor. Mills married Yaroslava in June, and soon after the wedding Mills, Yara, and Katie moved into the new house. They had been living there three months when Mills wrote the next letter.
To Ralph Miliband, from West Nyack, New York, dated "late Sept '59"
Dear Ralph:
I'm very sorry that I missed you when I went thru London last week. We got there earlier than expected and I looked forward to several long talks with you on radical matters. I know you must be very busy with the election and all, so if the questions I raise in this letter are too much bother to answer, please forget them. First, a bit of news: I've just rec'd a very depressed letter from Julian Hochfeld.
[69] Political sociologist and socialist activist who was the director of the Institute of International Relations, associated with the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, from 1957 to 1960, and who later became deputy director of the Social Science Department of UNESCO.
Apparently the Poles are trying to suppress the Polish edition of PE; I'm not sure of that, but that's what the letter seems to say. Also Hochfeld's longish introduction to it, which he worked on very hard;[70] A Polish translation of The Power Elite was published by Ksiazka i Wiedza, Warsaw, with an introduction by Mieczyslaw Manelli, in 1961.
also his study of the Polish parliament. He even speaks of "leaving" the institute. Don't let on that I wrote you, but why not write him a friendly, encouraging note? I've just done it. He plans to come to [the] US in January, and of course I shall treat him royally.I saw P. Worsley at Stresa [Italy]
[71] The anthropologist Peter Worsley, author of The Trumpet Shall Sound: A Study of "Cargo" Cults in Melanesia (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1957), among other titles. Stresa was the site of an international sociological conference where Mills also met Russian sociologists.
and tried to help him outline a little study; I think now in my damned enthusiasm I might have been rude or something, but I like him, what I saw of him.In about a week, I am told, I'll know whether or not the Russians are going to invite me to their fair land. Wish they'd make up their minds…It would be in the spring, and I've got to say yes or no to dates in the US, lectures and all. Also there's a chance (also not yet jelled) to go to Mexico; and I think I go for a week to Rio de Janeiro in late Oct, but they only hint around and don't send tickets. God damn it, I want to travel, beginning in Feb or so, with Yaro and Katie. Tired of being a hick.
I don't know what questions, if any, you wanted to raise with me…about work I mean, but if you'll write I'll respond of course. So forgive me now for raising my own.
I've decided to do a short book on Marx. […] I'm very excited about it but can't get on it just yet; probably start seriously in about 2 months. Questions to you:
What do you think are the best two or three summaries of what Marx said? Preferably some kind of precis or propositional outline.
What are the best two or three criticisms of Marxism: critiques as it were that one really must take into account? I don't mention those I have at hand for both A and B because I want it off the top of your head.
I must now tell you that I've never really read Laski: what of his about Marxism, about socialism in general and about USSR, should I by all means get into?
My final question is also open-ended. I've got to edit a Reader of classical sociological, or social (perhaps including political) thinkers. I don't like this sort of thing but I've got to do it to pay a few debts remaining on this house, and I may as well try to do something useful. […]
[72] Mills included a rough outline that closely corresponds with the sources in the final book, including Karl Mannheim, Herbert Spencer, Thorstein Veblen, Max Weber, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Emile Durkheim, and Gaetano Mosca, among others. Images of Man: The Classic Tradition in Sociological Thinking, selected and edited and with an introduction by C. Wright Mills (New York: George Braziller, 1960).
Do you think that would be useful to put― 273 ―together? Of course with brief notes introducing each and words defined in footnotes if need be. Who have I missed? Any of these you think to hell with?
Think of this: suppose you had to go off on a mountain without communication for 10 years and could take only 10 books with you. What would they be? Do answer that…I mean of course only books in social science.
Again forgive my imposing these questions on you, but the truth is I need advice and discussion and there is no one around here to talk with anymore.
I've seen some reviews of Sociological Imagination that appeared in England: on the whole rather good, but sort of stale. I'm sick of writing about academic stuff, and want badly to get back to writing about realities. The Marx book, however, I realize I really must do, as I've always addressed my stuff to liberal doctrine, since that is so dominant in the audience.
Send me your news.
As ever,
Wright
Mills
To Hallock Hoffman, the Fund for the Republic, Inc., Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, from West Nyack, New York, dated October 7, 1959
Dear Hallock Hoffman:
Your query of 23 Sept, just rec'd, gives me a good chance to talk to myself as well as to you. If you don't mind my rambling, I'm going to write for my own carbon. First, for the externals: I am and have been at the address posted above; this is my Sabbatical year. Have just returned from ten days at the Fourth World Congress of Sociology. Will go to conference in Rio from 18th to 29th Oct. Otherwise—apart from a few speeches about the country—will be at this address
Second, the state of my comparative project, for which the Fund gave me money last spring:
[73] The project was a comparative sociological study of 124 countries.
the money is spent and here is where I am on the project. I've got a good file set up, and with the assistant I had spring and summer, we've coded in three big notebooks about half of the information readily available on 110 national structures. Until I am over the rest of that first big empirical hump I'm rather stuck. I'd judge about four or five months with Guterman, the assistant, would see me to a set of cards. It just takes a lot of plain drudgery with apparently simple facts before I am freed, as it were, to make with the theory etc.Third, as to my immediate situation: I'm on half pay, this being the Sabbatical ($366 per month take home), and without even a typist. I've told Jacques Barzun my problem and he is trying to do something about it; I think probably he will. I should know in about ten days or so. You remember I applied to various foundations for $25,000 … enough to do the job elegantly and also avoid my having to scruge (sp?) [scrounge] around for personal income. Well every damned one of them turned it down flat. Some promptly, some with aggravating delay. So I now face up to the fact that I'm not going to get any adequate research money. I'm just off the list. So to hell with them. In the meantime, for the personal income in it, I am editing a Reader […] of great sociologists for George Braziller:
[74] Images of Man.
it should be done in about 2 more weeks. I am also in touch with an interesting guy, Ivan Nagy, who turns out to be a former student of mine and who runs a thing called Deadline Data. He's got a file of nation-states and internal affairs he sells as a service, and he likes my stuff. I may make some kind of deal with him…to work out indices for him to use and in turn I use his stuff to further my own file and later the cards I need to set up. I see him again next Tuesday Oct 13th.So much for externals. What I wanted to say is that two things now preoccupy me. This comparative file, first. I've known of course that it was a longtime thing, but I grow more sure that I have got to do it even if in the end I do the clerical work myself. It is the sort
The second thing I must do, and which I have begun, is a real confrontation of "Marxism." You see, I have always written with reference to liberalism, because that is a kind of common denominator of the public for which I write. I've not felt the need to confront Marxism because the audience wasn't preoccupied with it, indeed didn't even know it. So I've just used what I wanted from the body of Marxist stuff but never defined my relation with it. This is getting a little messy now, especially as I get more into the comparative stuff and more into what I suppose is explicitly political philosophy. So I have outlined and begun to draft a little book of about 30,000 to 50,000 words (certainly not more than 50,000) which might run like this:
ONE: liberalism and socialism.
TWO: propositional inventory …of Marxism-Leninism…reducing the whole thing to 30 or 40 pivotal propositions, and none of these damned boring long quotes. What is being said?
THREE: theses on Marxism, in this take a stand on two, point by point, of course taking into account the three "revisions," the turn of the century stuff, the sociologists, such as Weber and Veblen, and the Soviets.
FOUR: Soviet Marxism…along the lines of Marcuse's new book.
[75] Herbert Marcuse, Soviet Marxism: A Critical Analysis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958).
FIVE: a new left?…here an attempt, for both East and West, to work out a political orientation.
ONE I've got well in hand: a sort of model suggesting the four major questions that one must confront in any political philosophy.
Well, that is crude, but you see the general idea? Do you like it? Think I ought to carry it thru or just leave it in the kitchen, in the back room of the shop? It seems to me that I'm a pretty good person to do this kind of summing up and orientation because I've never been emotionally involved with Marxism or Communism, never belonged in any sense to it. And yet I know the stuff pretty well.
Despite that I find that I become curiously agitated when I work at it … which for me at least means that whether or not I publish it I am going to finish it. By the way did you happen to read the appendix to The Sociological Imagination, the thing on intellectual craftsmanship? I'm tempted to send a copy of it along with a reapplication for support to all the bastards that turned me down. But it wouldn't do any good I suppose, and besides I'm not going to ask any more.
Let me know what you think of the Thesis on Marxism; I'll keep in touch about developments in the comparative study.
Yours,
Wright Mills
In Rio in October 1959, Mills read his "Remarks on the Problem of Industrial Development" at the International Seminar on Resistances to Social Development, sponsored by the Latin American Center of Investigation in the Social Sciences.
To Tovarich, from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, fall 1959