Mike Oren
Power, Politics, and People
(Culture and Politics)
C. Wright Mills
Mills’s Why Questions: Why have the rational objectives of the Enlightenment failed society, and where can it go from here? Why
do “ordinary people” not have a say in society / why aren’t ordinary people free? Why don’t the intellectual elite take up the charge of
uncovering and putting an end to “The Cheerful Robot” that has exterminated the ideal of the Renaissance Man?
Mills’s motivational-mechanisms: Enlightenment thinking has led to a blind faith in rational thinking at the expense of reason. The
elite intellectuals focus on rational thought in order to improve efficiency at the cost of individuality, becoming an industrial and
commerce apparatus where the individual is in a panic of status based on possessions. Individuals are taught to be part of the
producing and consuming system and education does not teach people to be individual intellectuals as the Enlightenment thinkers had
hoped would occur by education for everybody.
Key terms:

Overdeveloped Nation – “[s]tandard of living dominates the style of life; its inhabitants are possessed […] by its industrial and
commercial apparatus; collectively, by its maintenance of conspicuous production; individually, by the frenzied pursuit and
maintenance of commodities” (240).

Underdeveloped Country – focus of life on economic subsistence (240).

Properly Developing Society – deliberately cultivates styles of life; standard of life product of debate among styles; industrial
advancement focused on increasing range of choice among styles of life (240).

Fourth Epoch – the post-modern age, where liberalism and socialism have collapsed and rationality can no longer rule all
decisions: “ideas of freedom and of reason have become moot; that increased rationality may not be assumed to make for
increased freedom” (236-237).
1
Enlightenment Ideal
Increasing rational thought will
increase freedom.
Universal education will lead to
rational man (and freedom).
Increased rationality among all
people will lead to increased shared
control over production and
consumption.
History made by men.
Enlightenment Reality
Bureaucracies, rational organizations,
have increased but substantive reason of
individuals has not (237).
Technological idiocy and nationalist
provinciality has resulted (238).
“In neither [the US or USSR] do the
workers control the process of
production or consumers truly shape the
process of consumption (242).
“men can now make history. But this
fact stand ironically alongside the
further fact that just now ideologies
which offered men the hope of making
history have declined and are
collapsing” (244).
2
Fourth Epoch
Freedom and reason are moot.
Tyranny has increased as education now serves as a
“function” of rational social machinery (238).
Bureaucracies are free to act in inhuman ways
because they are impersonal since people allow them
to act in purely rational manners.
Voluntary associations cease to dominate political
structures, history is in control of the elites that
shape and control the bureaucracies founded on
rational thought (242).
Men may abdicate the making of history and merely
drift, or a narrow circle of elites may make history
“with effective responsibility to those who must try
to survive the consequences of their decisions and of
their defaults” (245-246).