The Power Elite

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The Power Elite is a book written by the sociologist, C. Wright Mills, in 1956. In it Mills called attention to the interwoven interests of the leaders of the military, corporate, and political elements of society and suggested that the ordinary citizen was a relatively powerless subject of manipulation by those entities.

The structural basis of The Power Elite was that, following World War II, the United States was the leading country in military and economic terms.

The book is something of a counterpart of Mills' 1951 work, White Collar: The American Middle Classes, which examined the growing role of middle managers in American society. While White Collar characterized middle managers as agents of the elite, The Power Elite did not differentiate them from the rest of the non-elite in society.[citation needed]

A main inspiration for the book was Franz Leopold Neumanns book Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism in 1942, a study of how Nazism came in position of power in a democratic state as Germany. Behemoth had a major impact on Mills and he claimed that Behemoth had given him the "tools to grasp and analyse the entire total structure and as a warning of what could happen in a modern capitalist democracy". (C.Wright Mills: Power, Politics and People, (New York, 1963 p.174)).

Contents

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The Book

Chapter 1: The Higher Circles

Chapter 11: The Theory of Balance

Chapter 12: The Power Elite

Chapter 13: The Mass Society

Chapter 14: The Conservative Mood

Chapter 15: The Higher Immorality

See also

External links