Taking It Big: C. Wright Mills and the Making of Political Intellectuals

Stanley Aronowitz

Jul 2012 · Columbia University Press

About this ebook

C. Wright Mills (1916–1962) was a pathbreaking intellectual who transformed the independent American Left in the 1940s and 1950s. Often challenging the established ideologies and approaches of fellow leftist thinkers, Mills was central to creating and developing the idea of the "public intellectual" in postwar America and laid the political foundations for the rise of the New Left in the 1960s. Written by Stanley Aronowitz, a leading sociologist and critic of American culture and politics, Taking It Big reconstructs this icon's formation and the new dimension of American political life that followed his work.

Aronowitz revisits Mills's education and its role in shaping his outlook and intellectual restlessness. Mills defined himself as a maverick, and Aronowitz tests this claim (which has been challenged in recent years) against the work and thought of his contemporaries. Aronowitz describes Mills's growing circle of contacts among the New York Intellectuals and his efforts to reenergize the Left by encouraging a fundamentally new theoretical orientation centered on more ambitious critiques of U.S. society. Blurring the rigid boundaries among philosophy, history, and social theory and between traditional orthodoxies and the radical imagination, Mills became one of the most admired and controversial thinkers of his time and was instrumental in inspiring the student and antiwar movements of the 1960s. In this book, Aronowitz not only reclaims this critical thinker's reputation but also emphasizes his ongoing significance to debates on power in American democracy.

About the author

Stanley Aronowitz is the author of several major works, including Against Schooling: For an Education That Matters; How Class Works: Power and Social Movement; The Knowledge Factory: Dismantling the Corporate University and Creating True Higher Learning; False Promises: The Shaping of American Working Class Consciousness; The Crisis in Historical Materialism: Class, Politics, and Culture in Marxist Theory; and Science as Power: Discourse and Ideology in Modern Society. He is also the coauthor of The Jobless Future: Sci-Tech and the Dogma of Work and Education Under Siege: The Conservative, Liberal, and Radical Debate Over Schooling.