Mills Elite (1)

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PROFILE

The Power Elite and the Philadelphia Gentlemen

William Weston

Published online: 12 February 2010# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010

In 1956 C. Wright Mills argued that American society was

controlled by a centralizing but irresponsible power elitethat was making cheerful robots of us all. Two years later E.

Digby Baltzell, a one-time student of Mills whose work

contributed to The Power Elite, published his answer, The

Philadelphia Gentleman: The Making of a National Upper

Class. Baltzell agreed that American society was centraliz-

ing and there was a danger that we would be left with an

irresponsible power elite. But he also saw a counter-force,

an upper class of families that, at its best, could direct that

elite into a responsible establishment that would serve the

common good from a sense of noblesse oblige.

Mills died young, in 1962, still railing against the

impersonal social structures and the irresponsible elite.

Baltzell, though the same age as Mills, would live three

decades longerlong enough to see the Sixties under-

mine Baltzells faith in a responsible national establishment.

The principled argument between Mills and Baltzell over

social leadershipof elite vs. establishmentis not tied to

a particular era or society. I will touch on the particular and

interesting parallel tales of how two eminent sociologists

made sense of post-war American society, especially in its

higher circles. In the end, though, I want to consider the

general issue of the nature of social leadership, and the

possibilities of creating a responsible establishment today

out of the various fragmented elites in our nation.

Mills: Railing Against the Elite

After the Second World War, C. Wright Mills wrote a

trilogy on the new configuration of power in the massive,

centralized, bureaucratic state emerging in America. He

might have written a similar book about all the industrial-

ized societies, including the Soviet Union.

He started with the workersor rather, with the new

leaders of the workers, the New Men of Power: Americas

Labor Leaders (1948). Union leaders are now an essential

part of the power structure of production. This was a slap at

political leftists and academic Marxists, who hoped the

workers would lead a revolution against the social structure.

With their leaders co-opted, the workers could do nothing

but fit in to the production machine.

In White Collar: The American Middle Classes (1951)

he broke new ground in describing the massive growth in

the middle layers of society. The white-collar layer

stretched from the bottom of the middle class to near the

top of the power structure. They are the cogs of both the

production machine and the consumption machine. White

collar includes the new categories of mass educated women

and college-educated G.I.s.

The Power Elite(1956) took the trilogy to the top of the

power structure. What was distinctive about Mills ap-

proach was that he thought the warlords were an equal

third of the power elite, and that the three powers

economic, political, and militaryinterlocked. Mills does

not offer a clear account ofhow the elite worked together.

More importantly, he did not offer much of an account of

what they did, what ends they were working toward. He

thought it enough to show that elite individuals in one

sphere had connections with elite individuals in another

sphere. It does not seem to cross his mind that he should try

to join the power elite, or train his students to try to join it.

W. Weston (*)

Centre College,

Danville, KY 40422, USA

e-mail: [email protected]

Soc (2010) 47:138146

DOI 10.1007/s12115-009-9289-3


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His last important book, The Sociological Imagination

(1959), makes the case for understanding the larger social

forces that shape the world. He offers clear and hardheaded

analysis of how private troubles and public issues are

connected. Two generations of sociologists have found the

sociological imagination a paradigm of how to understand

the big world in order to change it. I find it ironic, therefore,

that Millssubstantive sociology led him to understand theworld as something he could not change, as structured in a

way that there was no point in him trying to change it.

Baltzell: Promoting a Responsible Establishment

E. Digby Baltzell also wrote a trilogy about the social

organization of power in the United States. Whereas Mills

concentrated on developments since the Second World War,

Baltzell traced the century prior to the war. Baltzells

studies began with the stratum that Mills ended with: the

power elite. Baltzell then went on to explore the layerabove the power elite, the multi-generational upper class.

Baltzell and Mills agreed on several important points about

the top of the social structure. Both saw the power layer

becoming more unified and national after the war. In the

end, though, their differences about what the top layer of

the social structure was like, and especially their dispute

over the purpose of that stratum in social life, were more

important to sociology than their similarities.

The Philadelphia Gentleman: The Making of a National

Upper Class, published in 1958, was a revision of Baltzells

dissertation. The great sociology faculty at Columbia

influenced Baltzell after the war, including Paul Lazersfeld,

the young C. Wright Mills, Robert Lynd (who Baltzell

thanked for faith and encouragement), and his principle

intellectual influence, Robert Merton. For five decades,

starting with this study, Baltzell conducted an empirical

investigation of the circulation of the elites from the

inside. Baltzells work was, as he saw it, an application of

Tocqueville. If the upper class continues to absorb the new

elite individuals in an aristocratic process, it will renew

itself and earn its right to rule. If, on the other hand, it

becomes a closed caste, excluding the new elite and serving

only itselfas the pre-Revolutionary French upper class

didit will cease to rule, cease to serve, and invite its own

overthrow by a new upper class.

Baltzells best-known work, The Protestant Establish-

ment: Aristocracy and Caste in America was published in

1964. The book was written during the administration of

John F. Kennedy, whose election Baltzell saw as a

vindication of the principle of aristocracy over caste. As

he was finishing the book, Kennedy was assassinated,

which in retrospect looked like the beginning of the end of

the era of a coherent American upper class. Where

Philadelphia Gentleman traced how the First Families of

one city were absorbed into a national upper class,

Protestant Establishmentexamined how the culture of that

national upper classespecially their religious culture

was both a spur to leadership and a temptation to ugly caste

exclusions, especially of Jews.

Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia (1979) was

Baltzells magnum opus, a massively researched compara-tive study of, as the subtitle said, Two Protestant Ethics and

the Spirit of Class Authority and Leadership. This book

was designed to discover why the Proper Philadelphians

Baltzells own classhad never made the contribution to

national leadership that Proper Bostonians had. To my

mind, this book is the best American example of the great

Weberian project of empirically studying the worldly

effects of contrasting religious ethics.

What drove all of these Baltzell studies was the

conviction that the elite was always in the process of turning

into a hereditary upper class. The main ethical problem for

this upper class was whether it would use its privileges forsocial leadership, or instead turn in on itself and simply

consume the sweet lifeuntil displaced by a new elite. It

was not enough, Baltzell argued, that the elite have the

power that came from the institutions they ran. Society

needed the class that grew out of the elite to carry and foster

a long-term vision of social order and social betterment.

Mills and Baltzell: The Biographical Bridge

Wright Mills and Digby Baltzell crossed paths at a crucial

moment early in their careers. I dont want tomakemuchof the

biographical background of either man. They both continue to

affect sociology through their published works, which stand on

their own. I want to compare their ideas as ideas. It seems

foolish, though, to entirely pass over their personal connection.

For a couple of years after the Second World War both

were in the great sociology department at Columbia

University, Mills as a new professor, and Baltzell as a

graduate student. Their mutual interest in the higher circles

in society gave them something to talk about, for a time. In

the end, though, their differences in social theory and

practical politics took them in different directions from their

shared starting point. Baltzell was trying to build up the

establishment, while Mills was trying to tear it down.

The pivot of the biographical comparison of Mills and

Baltzell, I think, is the fact that Baltzell is a year older than

Mills, yet Mills was the teacher and Baltzell the student at

Columbia. This came about because Baltzell volunteered for

the war, thus delaying his academic career, while Mills did not.

Baltzell was 26 when the war began, having graduated

from the University of Pennsylvania and begun a career in the

insurance business. His war experiences broadened Baltzells

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view of society and set him on the path to sociology.In fact,

Baltzell explained in The Protestant Establishment, I

visualized the possibility of an ethnically mixed establish-

ment, which underlies the theory of American leadership

developed in this book, during my own experiences in the

ward rooms and officers clubs of the South Pacific. At any

rate, the American ideal of equality of opportunity in a

hierarchically organized social structure had never been sonearly realized as in the selection of reserve officers who led

our armed forces during the Second World War (301). On

his discharge in August of 1945, just after the dropping of the

Bomb, he enrolled at Columbia in time to start the fall term.

Mills was 25 when Pearl Harbor was bombed, while he

was working on his dissertation at Wisconsin. He taught at

Maryland through the war, and then went to Columbia in

1946. Baltzell, who had already been a student in the program

for a year, must have been one of Mills first students there. In

that year Mills and Hans Gerth published From Max Weber,

probably the most influential collection of Webers writings

in English. Baltzell said that one of the two texts that heread at Columbia that influenced him the most was Webers

Class, Status, Party, included in that volume. The other

was Alexis de Tocquevilles The Old Regime and the

Revolution, which he heard about from a visiting lecturer.

Baltzell said in later years that he thought Mills had

drawn on Baltzells own work without attribution. Those

who have read Mills notes say that he did not incorporate

Baltzells text directly. As a reader of both White Collar

(published in 1951) and Philadelphia Gentleman (based on

Baltzells 1949 dissertation), though, I see a point where

Mills sounds surprisingly like Baltzelland not so much

like Mills. Specifically, the Metropolitan 400 chapter of

White Collardraws on The Social Registerand talks about

intermarriage in the upper class. These points are founda-

tional to all of Baltzells work. Mills comments on them in

this chapter, but does not connect these ideas to the rest of

his work. In particular, it is surprising to me that Mills does

not follow up on the connection between upper class families

and the power elite, as Baltzell did. Mills theory did not have

a place for families; Baltzells starts from families.

After only two years at Columbia, Baltzell returned to

Philadelphia and hisalma mater, the University of Pennsyl-

vania, where he spent the rest of his career and life. In the

opening words ofPuritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia

he wrote that he then lived a few blocks from where he was

bornsomething that few sociologists in our increasingly

rootless and disestablished society could claim. Mills, by

contrast, ended his days in the heart of the cosmopolitan

academy in Manhattan, socially as far as he could get in this

country from his hometown of Waco, Texas.

A decade after Mills early death, Baltzell placed Mills

in the larger historical context by comparing him with

another great antinomian figure of an earlier noisy age of

prose,the 1640s. It is indeed a fitting forecast of the shape

of things to come that, when he died in March, 1962, the

great disestablishmentarian guru, C. Wright Mills, the John

Lilburne of modern social science, was buried after a

Quaker memorial service. He, unlike Lilburne, died

unconvinced and an atheist, or as Mills himself would

have more dramatically put it, a Pagan (in The Protestant

Establishment Revisited, 209).

The Theoretical Argument

Elite vs. Establishment

Mills expresses the nub ofThe Power Elite in this oft-quoted

paragraph: These hierarchies of state and corporation and

army constitute the means of power; as such they are now of

a consequence not before equaled in human historyand at

their summits, there are now those command posts of modern

society which offer us the sociological key to an understand-ing of the role of the higher circles in America. (5)

The elite are individuals at the top of the functional

hierarchies of power. On this point Mills and Baltzell agree.

The elite of society is an analytic category created by

sociologists, consisting of all the individuals at the top of all

the functional hierarchies. Elite individuals do not neces-

sarily have any connection with one another. The heads of

functional hierarchies in the same industry or social sphere

(in a broad sense) are usually competitorswhether they

work together, or have any personal relations at all, is an

empirical question. It is reasonable to think that the heads

of competing institutions normally do not work with one

another. It is even more reasonable to think that the heads

of institutions in different industries or social spheres will

not work together at all, or even know one anothers

identities. There is nothing about the elite that requires them

to be a permanent class, or even a temporary conspiracy.

The main point that Mills makes in The Power Elite is

that in the specific historical moment of the United States

after World War Two, the elite individuals at the top of the

corporate, political, and military hierarchies were becoming

more coordinated with one another than ever before. Since

the United States had emerged as the greatest power in the

world after the war, and perhaps the greatest power that had

ever existed, the American power elite had more power

with more control than any power elite had ever had. The

top positions of state, corporation, and army are not simply

the leaders of state, corporation, and army, but together

they constitute the command posts of American society

as a whole. To see what Mills is arguing for, it may be

helpful to see what he is arguing against.

The power elite position opposes the pluralist view, like

that of Robert Dahl, who argued that the various elites in the

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various social spheres are not coordinated into one power

elite. Instead the pluralists see several veto groupswith just

enough power to prevent other elite individuals from always

getting their way at the expense of the other elites. Decisions

emerge from the compromise of veto groups, sometimes in

unintended ways. Pluralists think the power elite position is

too centralized and coherent in its view of power.

The power elite position also opposes the Marxist viewthat state, corporation, and army are all tools of a unified

capitalist class that ruled American society. Marxist critics

thought Mills allowed too much autonomy to the military,

to political leaders, and to corporate managers (as opposed

to owners) in pursuing their own institutional ends. Marxists

think the power elite position is not centralized and coherent

enough it is view of power.

Mills answered the pluralists by arguing that the

depression, the war, and Americas superpower role after

the war, made it necessary for the state to coordinate the

other elites on a national level to an extent never seenor

neededbefore. There is a power elite now because crisesarose which could not be solved by local elites.

In response to the Marxists, Mills allowed that top

politicians always tend to be representatives of the corporate

rich, even without these large national crises. Mills followed

James Burnham in perceiving that the massive size and

complexity of modern corporations had created a manage-

rial revolutionthat transferred power from Marxs owners of

the means of production to a large layer of non-owning

managersand an even more massive layer of white collar

workers who were neither owners nor a Marxian proletariat.

Later critics have noted that Mills gave too much indepen-

dent power to the warlords,the military leaders. At the time

that Mills was writing The Power Elite, half the U.S.

governments budget went to defense, General Eisenhower

was president, and former generals and admirals had a role in

corporate life not seen before or since. I agree that Mills

claim that the military leaders form an equal third in the power

elite is the weakest part of his argument, and has not held up.

The military, though significant players in government and,

indirectly, in business, have been re-absorbed into the state. In

a larger sense, though, I think that this criticism does not really

undermine the theory of the power elite, but simply requires

some tweaking: the corporate elite includes some former

military leaders, and the state elite includes some active

military leaders.

Mills thus defends his view of the power elite from three

kinds of simplifying theories: The simple Marxian view

makes the big economic man the realholder of power; the

simple liberal view makes the big political man the chief of

the power system; and there are some who would view the

warlords as virtual dictators. Each of these is an over-

simplified view. It is to avoid them that we use the term

power elite rather than, for example, ruling class(277).

In a footnote to this statement Mills clarifies that he rejects

ruling class because it contains the theory that an

economic class rules politically. He would make similar

objections, presumably, to a claim that society always had a

command economyor was always a military dictatorship.

The crucial point is that whether the elite constitutes a

ruling class, a political directorate, or a military cabal is an

empirical question, not a premise for social analysis.Understanding the power elite requires an act of

sociological imagination, a term Mills popularized three

years later. The power elite is made of individuals, but their

power comes from their institutional position, from the

various power hierarchies that they head and the complex

interactions of those institutions. We cannot infer the

direction of policy merely from the social origins and

careers of the policy-makers, (280) Mills contends. The

structural imperatives of the institutions that give these

individuals their power constrains the choices they make.

Mills is sometimes charged with having a conspiracy

theory of social organization. This is not quite true, if weenvision a conspiracy as the work of a secret organization

working for nefarious ends. By contrast, Mills thinks that

the power elite are more thrown together by structural

necessity than formed by seeking one another out.

Likewise, most of the work of the power elite is done in

the open, and the interlocking directorates that connect

them to one another are a matter of public record. The

power elite was not initially a conspiracy; however, once

created, they do tend to organize things.

The real weakness of Millspower elite theory, I believe, is

in his conception of how they are connected to one another

over generations, and what ends they use their power for.

Baltzells conception of the establishment, I believe, offers a

real advance on the theory of the power elite.

Early in The Philadelphia Gentleman Baltzell draws a

crucial distinction between an elite and an upper class: The

elite concept refers to those individuals who are the most

successful and stand at the top of the functional class

hierarchy. These individuals are the leaders in their chosen

occupations or professions. The upper class concept,

then, refers to a group of families, whose members are

descendents of successful individuals (elite members) of

one, two, three or more generations ago. These families are

at the top of the social class hierarchy (67).

Baltzell and Mills use the same concept of an elitethe

set of individuals at the top of the various power hierarchies.

This elite is an analytic category made by sociologists. The

elite may or may not form a living social unit.

The upper class, by contrast, is an organic social unit. The

great social function that an upper class of families ought to

perform is to assimilate the new men (and sometimes

women) who have risen in the elite, especially through

marriage. The upper class is highly intermarried with one

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another, as well. Baltzell even notes that Mills, in his review

of the Yankee City studies by Lloyd Warner and colleagues,

asked about the interrelations among business elites and

upper social circles, especially through marriage. Mills

himself did not pursue those family connections. Baltzell

offered the evidence of The Philadelphia Gentleman as a

partial answer to Mills question.

Mills believed that in the modern era powerful institutionshad displaced powerful families as the leading institutions in

society. He does not argue for or footnote this point, but takes

it as a given starting point for analysis. This is surely why he

did not follow up on his own questions about the connections

between the business elite and upper class families. Baltzell,

on the other hand, knew from personal experience that upper

class families were still intimately intertwined with the

business elite, as well as with the rest of the power elite.

Baltzell, like Mills and many other post-war sociologists,

noticed that centralized national institutions were displacing

local power centers. Mills focused on the federal govern-

ment and national corporations as the agents of centraliza-tion. Baltzell likewise saw this nationalization of the elite;

since he also had the category of the upper class of families,

he could see the way in which local upper classes were

consolidating into one national upper class. Hence the

subtitle of the book, The Making of a National Upper

Class. In fact, when The Philadelphia Gentleman was

released as a paperback it was given the somewhat

misleading new title of An American Business Aristocracy.

Power vs. Authority

Both Mills and Baltzell saw that great power was

accumulating in the large centralizing institutions of the

corporation and the government. Mills, though, was limited

by this same theory of the power eliteit prevented him

from understanding authority as an important social force

beyond mere power. The command postsat the top of the

various formal institutions were as high as Mills social

structure could go. He did not see how there could be a

different source of authority because his conception of

society had no upper class that could stand against the

powerful institutions of corporation and state. Baltzells

theory of social leadership, by contrast, turns on the mutual

balancing of elite and upper class.

Mills sees the maintheoretical advantage of defining the

elite in terms of major institutions as precisely this

emphasis on the way institutions shape individuals more

powerfully than whatever class they might come from. He

argues that:

1) The institutional positions men occupy throughout their

lifetime determines their chances to get and to hold

selected values;

2) The kind of psychological beings they become is in

large part determined by the values they thus experi-

ence and the institutional roles they play;

3) Finally, whether or not they come to feel that they

belong to a select social class, and whether or not they

act according to what they hold to be its interests

these are matters in large part determined by their

institutional position, and in turn, the select values theypossess and the characters they acquire. (Power Elite,

386 n.6.)

Note that Mills thinks the institutional position that elite

individuals rise into determines their values, determines

their personalities, and determines the social class they

come to feel they belong to. Socialization by the

institution beats socialization by the class they came from.

The possible power of the class that elite individuals are

being assimilated in to in shaping their social responsibil-

ities is not even on the table. Indeed, it seems to me

possible that in making his third point Mills had hisdiscussions with Baltzell in mind about the relative power

of institution and class.

Mills has a narrow conception of who can exercise power.

The thrust of the stratification trilogy and their epilogue, The

Sociological Imagination, is that no one has the freedom to

exercise real power in society except those at the very top.

And what does the top man (no women in Mills power

elite) do? In his Power Elite chapter on The CEO he

names that worthys main task as making The Judgment

the big strategic decision that guides the institution he heads.

Top management is drawn from the broad men who see a

way for the institution to profit, not the specialists whoimplement The Judgment.

The broad men at the top promote other broad men like

themselves, because the business world at its highest layers

depends on trust. Pierre Bourdieu makes a point like this in

his account of the value of cultural capital. Mills could have

gone on to consider how the broad men get their education

in class-specific institutions. This insight, in turn, would

lead one to see that the elite-producing institutions lead to

intermarriages and connections over generations that

produce the vast cousinage, as Nelson Aldrich calls it,

of the upper class. Mills does not follow this path, though,

because his theory limits him to look forpowerin the maincommand institutions of societycorporations, the state,

and the military. He thus misses the vast array of counter-

institutions of class authority.

Baltzell, by contrast, has a much richer conception of the

functions of the upper class in relation to the elite. He

names four primary functions in Philadelphia Gentlemen:

1) To maintain a continuity of control over important

positions in the world of affairs;

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2) To provide a primary social organization within which

the informal aspects of the normative social orderthe

folkways and moresmay operate as effective agents

of social control;

3) To provide an autonomous power in the community as

a protection against totalitarian power; and, finally,

4) To provide a more or less primary group social world

within which the younger generation is socialized. (60).

Like any class, the upper class provides continuity,

socializes and informally controls its members, raises their

young. The upper class has further, unique functions: the

primary function of the upper class is the exercise of

powerthe power of leadership in order to limit the

power of individual leaders(60). The upper class, when it

is functioning well, has the collective authority to check

and balance the power of elite individuals.

The upper class is a self-aware group of interconnected

families. It is a class in and for itself. Indeed, the upper class is

probably the only class in the nation small enough andinterconnected enough to function as one cosmopolitan

national class. All classes below them, from which new elite

individuals might rise, are divided into more parochial

fractions. Those elite individuals who were raised in the

upper class have an advantage, a body of cultural capital, over

those who come to the elite as adults. Baltzell demonstrates

that a disproportionate number of the elite did, indeed, come

from the social upper classin his studies, a hundred times

more than their proportion of the total population.

Many rising individuals do not even realize that there is an

upper class, or that it has power and authority functions. Too

often we focus on the lifestyles of the rich and the famous and

the excesses of the leisure class. Even scholarly studies are

often content to gaze upon the privileges of the monied and

merely list the interconnections among the eliteas Mills

does. As Baltzell often laments, Americans have been

concerned to succeed rather than lead. We thus miss the

authority function of the upper class.

Yet the main task of the leadership class is to make final

decisions about important things. Upper classes are built on

wealth, especially inherited wealth. But wealth is not enough,

and is certainly not the point. As Baltzell argued early and

often, the intellectual, professional and statesmanlike

accomplishments of the money-makers descendants have

always been recognized as the final flowering and ultimate

justification of the existence of that wealth.(PG 130)

Baltzells two main inspirations were Max Weber and

Alexis de Tocqueville. In dialogue with each he developed

and extended the theory of the American upper class as an

authoritative leadership institution.

The difference between power and legitimate power

authorityis central to Webers discussion of the different

kinds of power in society. Weber contrasted the traditional

authority of premodern societies with the dominant rational/

legal authority of modern societies. Webers third type,

charismatic authority, is a wild form that could break out in

any kind of social order. Baltzell noted that traditional

authority in society as a whole is primarily carried by the

upper class, whereas rational/legal authority is carried in

bureaucratic institutions of corporation, state, and military.

Rather than seeing rational/legal authority as supercedingtraditional authority, though, Baltzell set them up as checks

on one another in modern societies. Indeed, in the summa

of his trilogy he contended that: It is my central thesis that

class lies at the very core of the authority structure of any

society and, moreover, that it is the proper function of an

upper class in any healthy society to wield authority not

through manipulation, force, or fraud but through the

respect it commands throughout society for the accomplish-

ments and leadership qualities of its members over several

generations (Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia,x).

When Baltzell began his study of the circulation of the

American elite, the upper class still exercised traditionalauthority. After the anti-authority revolution of the Sixties,

Baltzell developed a further nuance: Broadly speaking,

hierarchy, authority, and leadership are necessary characteristics

of all civilized communities; however, a normative culture that

stresses the desirability of hierarchy, class, and authority will

instill in its members a far stronger desire and capacity to take

the lead in both community building and community reform

than a normative culture than emphasizes equality and

brotherly love, explicitly rejecting the need for hierarchy,

class, and authority (Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadel-

phia,6). This distinction is why he compared the hierarchical

culture of Puritan Boston, which did so much to lead the

nation for centuries, with the egalitarian culture of Quaker

Philadelphia. At that moment in the 1970s an egalitarian

culture that rejected all authority seemed to have triumphed in

the nation as a wholethreatening, Baltzell thought, decline

in the whole social order.

From Tocqueville, Baltzell saw that the upper class was

perpetually threatening to turn into a self-serving caste. To be

well ordered, the upper class needed to perpetually engage in

what Baltzell called the aristocratic process of assimilating

the elite individuals who had risen to power. In a democratic

society, there would seem to be a conflict between even an

aristocratic upper class and the premise of democratic social

equality. What Tocqueville noted was that Americans did not

rely on Great Men, as in Britain, or the state, as in France, to

do what needed to be done in society. Instead, Americans

create voluntary associations of citizenscommittees, clubs,

councils, leagues, orders, societiesto solve social prob-

lems. Baltzell saw that the American upper class took a

disproportionate role in organizing, leading, and funding

these associations. Unlike European aristocracies, the Amer-

ican upper class did not assume this leadership by right.

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Rather the American upper class makes itself into a

leadership class by earning its authority through voluntary

community service, as well as through the formal institutions

of power. It is the genius of Americans, Baltzell

contended, to have replaced aristocratic with associational

noblesse oblige, expressed today through the exercise of

leadership in nonprofit organizations (in Judgment and

Sensibility, 113).Baltzell wrote about the upper class as an interested

insider. Most sociologists, I expect, write about some

salient social category that they themselves are part of,

especially in their first studies. Baltzell was only unusual in

the class he came from, and his ability to plow that same

furrow so fruitfully for five decades. Since he was an

insider to the higher circles of social authority, if not to the

top reaches of power, he was able to see the people and

informal social institutions that held the upper strata

together better than most outsider sociologists. Looking

back on the studies that flowed from The Power Elite in

1981, a quarter century later, Baltzell offered a helpfulcorrective about the social sources of mere power as

contrasted with real authority: A large number of social

scientists have conspiracy theories about interlocking

directorships and the power structure, largely because of a

lack of an historical imagination or first-hand knowledge of

the real world or real people. the richness, variety, and

freedom of our society has depended on the very few men

and women in each generation and community who are

willing to shoulder the burdens of responsibility and

leadership (in Judgment and Sensibility, 119).

Irresponsible Intellectual vs. Responsible Cultivated Person

An important test of any stratification theory is where the

theorist places him- or herself in the social structure.

Intellectuals do almost all stratification studies, yet it is a

peculiarity of intellectuals that they like to deny that they fit

in the social structure. Theywelike to imagine that they

stand outside the social structure, able to comprehend it all

without being limited by our parochial perspective. Mills

criticizes intellectuals for becoming tools of the power

structure. Indeed, one may read his stratification trilogy,

and even The Sociological Imagination, as primarily a

critique of his fellow intellectuals for not criticizing and

correcting the drift of society. Baltzell, by contrast, saw

himself as responsible intellectual precisely because he was

heir to the cultivation and privilege of the upper class. Mills

saw his intellectual attainments as freeing him from the

social structure; Baltzell saw his intellectual attainments as

binding him to social leadership.

Wright Mills makes the most extraordinary claims for his

own intellectual project: The sociological imagination is

becoming, I believe, the major common denominator of our

cultural life and its signal feature (Sociological Imagina-

tion, 14). Yet who can bear the sociological imagination

and the task that comes with it? Not the poor, or the blue-

collar workers, nor the vast army of cheerful robots who

wear the white collar. The power elite use intellectuals to

carry out The Judgment, but are not themselves intellectu-

ally concerned with solving the problems of the old or new

masses. Is it not obvious, Mills asks, that the ones toconfront them [the problem of the Cheerful Robot], above

all others, are the social scientists of the rich societies?

(Sociological Imagination, 176).

So who are the intellectuals who bear this large

responsibility? They are, he argues in the happily named

Brains, Inc. chapter of White Collar, the most classless

and heterogeneous of middle class groups, blessed more

with the intellectual than the social graces. They have no

common origin and share no common social destiny

(Sociological Imagination, 142). His definition of intellec-

tuals has a wonderful moral purity: as intellectuals they

live for and not off ideas (143). Mills believes that whenthe intellectual was invented as a social type in the glory

days of the Enlightenment, they were free. But no more.

The power elite now co-opts intellectuals to create

ideological legitimation for their power. This legitimation

is as important to mollify those who work within the

bureaucracy as it is to pacify those without. The several

kinds of knowledge workers have committed the treason

of the clericsin one way or another: What must be called

the Christian default of the clergy is as much a part of this

sorry moral condition as is the capture of scientists by

nationalist Science-Machines. The journalistic lie, become

routine, is part of it too; and so is much of the pretentious

triviality that passes for social science (Sociological

Imagination, 184). Ralph Miliband, in his memorial

appreciation of his friend, said that Mills did not blame

the power elite, who were merely acting out the role cast

for them by the social setting in which they were allowed to

wield power. What angered him most were defaulting

academics and intellectuals (in C. Wright Mills and the

Power Elite, 5) Mills, Miliband contended, had an intense

respect for the intellectual as the high priest of reason

and truth (6).

Intellectuals do not wish to face their cooptation and

irresponsibility. One tactic is to retreat into objectivity,

academic value-freedom, and the bureaucratic claim of

thats not my department. Followers of Mills such as the

Sociological Imagination Group reject this dodge. Mills

was equally critical of alienation as a fashionable middle-

brow way of admitting defeat without taking responsibility

for giving up. Both approaches, Mills asserts, are fit

moods and ideologies for intellectuals caught up in and

overwhelmed by the managerial demiurge in an age of

organized irresponsibility (160).

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It is hard to shake the feeling, though, that Mills himself

retreated into alienation. He was not miserable about ithe

describes himself as actually rather cheerful. Still, his

description of the system of organized irresponsibility

that extended from the power elite down to the invisible

bottom of society had no place for C. Wright Mills, and

people like him, to act responsibly to achieve a better

society. He eschewed all social institutions, even the oneshe was nominally part of, that might act upon society.

One of the criticisms of Mills is that he cannot really

offer an account of how the leaders of society ought to use

their power because he has a thin conception of power, and

an even thinner conception of human nature. His analysis of

the organized irresponsibility of the power elite keeps

falling back into cynicism because he has no standard of

what organized responsibility would do. As A.A. Berle

wrote in his critique ofThe Power Elite, if Mills is going to

criticize the higher immorality,he has a duty to articulate

the higher morality (in C. Wright Mills and the Power

Elite). The Millsian intellectual has a difficult time steppingup to shape society, because all he can offer to the iron cage

of a hyper-rationalized society is a hope of more rationality.

Mills never offers an account of why non-intellectuals act

as they do, other than from a desire to conform. Even David

Riesmans The Lonely Crowd, Mills great competitor in

social analysis at the time of White Collar, could at least

offer the contrast of inner-direction being replaced by other-

direction by way of explanation.

Digby Baltzell, on the other hand, thought, those who

perform the intellectual functions of any society are

primarily concerned with values, morals, and ideas, in the

large sense, or the normative and creative aspects of social

life (Philadelphia Gentlemen, 32). The job of intellectuals

is not simply to criticize, but to help translate the

fundamental values of society into practical action. The

deepest task of intellectuals is to understand how the

fundamental religious understanding of a society shapes

how the leaders of society should use their power

responsibly.

Baltzells empirical analysis of social leadership is richer

than Mills because Baltzell attends to the details of the

conception of human nature and social order that different

kinds of leadership classes enacted. In Puritan Boston and

Quaker Philadelphia, Baltzell could ground the different

leadership cultures of the two cities in the contrasting

conceptions of human naturethe theological anthropolo-

giesof the two founding faiths. Whereas both the

Puritans and the Quakers recognized the absolute authority

of God, the Puritans for theological reasons, assumed that

sinful man needs an earthly and institutionalized hierarchi-

cal authority structure; the Quakers argued that perfectible

man needs no such system but is capable of approaching

God directly(95).

How to Really Make the World Better

In the last paragraph of his most influential book, The

Sociological Imagination, C. Wright Mills offered this

inspiring, but enigmatic, vision of his approach to improv-

ing the world: What I am suggesting is that by addressing

ourselves to issues and to troubles, we stand the best

chance, I believe the only chance, to make reasondemocratically relevant to human affairs in a free society,

and so realize the classic values that underlie the promise of

our studies. (194). That phraseto make reason demo-

cratically relevant to human affairsis pregnant with

possibility. It is a task in which a politically engaged

intellectual, especially in the social studies, could take the

lead.

It is harder to see from Mills work, though, just what

sort of institutions could make reason democratically

relevant. The main power centers of the state, corporation,

and military have been taken over and integrated by the

power elite. The state and corporation have superceded thefamily and church. The university makes a partial showing

as a place in which critical reason might be made relevant,

though universities are not especially democratic and in any

case have largely been incorporated as cogs in the Brains,

Inc. machine. The vast array of voluntary associations that

Tocqueville (and Baltzell) thought were the glory of

American democracy barely make an appearance in Mills

picture of society. The contrast with Baltzell makes it

particularly clear that Mills does not consider a social class

a possible agent of social change, much less of democratic

reason.

Mills tool for improving society is the critical book.

E. Digby Baltzell, on the other hand, is centrally

concerned with the empirical institutions of social

leadership. In his greatest book, Puritan Boston and

Quaker Philadelphia, Baltzell laid out his vision this way:

It is the central thesis of this book that no nation can long

endure without both the liberal democratic and the

authoritative aristocratic processes (7).

Specific and very concrete institutions carry out the

democratic and aristocratic processes. School, business,

government, and the many voluntary associations lift talent

democratically. The clubs, associations, religious institu-

tions, and most especially the families of the upper class

assimilate talent aristocratically. The point of the elite is to

use power; the point of the upper class is to use power

responsibly for the good of the whole. When the upper

class is doing its job, and does it over time, it can become

an establishment.

Baltzell argues that both political parties of leadership

should come from the same establishment. This is an idea

so out of the liberal and egalitarian stream that most

sociologists today find it hard to grasp what Baltzell is

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really saying. The traditional authority of any ruling class

in the long run depends on its producing leaders of more

than one party or set of political convictions. This point,

Baltzell allows, has always been hard for Marxists to

understand (Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia,

147). Mills, more a populist than a Marxist, has a similar

problem seeing institutions as the bulwark of freedom, least

of all an institutionalized establishment as a bulwark offreedom.

G. William Domhoff has continued Baltzells emphasis

on empirical study of the higher circles, while at the same

time incorporating Mills commitment to resisting the

power elite. In his 1968 critical assessment ofThe Power

Elite and its critics, Domhoff proposed Baltzells work as

the empirical bridge between pluralists and Marxists while

retaining the power elite concept. Domhoff said that he

wrote Who Rules America? to fill in the blanks in Baltzell

about political control. Contrary to Mills, Domhoff thought

the corporate rich do form the core of the power elite, and

in general policy the power elite serves corporate interests.He thus offered this new definition of the power elite:

politically, economically and culturally active members of

the social upper class and high-level employees in

institutions controlled by members of the upper class

(276).

Mills and Baltzell were, in a sense, fighting the last war.

They were worried about a unified and centralized military/

industrial state that crushed opposition and eliminated

freedom and individuality. It is not hard to see that they

were each concerned, in their social theory, to fight fascism.

Both saw alienation as a problem.

Mills did not offer much of a practical solution to the

problem of fascism and alienation beyon d promoting

reasoned analysis and intellectual resistance. Baltzell offered

the establishment and traditional authority as a bulwark

against a charismatic leader coming to power through

bureaucratic means. Both Mills and Baltzell analyze society

within a Weberian framework. Baltzell, going beyond Mills,

saw a way to employ Weberian means, along with Tocque-

villes voluntary associations, as a secondary source of

power, to check the problem of the iron cage.

Neither Mills nor Baltzell were well prepared, though, to

fight the next war of social order, the antinomian cultural

revolution of the Sixties. Mills died in 1962. He is widely

hailed as a radical. One might think that he would have been

a leader in the social revolutions of the late 1960s and early

1970s. Yet Mills, for all his dissent, was a reason-loving

intellectual. It is hard for me to see how the sociological

imagination would lead one to days of rage, or the

theatrical anti-politics of the counter culture. It is impossible

to know, of course, but I think Millsreputation as a radical

would have been greatly complicated by his likely dissent

from the radicalisms of the era just after his death.

Baltzell lived through the Sixties and was disheartened

by them. He was at low ebb, I think, in 1976s The

Protestant Establishment Revisited. Perhaps I was overly

nave and optimistic at the time, (1964) in believing that

the establishment could be renewed. What remains of the

Protestant establishment has been watered down beyondrecognition(76). His response was a bit more evenhanded

a decade later, in The WASPs Last Gasp. When I

compare Philadelphia fifty years ago with today, he wrote

after the Reagan years, I am bound to conclude that, while

social justice has definitely improved, social order and

communal authority have just as definitely declined (in

The Protestant Establishment Revisited, 35). Disestablish-

ing communal authority does not end the need for social

order. We have not brought on the rule of individual liberty,

but instead have inspired conspiracy theories.

When Digby Baltzell died in 1996 he was not hopeful

about renewing the social establishment in America. Wevalue individual success, but not social responsibility. Yet I

believe there are resources in Baltzells analysis that should

give us hope. In his earlier work, Baltzell contended that if

the upper class does not rule, the new ruling class would

eventually replace it. I believe this is true.

The changes in the economy that we have come to see as

post-industrial, and even post-modern, are generating a new

elite. The rules of liberal democratic elite-making have

changed, too. People of all sexes, races, religions, and

nationalities are routinely drawn into the meritocratic

escalator of our educational, corporate, and even state

institutions. Marriage practices are following a similar

pattern, though more slowly. I think we are regrowing an

establishment because we always need one. The new

establishment will rest on mastery of knowledge technol-

ogy and on marriages open to talent.

Further Reading

Aldrich, N. W., Jr. 1988. Old money the mythology of Americas upper

class. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Bourdieu, P. 1984. Distinction: The social critique of the judgment of

taste. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Domhoff, G. W., & Ballard, H. B. (Eds.). 1968. C. Wright Mills andthe power elite. Boston: Beacon.

Gillam, R. 1975. C. Wright Mills and the power of truth: The Power

Eliterevisited. American Quarterly, 27(4), 461479.

Gillam, R. 1981. White collarfrom start to finish: C. Wright Mills in

transition.Theory and Society, 10(1), 130.

William (Beau) Weston is Van Winkle Professor of Sociology at

Centre College in Danville, KY. He studies the intersection of religion,

family life, and social class

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