The Power Elite. by C. Wright MillsReview by: Robert E. AggerSocial Forces, Vol. 35, No. 3 (Mar., 1957), pp. 287-288Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2573526 .

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LIBRARY AND WORKSHOP 287

as a result of this organization are cases related to civil liberties and national security. The new adminis- trative applications of the procedures of "presumptions of guilt" and "guilt by association" are treated care- fully and thoroughly. Their comparison to more ancient areas of contention is made without emotion but with considerable insight. Racial discrimination cases since 1945 are handled in a single grouping in much the same way, and form a handy body of ma- terial with which to begin a study of any problem in the area.

Also of great value are the selected reading sugges- tions made at the end of each of the nine major sec- tions of the book. These sections are brief enough to be used essentially in the usual bibliographical sense. However, the commentary form permits an evalua- tion which gives the reader even more of an insight into the values and relationships of the various vol- umes, studies, and periodicals cited than does the usual formal annotation system.

The handbook was commissioned by The Fund for the Republic. It should be eloquent testimony for that embattled organization's case before men who are able to discern real values in these somewhat troubled times.

CHARLES E. HIGBIE University of Wisconsin

COMMUNISM, CONFORMITY, AND CMIL LIBERTIES. By Samuel A. Stouffer. New York: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1955. 278 pp. $4.00.

Samuel Stouffer asked and answered some extremely significant questions in his book on civil liberties. His study was conducted during a time when many were gravely concerned about the way in which a small group of national political figures were opportunisti- cally using the "threat of Communist movement" to destroy basic American liberties. How widespread were American fears of Communism? Who were the most fearful? How tolerant were our people of non- conformists? Did leaders and average citizens agree in their opinions on these questions? These were a few of the pertinent questions asked by the Stouffer re- searches.

The answers to the questions were a wealth of clean air in a fouled atmosphere of distrust and suspicion. The people, it was found, were not nearly so hysterical and excited about the Communist menace as they were about a number of more down to earth questions affecting their personal lives. The leaders of the people were even less excited. American citizens were less conformist and docile in their thinking habits than was being assumed-even in some quarters of the in- tellectual world. The study is one of the marks in the turning point away from post-war fear, guilt, and hysteria. It was conceived in the scholarly tradition of a genuine search for truth, and has turned out to be a classic example of fruitfulness of soundly projected social science. Its scope of study was nationwide, but its message can give comfort to the world.

Beyond its average citizen appeal, the Stouffer book is an exposition of clear, concise social science data

classification, and its method suggests that American society is amenable to precise study.

FLOYD HuNTER University of North Carolina

MODERN PUBLIC OPINION. By William Albig. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1956. 518 pp. $6.50.

Part Five of this volume, the section on Mass Media, makes it worthwhile having as collateral read- ing for interested students or for lecturers seeking quick, lucid vivifications of a topic. Part Six, Theories and Issues, contains the germ of a social philosophy of public opinion, probably worth reflective discussion. Unfortunately, these parts are plastered on the main text as a set of not very closely related aphorisms, differing greatly in level of sophistication. A seminar in political or social philosophy might profitably try to make more rigorous the theses stated therein.

I can find no meaningful central theme in the first 368 pages. Why this topic or stress rather than that? How is the section on legend related to the section on perception and how is either related to the rather de- tailed description of public opinion polls? (I am a pollster myself by profession; but I see no great value for the nontechnical student in all this detail on polls.) What indeed is the reason why the student is sup- posed to read about any of these things except that the writer regards them as classifiable under the head- ing, "public opinion"?

Of course, a competent teacher can establish rela- tionships and give reasons. But he would not be helped by this book, as he would by many of the selec- tions in Berelson and Janowitz; and he would probably be best advised to teach a course in public opinion from one of the better social psychology texts, joined with a text on political parties and pressure groups or from a selection of readings of his own choosing on political behavior.

Many textbooks are valuable as compilations or syntheses of knowledge in the field. This volume is too uneven to be so characterized; for instance, in Chapter IV the author scolds political scientists for not fol- lowing up Rice's "pioneer" studies in the geography of voting (p. 68) without betraying any awareness that the French work in this field, following Siegfried, has been far more voluminous than our own, and that there have been at least twenty-five significant con- tributions in English in this field since the end of World War II. He falls into unproved generalizations, such as "personification is psychologically inevitable." (p. 87) Is there cross-cultural and cross-class evidence for this? If so, it should be cited. He fails to illustrate awareness of the different senses of the term "seman- tics" in current writing on language. (p. 99) This is not to say that the book is peculiarly inaccurate; but merely it is not precise enough as a synthesis to com- pensate for weaknesses as a text.

LEWIS ANTHONY DEXTER Bstinn. Ma.sachusepis

T1E POWER ELITE. By C. Wright Mills. New York: Oxford University Press, 1956. 423 pp. $6.00.

In the United States there are three important domains which come together at the pinnacle in the

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288 SOCIAL FORCES

form of an interlocked power elite. The coming to- gether is reflected in the interactions and shared atti- tudes and ideology of the big industrialist, the member of the presidential cabinet or similar top level political executive (including the president himself), and the general-who represent the three institutional domains which contribute to, or constitute the pyramid of power. Thus does C. Wright Mills view American politics in the mid-twentieth century. His book is an elaboration of this view; a discussion of the genesis, consequences and morality of such a political organi- zation of society. His value position is such that he appraises the relatively new power elite in a negative sense, and this reviewer suspects that his moral feel- ings lead him to a certain repetitiveness in his analysis. Time and time again he repeats his view of who and what the power elite is and does. He thereby offers the reader an opportunity to react repeatedly in a horri- fied or antagonistic fashion to these images.

Yet there is another possible reason for his repeti- tiveness, and one that goes to the heart of his analytic problem. There is a lack of data bearing on Mills' conception of the power elite-at least a lack of rela- tively systematic, empirical data about both the de- velopment of the power elite and its dynamics. For validation or reformulation of Mills' conceptions we must have such data, at least on dynamics: on the interrelationships of members of the power elite, and on the relationships of members of the power elite with middle and lower levels of the power structure.

Political scientists will no longer quarrel with the notion of a power structure, at least those political scientists who are of the "political behavior" school. This fundamentally sociological level of abstraction quite clearly is useful, even if someone is primarily concerned with political action or problem-solving in- stead of with the scientific study of politics. But the adequacy of a particular conception of a power struc- ture is at issue: to what extent is the shape of that structure accurate, and to what extent do we adequately understand the functioning of politics in order to dia- gram the static aspect: the structure.

The basic inadequacy is not so much reflected in such notions that Congress, for example, is relatively low in the present power structure, although the actual relationships between Congressmen, the military, and top-level industrialists are not adequately discussed by Mills and, in fact, have not yet been adequately stud- ied. The inadequacy is perhaps clearest in the relation- ships Mills sees between the modern "mass society" and the power elite. Mills says that "The idea of a mass society suggests the idea of an elite of power." In fact the two conceptions are necessarily related in Mills' view. Without a mass society in the way Mills defines it we could not have a power elite, and vice versa. A number of reviewers have taken Mills to task for various aspects of his treatment of the power elite, but almost everyone has accepted his conception of the mass society. Political sociology today, whether of the Mills-Riesman speculative essay type, or of the Lazars- feld empirical school, has as its conceptual corner-stone the notion of a mass society. Without going into de- tails of definition, the question that must be asked is to what extent the routinized, apathetic, superficially edu-

cated, other-directed metropolitan man is so different from his counterpart of the eighteenth and early nine- teenth century in the United States? More important, to what extent does the conception of the mass man accurately mirror real men, in terms of their political behavior as well as their personality? The concept of the mass society needs specification into its component parts, and then operationalizing for systematic study. It may be that even though certain percentages of cer- tain populations share certain mass characteristics, the operation of reality-oriented expectations on the part of a certain portion of the populace is sufficient to result in the sort of political structure termed by Dahl and Lindblom "polyarchy"-a far cry from Mills' power elite concept.

Regardless of the need for further clarification and probably reformulation of Mills' analysis, his book is important. It should stimulate the reader to ask for fur- ther information, and hopefully, to collect such infor- mation. It is also important in the sense of being the sort of focus so desperately needed by political reform- ers today. In this era of moderation and high living such people are either driftless or expend mountains of energy on the solution of minute governmental prob- lems whose causes are frequently far removed from the administrative reorganizations or legal reformulations so dear to their hearts as appropriate solutions. Our current passion for precision in political analysis and antagonism to political movements can use the sort of antidote offered by Mills if political liberalism in the finest old-fashioned sense is to survive.

ROBERT E. AGGER University of North Carolina

WORK AND AuTHORITY IN INDUSTRY. Ideologies of Management in the Course of Industrialization. By Reinhard Bendix. New York: John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 1956. 466 pp. $7.50.

The ideologies used by industrial managers to justify their authority differ according to the social contexts in which they arise. The ideology of early industrializa- tion, when entrepreneurs are just arising as a class and workers are a new and rootless proletariat, differs from that of an entrenched managerial bureaucracy dealing with an established working class. The ideology of au- tonomous managers dealing with free workers differs from the managerial beliefs of a society whose managers and workers are both subject to the all-embracing au- thority of the state. Professor Bendix brings an enor- mous array of historical and documentary material, and a keenness of insight, to bear on four contrasting case studies which illustrate the above thesis: England up to the mid-nineteenth century (early industry, au- tonomous managers), Tsarist Russia (early industry, managers subordinate to the state), the United States in the twentieth century (mature industry, autonomous managers), and the Soviet Zone of Germany (mature industry, managers subordinate to the state).

To summarize briefly is to oversimplify, but the main threads of analysis run as follows: In England, entrepreneurs justified their displacement of the aris- tocracy from power and their harsh control over the workers by claiming that entrepreneurs deserved to rule because of their superior prudence and self-discipline,

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