Cold War Communism
Considering the fall of Cold War communism and other notable events of the second half of the 20th century, C. Wright Mills' The Power Elite still seems to holds up on several points as read in the year 2002. Charles Mills died in 1962 at the age of 46 as a distinguished professor of sociology. He was a pragmatist and he was always concerned with real world problems. His writing style and attitude seems somewhat bitter today but I suppose the truth as he saw it was pretty dismal. In the excerpt from the book, he comes to a seemingly abrupt logical conclusion that there is no large-scale conspiracy by the power elite of America. In the unabridged version of The Power Elite he probably develops the reasoning more methodically. I believe his conclusion is correct, however I think it would have been interesting to get his take on events such as the Kennedy assassination - if he had only lived to see it and the contradictory ballistic evidence such as the Zapruder documentary film. I think he may have viewed the Kennedy assasination as an attempt by the military industrial complex to quell a politically popular leader who overstepped his bounds on various social issues of the day. In the very first paragraph Mills makes his opini
His careful analysis of social and political influence from the 1950s, I believe, holds true today: "[celebrities] . This reveals, it seems, his intimate and personal knowledge of our social and political cultures, as only an aloof intellectual could describe. edu/handbook/online/articles/view/MM/fmi37. Theodoulou, Stella, Public Policy: The Essential Readings, 1995 (Pearson)2. And it is true that our society has not had a feudal age as Europe did, but did "the revolutionary War put an end to colonial pretensions to nobility" as Mills claims? It seems to me that we have always had unofficial nobility whether through asset ownership, equity holdings, or high government office. Mills writes, "people are either accepted into this class or they are not, and there is a qualitative split . The economic elite is managed by the wealthy who attend Ivy League schools and become CEO's. All of the elites are interconnected although it is not very commonly documented. The recent Enron debacle could also back up his assertions about the far-reaching and corrupting influence of corporations and their executives upon government institutions. I think the reactions here on campus may be a reflection of the conservative leaning of this farm belt.
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Acceptance Essays
