This essay argues that C. Wright Mills's 1956 work The Power Elite remains strikingly relevant to contemporary American society. It traces Mills's central thesis — that political, corporate, and military elites share overlapping economic interests and fluid membership — and applies it to modern developments such as the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, the post-9/11 expansion of government surveillance powers, and ongoing U.S. military engagements. The essay also engages briefly with Marxist critiques of Mills, particularly those associated with Max Weber, and defends Mills's multi-causal framework against purely economic reductionism.
A half-century after it was written, C. Wright Mills's The Power Elite remains relevant to American society. Mills's analysis of the ways in which powerful people in different sectors of society share economic interests — and thereby share concepts and access to power — remains true of the United States today. We can see many of the same dynamics at work in the current political moment. While some of the key particulars of American society have changed since Mills wrote, the way in which power interests intersect and reinforce each other has not.
Mills wrote The Power Elite in the aftermath of World War II. By 1956, the year of publication, much of the country had moved on to what its citizens believed would be generations of peace and prosperity. Mills's view of society, however, was that there were important holdovers from the war economy and the social priorities that had arisen during the war — holdovers that were growing in strength rather than dissipating or diminishing.
The demographics of power that had been solidified during the war had been profitable for all participants. Political leaders had joined with corporate and military leaders to guide the nation through war, while also benefiting themselves in the process. Members of one of these three groups were often, in fact, members of the other groups as well, with very fluid divisions among the three clusters of power holders. In the same way that government officials today move into lobbying and corporate roles and back again through numerous permutations, the members of the three elite groups Mills described slipped back and forth from one group to another.
Mills was not necessarily seeking to vilify these elites. He acknowledged that leaders in these three sectors of society could act in honorable ways; however, he also noted that there were no structural mechanisms to ensure that they did so. Given that power tends to corrupt — a view Mills shared with George Orwell — there was a significant likelihood that leaders in these three segments would act less and less honorably over time, increasingly looking after their own interests and growing less concerned with using their power for the good of democracy.
Mills focused on these ideas in Chapters 12 and 15 of The Power Elite, arguing, among other points, that American society had lost many of the most important checks and balances that the Framers had built into the Constitution. One of the key changes Mills identifies in Chapter 12 — a change that shifted the nature of power in American society and granted a vastly larger share of power to the elites — was that corporations were given the legal status of personhood during the nineteenth century. This development fundamentally altered the relationship between private economic power and democratic governance, providing corporations with legal protections originally intended for individual citizens.
"Supreme Court ruling expands corporate campaign influence"
"War benefits elites and justifies growing government authority"
"Mills rejects purely economic reductionism as oversimplistic"
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