C. Wright Mills and the American Left

Abstract

It is natural that the Left in this country and elsewhere should feel an affinity with the work of C. Wright Mills. His values were those which have historically defined the Left. For Mills, as for the Left, the supreme values of human life were rationality and freedom. Rationality and freedom are the necessary conditions for the solution of the enormous problems facing mankind; even more, they are the quintessence of human nature. Mills was against those things which the Left is against: the corruption of modern society, the alienation of masses of people within, the vulgarization of life, the constriction of freedom, the drift toward slump and thermonuclear war. His works are replete with the disgust, the moral indignation, the sense of outrage, which have long been the motivating forces of the Left intellectual. And, finally, many intellectuals found in Mills a voice which, for once, had sufficient power and range to make some impact on the deafened ears of America.

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