¹ Cf. also p. 73.

² Here are a few instances of the manner in which that great language is used for clear expression: “Power … has to do with whatever decisions men make about the arrangements under which they live” (p. 40); “The classic practitioner verifies a statement by detailed exposition of whatever materials are relevant” (p. 126); “Ours seems to be a period in which key decisions or their lack by bureaucratically instituted elites are increasingly sources of historical change” (pp. 115–16). (Italics added.) Terms like “structural mechanics,” “structural transformations,” “generic unit,” abound and show that vigorous expression is fully compatible with portentous ambiguity.

³ Also p. 148.

⁴ In principle, Professor Mills's own position, in other parts of his argument and above all in his rejection of “grand theory” and his preference for “middle principles,” should render acceptable the limited temporal aspiration which characterizes “abstracted empiricism.”

⁵ It is hard to know how seriously to take Professor Mills on this. On page 32, he says that Professor Parsons' problem is “How is social order possible?” I would readily agree that this is Professor Parsons' problem; but Professor Mills surely must accept it as an important one. Otherwise, how can one impute to him a rational ground for his own concern with power?

⁶ Professor Mills implies that sociology has more to gain from a hostile attitude toward the existing order than from uncritical incorporation into it. It is true that, in taking this position, he stands in a distinguished tradition. Nonetheless, neither his viewpoint nor its opposite is correct. Neither the unqualified hatred of the outsider nor the uncritical affirmation of the patriot opens the path to truth about society.

⁷ Professor Mills certainly must believe that there are possibilities of development inherent in a system of cultural values—otherwise, how could he claim to believe in the value of reason and the freedom to exercise it, or why should he proclaim his adherence to the “classic tradition” of sociological analysis which he believes he is extending in accordance with the dictates of reason?

⁸ Naturally, I do not for a moment concur with Professor Mills's preposterous assertion that the general theory is the association and dissociation of concepts. It is an effort to discern and delineate the most essential elements in the most simple model of a social system and then, by the successive addition of complicating elements, to build up a differentiated picture of the working of a society. It is, accordingly, a set of categories which designate the variables that constitute social systems and societies. The variables possess dynamic properties; the scheme is therefore not merely classificatory.

⁹ Only small, unreal, trivial things are capable of exact analysis.

¹⁰ “It is his job to make that structure explicit and to study it as a whole” (pp. 78–79).

¹¹ Although, strangely enough, he says that it is not necessary to know American history in order to understand American society (pp. 156–57)!

¹² He is rightly skeptical about the validity of any laws which are asserted from the general theory or from systematic empirical research. But does he know of any really valid laws of particular epochs, including his own apocalyptic visions of contemporary Western society?

¹³ “The idea of some ‘human nature’ common to man as man is a violation of the social and historical specificity that careful work in the human studies requires; at the very least, it is an abstraction that social students have not earned the right to make” (p. 164).

¹⁴ The informed reader will soon recognize the identity of Professor Mills's historicism with that of Karl Mannheim as he expounded it in Man and Society in an Age of Transformation, London, 1940, Part IV, “Thought at the Level of Planning.” The foundations of Professor Mills's position are clearly delineated and emphatically criticized in Professor Popper's The Poverty of Historicism, London, 1957.

¹⁵ Professor Mills's recommendation that sociologists help ordinary men to translate their “private troubles” into public issues is reminiscent of the Marxian idea of “false consciousness” and its transformation into “class consciousness” through the adoption of the Marxian oudook.

¹⁶ He does make a good point when he observes that one of the most famous voting studies did not study the role of the party machine “in getting out the vote” (p. 50)! Yet how could he have any sympathy for voting studies, which show that much of the individual's decision as to which party he will vote for is a function of traditionally accepted religious affiliations, of vaguely conceived class identifications and interests, and of the traditional orientations of urban, small town, and rural life? These studies support neither the view that people are coerced or manipulated nor the view that they are rootless, traditionless, beliefless, frightened “mass men.”

¹⁷ Professor Mills does not say here whether the investigators who attempt to realize this program will be able to dispense with the techniques which have been developed by “abstracted empiricism.” They certainly will not if they are to do a good job.

¹⁸ These spheres were, it seems, co-ordinated into a relatively ordered society by the identity of orientation of men in the different spheres—a very anomalous occurrence from the standpoint of one who vigorously denies the autonomy of value orientations as well as the possibility of a consensus of value orientations. Are we to infer that the general theory of action is applicable to nineteenth-century liberal society but not to the twentieth century?

¹⁹ Professor Mills thinks that “facts” only discipline “ideas” (p. 71). Do they not also stimulate them? He regards the results of sociological research only as epiphenomena of no intrinsic or scientific value. This is quite in agreement with the general disposition of his thought. Yet, on page 74, he seems to believe that “detailed investigations” ought to be used to “reshape ideas.” This is only one more instance of the slapdash way in which Professor Mills deals with complicated problems.

²⁰ Professor Mills says that every man should be his own theorist. In one sense he is correct. No theory is worth anything unless it becomes the theory of the person who uses it, i.e., unless it has been deeply assimilated and adapted to that person's own mind and relationship to reality. Otherwise, it remains a set of phrases. One of the defects of our general theory is that it is difficult for young people to assimilate it selectively and individually.

²¹ I agree with Professor Mills in his aversion to a technological sociology which would be at the disposal of the powerful for the manipulation of their subjects. It is, however, an unnecessary anxiety which he feels. Sociological knowledge is nowhere near the condition in which it could be used manipulatively, as can pharmacology or neurology. It is strange that he should be concerned about this subjection of empirical research to the manipulators when he thinks that its truth value is so negligible.

²² For example, American sociology of the period prior to abstracted empiricism and grand theory is derogated as “liberal practicality”; and, though he regards “liberal practicality” as better than the “illiberal practicality” of technocratic “abstracted empiricism,” he regards it as very little better.