C. Wright Mills

C. Wright Mills was an American sociologist known for his sharply critical analyses of power and for urging sociology toward a more publicly engaged, historically grounded practice. In The Sociological Imagination (1959) he argued that the discipline's task is to connect personal troubles to broader public issues and historical structures, a stance he set against both abstract grand theory and narrow empiricism. In The Power Elite (1956) he argued that a relatively small, interlocking group of military, corporate, and political leaders had come to dominate decision-making in American society, a thesis that made him one of the most influential and contested critics of mid-century American sociology's consensus assumptions.