{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.029055690072639227, 'fraction_numerical': 0.014527845036319613, 'mean_word_length': 4.953890489913545, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
C. Wright Mills and American Democracy

Do the writings of C. Wright Mills, largely published in the 1950s, have anything to offer to the discussion about the condition and possibilities of egalitarian democratic politics during a period of conservative and corporate domination in the United States? In the last decade interest in the work of Mills, who died in 1962 at age 45, has revived. In 2000 a collection of his letters and unpublished writings was published in a volume edited by his daughters Kathryn Mills and Pamela Mills, offering a fresh and vivid portrait of Mills’s character, politics, and intellectual development. The New Men of Power (1948), White Collar (1951), The Power Elite (1956) and The Sociological Imagination (1959) were republished in new editions with essays by prominent scholars Nelson Lichtenstein, Russell Jacoby, Alan Wolfe, and Todd Gitlin, respectively. New Left activist Tom Hayden’s MA thesis on Mills has been published in book form, with contemporary reflections by sociologists and activists Dick Flacks, Stanley Aronowitz, and Charles Lemert, as well as by Hayden himself. Even the New York Times Book Review published a respectful article on the importance and relevance of The Power Elite. Mills was best known for his studies of the American power elite and the new middle classes, and as a champion of a “sociological imagination” that linked individual experience to historical process. But underlying all of Mills’s work, in my view, is a normative vision of radical, egalitarian democracy. As his friend Ralph Miliband put it, Mills’s “political point of reference . . . was the need for democratic participation at all levels and at all points of decision making, industrial as well as political, on the job as well as in the polling-booth.” While Mills was increasingly interested in Marxism, and his last book was about The Marxists, his democratic views were rooted in an American radical tradition and influenced by figures such as Thorstein Veblen, John Dewey, and George Herbert Mead. As political theorist