Tuesday, June 18, 2013

"Crackpot realism" (C. Wright Mills)

In his 1956 book, The Power Elite, Mills wrote: For the first time in American history, men in authority are talking about an 'emergency' without a foreseeable end... such men as these are crackpot realists: in the name of realism they have constructed a paranoid reality all their own.
Real Economics
Drinking from a firehose
Jonathan Larson

3 comments:

Unknown said...

The wicked flee when no one is pursuing, but the righteous are bold as a lion. Proverbs 28:1

Jan said...

Tom!Excellent.There is an excellent book by Prof.
Stanley Aronowitz at CUNY on C. Wright Mills as Public Intellectual
http://www.cupblog.org/?p=7511

“Mills is an exhilarating exemplar of the role and reach of the public radical intellectual and, at the same time, a sobering reminder of how far the human sciences have declined since the end of the Vietnam war.”—Stanley Aronowitz
and here is an article i think you like :http://www.logosjournal.com/aronowitz.htm
A Mills Revival?

by
Stanley Aronowitz
http://www.logosjournal.com/aronowitz.htm
"Perhaps you know Foucault’s remark that despite the torrent of criticism directed against his philosophical system, “Hegel prowls through the twentieth century.” Consigned to a kind of academic purgatory for the last three decades of the twentieth century, at a time when social theory had migrated from the social sciences obsessed with case studies and social “problems” to literature and philosophy where he was rarely discussed and almost never cited., C. Wright Mills was an absent presence.Mills’s work is experiencing a small but pronounced revival.

Tom Hickey said...

Thanks. I'll take a look.