Suchergebnisse

An obituary for Flora Wright, last surviving child of Iowa politician General Ed Wright.

A review essay covering a book by Lawrence Wright, Thirteen Days in September: Carter, Begin, and Sadat at Camp David (2014).

There has been a revival of interest in Charles Wright Mills by professional sociologists, who reject him because he was a political utopian, & by radical thinkers, who idealize him as an important purveyor of the US radical intellectual tradition. These two interpretations are critically examined in Irving L. Horowitz's C. Wright Mills: An American Utopian (see IRPS No. 20/83c00291) & Rick Tilman's C. Wright Mills: A Native Radical and His American Intellectual Roots (University Park, Pa, 1984). The difficulty of politically classifying Mills is stressed. Mills was an independent intellectual who utilized the classics & tools of social science to subject US society to an immanent critique from the normative viewpoint of liberal values: individualism, craftsmanship, & democratic publics. Mills was a classic liberal whose social critique was built from a theory of social rationalization that his own political generation had falsely identified as the achievements of modernity. Mills's work demonstrates the necessity & possibility of a publicly relevant sociology as both the ends & means of a society's normative traditions, critically reinterpreted as public dialogue. AA