Taking it big [[electronic resource] ] : C. Wright Mills and the making of political intellectuals / / Stanley Aronowitz

• Record Nr.: UNINA9910452852803321
• Autore: Aronowitz Stanley
• Pubbl/distr/stampa: New York, : Columbia University Press, c2012
• ISBN: 0-231-50950-2
• Descrizione fisica: 1 online resource (289 p.)
• Disciplina: 302.12
• Soggetti: Social psychology - United States; Social structure - United States; Electronic books.
• Lingua di pubblicazione: Inglese
• Formato: Materiale a stampa
• Livello bibliografico: Monografia
• Note generali: Description based upon print version of record.
• Nota di bibliografia: Includes bibliographical references and index.
• Nota di contenuto: Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface and Acknowledgments -- Introduction and Overview -- 1. Mills's Sociology and Pragmatism -- 2. Mills and the New York Intellectuals -- 3. On Mills's The New Men of Power -- 4. White Collar -- 5. On Social Psychology and Its Historical Contexts: The Origin of Psychology as an Independent Discipline -- 6. The Structure of Power in American Society -- 7. What Is a Political Intellectual? -- 8. Taking It Big -- Afterword: Mills Today -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index
• Sommario/riassunto: C. Wright Mills (1916-1962) was a pathbreaking intellectual who transformed the independent American Left in the 1940s and 1950s. Often challenging the established ideologies and approaches of fellow leftist thinkers, Mills was central to creating and developing the idea of the "public intellectual" in postwar America and laid the political foundations for the rise of the New Left in the 1960s. Written by Stanley Aronowitz, a leading sociologist and critic of American culture and politics, Taking It Big reconstructs this icon's formation and the new dimension of American political life that followed his work.Aronowitz revisits Mills's education and its role in shaping his outlook and intellectual restlessness. Mills defined himself as a maverick, and Aronowitz tests this claim (which has been challenged in recent years) against the work and thought of his contemporaries. Aronowitz ; describes Mills's growing circle of contacts among the New York Intellectuals and his efforts to reenergize the Left by encouraging a fundamentally new theoretical orientation centered on more ambitious critiques of U.S. society. Blurring the rigid boundaries among philosophy, history, and social theory and between traditional orthodoxies and the radical imagination, Mills became one of the most admired and controversial thinkers of his time and was instrumental in inspiring the student and antiwar movements of the 1960s. In this book, Aronowitz not only reclaims this critical thinker's reputation but also emphasizes his ongoing significance to debates on power in American democracy.