Week 5 Readings 

The Power Elite

Mills

  • Power elite: men whose positions enable them to transcend the ordinary environments of ordinary men and women
    • Decisions = major consequences
    • Have power, wealth, and celebrity
  • Professional celebrities: have the power to distract the attention of the public to gain the ear of those who do occupy positions of direct power
  • Major institutions of modern society constitute the means of power
  • Power = economic, political, military
    • Major corporation
    • Military establishment
    • National Security Council

    → interlocking of those structures = triangle of power

  • Higher circles: make up the economic, political and military elites
    • Economic: chief executives
    • Political: political directorate
    • Military: Joint Chiefs of Staff
  • Top social stratum
  • Moral conception of the elite: many individuals of the upper stratum do come to approximate the types of character they claim to embody
  • Unity of the power elite
  • Power elites enact historical change

Power, Democracy, and Civil Society

HRS

  • Noted a contradiction between qualitative and quantitative methods
  • Relationship between capitalism and democracy
  • Democracy: is a matter of power and power-sharing
  • Clusters of power
    • Social classes
    • Structure of the state
    • International power relations

    → Are closely interrelated

  • Capitalism is related to democracy because it shifts the balance of class power, weakens the power of the landlord class and strengthens subordinate classes
    • Enlarges the working/middle class making it more difficult for elites to exclude them politically
  • Bourgeoisie = not a key component in the development of democracy

Hall

  • Civil society: a form of societal self-organization that allows for cooperation with the state while permitting individuation
  • Civility: based on the recognition of difference and diversity
  • Fashion: expressing yourself artistically in public
  • The diversity that is acceptable to civil society is within a particular world with its own boundaries
  • Civility: concerns the modern world
  • Civil society first emerged in Western Europe
  • Tragedy of European civilization: political elites that might have modernized their policies failed to do so
  • Civil society is only one option among others
    • It is an ideal born in the West