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

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