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