I was studying sociology in the graduate program at Harvard, where themes like class, gender and race were assiduously underemphasized. By the time I heard Mills speak, at a meeting of the Eastern Sociological Society in 1948, he had become exceedingly pessimistic about the liberating power of thought. Mills’s earliest academic work was on American pragmatism, which he viewed as our way of connecting present and future, a dramaturgy of historical purpose. I was 18 at the time and thought there was nothing better than becoming an intellectual–and I suppose I had John Dewey’s influence on the New Deal generation in mind.
It was an essay on the plight of the intellectuals. Wright Mills in Dwight Macdonald’s all too short-lived journal Politics in 1944.
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