It makes a considerable amount of sense for Stanley Aronowitz to write a book about C. Wright Mills. Mills was an academic who turned radical; Aronowitz a radical turned academic. Both became professors of sociology, one (Mills) at Columbia, the other (Aronowitz) at the City University of New York. Two years before he died, Mills wrote “A Letter to the New Left,” and in doing so became one of the first intellectuals to recognize that the end of consensus-type politics in both Britain and the United States might bring about a new radicalism. Aronowitz then became an activist in that very New Left. “My own insights, as a result of my own experience as a worker, as a trade unionist, and as an activist,” he told the Brooklyn Rail in conjunction with the publication of Taking It Big, “were stimulated and, to some extent, guided by Mills's example.”

Mills “took it big” on a number of subjects: organized labor, the new middle class, the structure of power in the United States, and U.S. foreign policy. These, with the possible exception of the last, are subjects with which Aronowitz has concerned himself throughout his career. One purpose Aronowitz sets out for himself in Taking it Big is to review the substance of what Mills had to say in those books: despite their age, Aronowitz believes, much of what appears in them remains relevant. His other purpose is to use Mills's career to reflect on what it means to be an engaged political intellectual in American society.

Of the trilogy that established Mills as an important social critic, New Men of Power, his analysis of the American labor movement, is the least known. For that reason, perhaps, Aronowitz's chapter on that book is the best in his book. Published in 1948, Mills's book raised major questions about the strategy pursued by key labor leaders such as Walter Reuther in the years after World War II. Reuther wagered that labor and management could find ways to further both profits for the companies and benefits for the workers simultaneously. It worked—so long as economic growth was sustained at home and foreign competition remained negligible from abroad. Ultimately, however, a price was paid for labor-management cooperation, and workers, even more than labor leaders, paid it. Indeed even in his earliest work, Mills had identified organized labor as part of the power elite. At the present time, when organized labor is so thoroughly on the defensive, Mills's analysis, and Aronowitz's commentary on it, are more than worth revisiting.

I was less impressed by Aronowitz's discussion of White Collar and The Power Elite, in part because so much has been said about these two books that not much more can be added. (I had my say on the latter book as a preface to Oxford University Press's republication of The Power Elite in 2000). Of the two, White Collar, Aronowitz argues, “may be Mills's greatest book” (133) and its last chapter “perhaps Mills's sharpest statement on the state of U.S. politics” (141). I find this characterization somewhat odd in that White Collar is also Mills's most depressing book. For all his enthusiasm for a new radical politics, Mills could at times write with such despair at the state of American society that there seemed no possible way out; radicalism can produce the very apathy that Mills constantly denounced. In both books, Mills's attraction to what was then called “the theory of mass society” is pronounced. The first chapter of Daniel Bell's The End of Ideology is a critique of the theory of mass society, and I think Bell had it right when he said “it is at heart a defense of an aristocratic cultural tradition” that “often becomes a conservative defense of privilege.”

Aronowitz has a different view. “Mills's exploration of the new middle class,” he writes, “marks his becoming a public, political intellectual, a situation that most of his colleagues scrupulously avoided … (149).” Note the terminology here. A public intellectual, as I understand the term, comments on all matters of human concern, including culture, the mass media, the family, and religion, while a political intellectual writes primarily about politics. Public intellectuals tend to remain above the fray, while political intellectuals feel the need to identify with a movement or a party. Political intellectuals, in that sense, run bigger risks than public intellectuals: if the movement that attracts them becomes corrupted by its quest for power or turns against its earlier positions in search of new ones, the intellectuals attracted to it can be left twisting in the wind.

Mills was far more a political intellectual than a public one. While never attracted to communism (although he did make some embarrassing comments to the effect that there was little difference between the United States and the U.S.S.R.) he did identify with third world movements, including the Cuban Revolution, one reason his late-in-life pamphlets on foreign policy are more examples of screed than analysis. But the problem goes deeper than this. The mission of the political intellectual, Aronowitz writes, “was to expose the distortions, half-truths, and outright lies that were the steady diet offered by official propaganda. Moreover, the political intellectual is one who offers ruthless criticism of the way we live. For Mills, becoming a political intellectual was, first and foremost, a moral obligation to one's self as much as to society (190).”

I wish Aronowitz had engaged in more criticism—not necessarily ruthless—of this way of thinking. Exposition is not the same as analysis. Criticizing official propaganda too often winds up as unofficial propaganda. An obligation to the self is another term for narcissism. While Mills will always be remembered as a great stylist—some of the chapters in The Sociological Imagination are a joy to read—and while he had much of value to say about trends in American life, he is unlikely to achieve the status of a great social theorist because too much of his work reads as propaganda in reverse. Aronowitz wants to view Mills as a philosopher in the tradition of American pragmatism, the subject of his dissertation. But I expect that William James and John Dewey will still be read when Mills is forgotten.

For all that, Taking It Big is worth reading. Aronowitz has more than done his homework; all of Mills's major books, and not just those I have discussed here, are given careful attention. Aronowitz has his own comments to make about American society in the Bush and Obama years, and if we do not have Mills around to comment on such matters, we do have Aronowitz. There is a chapter in Aronowitz's book on New York intellectuals that strikingly attributes Mills's decision not to join in what he called “the American celebration” because, Texas-born, he had no need to assimilate into American life as so many of his Jewish contemporaries did. Although Mills is unlikely to join the pantheon of great sociological thinkers, there is plenty of interest in him now. Taking It Big is a good introduction to the thoughts of one political radical written by another.