whom he accused of abandoning their intellectual independence by joining the era’s American celebration. Schlesinger fired back, charging that Mills’s book seemed more intent on stirring the masses than on stimulating serious academic debate. “I look forward to the time when Mr. Mills hands back his prophet’s robes and settles down to being a sociologist again,” he wrote in the New York Post. Mills considered himself an intellectual loner—“I am a politician without a party,” he wrote in a letter. But The Power Elite touched a deep chord with a rising new generation of revolutionaries and
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