The Power Elite Quotes

“People with advantages are loathe to believe that they just happen to be people with advantages. They come readily to define themselves as inherently worthy of what they possess; they come to believe themselves 'naturally' elite; and, in fact, to imagine their possessions and their privileges as natural extensions of their own elite selves.”
― C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite

“The idea that the millionaire finds nothing but a sad, empty place at the top of this society; the idea that the rich do not know what to do with their
money; the idea that the successful become filled up with futility, and that
those born successful are poor and little as well as rich - the idea, in short,
of the disconsolateness of the rich - is, in the main, merely a way by which
those who are not rich reconcile themselves to the fact. Wealth in America is
directly gratifying and directly leads to many further gratifications. To be
truly rich is to possess the means of realizing in big ways one's little whims
and fantasies and sicknesses....”
― C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite

“Once war was considered the business of soldiers, international relations the concern of diplomats. But now that war has become seemingly total and seemingly permanent, the free sport of kings has become the forced and internecine business of people, and diplomatic codes of honor between nations have collapsed. Peace in no longer serious; only war is serious. Every man and every nation is either friend or foe, and the idea of enmity becomes mechanical, massive, and without genuine passion. When virtually all negotiation aimed at peaceful agreement is likely to be seen as 'appeasement,' if not treason, the active role of the diplomat becomes meaningless; for diplomacy becomes merely a prelude to war an interlude between wars, and in such a context the diplomat is replaced by the warlord.”
― C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite

“Perhaps J. P. Morgan did as a child have very severe feelings of inadequacy, perhaps his father did believe that he would not amount to anything; perhaps this did effect in him an inordinate drive for power for power’s sake. But all this would be quite irrelevant had he been living in a peasant village in India in 1890. If we would understand the very rich we must first understand the economic and political structure of the nation in which they become the very rich.”
― Charles Wright Mills, The Power Elite

“The truth about the nature and the power of the elite is not some secret which men of affairs know but will not tell. ... No matter how great their actual power, they tend to be less acutely aware of it than of the resistance of others to its use.”
― C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite

“So speak in the rich, round voice and do not confuse your superiors with details. Know where to draw the line. Execute the ceremony of forming a judgment. Delay recognizing the choice you have already made, so as to make the truism sound like the deeply pondered notion. Speak like the quiet competent man of affairs and never personally say No. Hire the No-man as well as the Yes-man. Be the tolerant Maybe-man and they will cluster around you, filled with hopefulness. Practice softening the facts into the optimistic, practical, forward-looking, cordial, brisk view. Speak to the well-blunted point. Have weight; be stable: caricature what you are supposed to be but never become aware of it much less amused by it. And never let your brains show.”
― C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite

“The life-fate of the modern individual depends not only upon the family into which he was born or which he enters by marriage, but increasingly upon the corporation in which he spends the most alert hours of his best years….”
― C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite

“Historically, the warlords have been only uneasy, poor relations within the American elite; now they are first cousins; soon they may become elder brothers.”
― C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite

“navies have much less influence upon national social structures than armies often have, for they are not very useful as a means of repressing popular revolt.”
― C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite

“an ambiguous fact: it is that peace has been due to the centralization and monopoly of violence by the national state, but that the existence of a world now organized into some eighty-one such national states is also the prime condition of modern war.”
― C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite

“All politics is a struggle for power; the ultimate kind of power is violence. Why, then, is not military dictatorship the normal and usual form of government?”
― C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite

“That means that the corporate executives will not need to manage huge organizations of people; rather, in Business Week’s words, they will be ‘operating great mechanical organizations using fewer and fewer people.”
― C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite

“Most of the thirty-odd billion dollar corporations of today began in the nineteenth century. Their growth was made possible not only by machine technology but by the now primitive office instruments of typewriters, calculators, telephones, and rapid printing, and, of course, the transportation grid.”
― C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite

“They have also adopted every conceivable type of protective coloration for the essentially irresponsible nature of their power, creating the image of the small-town boy who made good, the ‘industrial statesman,’ the great inventor who ‘provides jobs,’ but who, withal, remains just an average guy.”
― C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite

“Not great fortunes, but great corporations are the important units of wealth, to which individuals of property are variously attached.”
― C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite

“That the social and economic split of the upper classes is also a political split is not yet fully apparent in all localities, but it is a fact that has tended to become national since World War”
― C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite

“If members of armies gave to them no more of their lives than do believers to the churches to which they belong, there would be a military crisis.”
― C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite

“SIXTY glittering, clannish families do not run the American economy, nor has there occurred any silent revolution of managers who have expropriated the powers and privileges of such families. The truth that is in both these characterizations is less adequately expressed as ‘America’s Sixty Families’ or ‘The Managerial Revolution,’ than as the managerial reorganization of the propertied classes into the more or less unified stratum of the corporate rich.”
― C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite

“But not Owen Young. During World War I and the ’twenties, he changed all that. To him, the corporation was a public institution, and its leaders, although not of course elected by the public, were responsible trustees. ‘A big business in Owen D. Young’s mind is not … a private business … it is an institution.”
― C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite

“It is below the top levels, it is where the management hierarchies are specialized and varied by industrial line and administrative contour, that the more ‘bureaucratic’ types of executives and technicians live their corporate lives. And it is below the top levels, in the domain of the Number Two men, that responsibility is lodged. The Number One stratum is often too high to be blamed and has too many others below it to take the blame. Besides, if it is the top, who is in a position to fix the blame upon its members? It is something like the ‘line’ and ‘staff’ division invented by the army. The top is staff; the Number Two is line, and thus operational. Every bright army officer knows that to make decisions without responsibility, you get on the staff.”
― C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite

“It is of the Number One stratum that the very rich and the chief executives are a part. The Number Two men are individually responsible for given units, plants, departments. They stand between the active working hierarchies and the directing top to which they are responsible. And in their monthly and yearly reports to the top executives, one simple set of questions is foremost: Did we make money: If so, how much? If not, why not?”
― C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite

“Both the advancement of the chief executives and the accumulations of the very rich, on the higher levels, are definitely mixed up in a ‘political’ world of corporate cliques. To advance within and between private corporate hierarchies means to be chosen for advancement by your superiors—administrative and financial—and there are no strict, impersonal rules of qualifications or seniority known to all concerned in this process.”
― C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite

“There is the bureaucratic crawl and there is the entrepreneurial leap. But there is also the deal of the fixer, the coup of the promoter, the maneuver of the clique. Words like entrepreneur and bureaucrat are no more adequate to convey the realities of the higher corporate career than of the appropriation of great fortunes. They are, as we have noted in connection with the very rich, middle-class words, and retain the limitations of middle-class perspectives.”
― C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite

“The taking of a clerical or, much better, a labor job for awhile ‘to learn the business’ is often a sort of ritual for some families and some companies. At any rate, more of the chief executives started on the executive level; more of the younger men started in the more specialized departments. For example, over one-third of those under 50 had a position in ‘sales’ just before their top jobs.”
― C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite

“Today, the success of the corporation depends to a considerable extent upon minimizing its tax burden, maximizing its speculative projects through mergers, controlling government regulatory bodies, influencing state and national legislatures. Accordingly, the lawyer is becoming a pivotal figure in the giant corporation.”
― C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite

“The top executives of the big companies are not, and never have been, a miscellaneous collection of Americans; they are a quite uniform social type which has had exceptional advantages of origin and training, and they do not fit many of the stereotypes that prevail about them.”
― C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite

“Not ‘Wall Street financiers’ or bankers, but large owners and executives in their self-financing corporations hold the keys of economic power. Not the politicians of the visible government, but the chief executives who sit in the political directorate, by fact and by proxy, hold the power and the means of defending the privileges of their corporate world.”
― C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite

“the enormous size of the modern corporation cannot be explained as due to increased efficiency; many specialists regard the size now typical of the giants as already in excess of the requirements of efficiency. In truth, the relationship of corporate size to efficiency is quite unknown; moreover, the scale of the modern corporation is usually due more to financial and managerial amalgamations than to technical efficiency.”
― C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite

“What the old guard represents is the outlook, if not always the intelligent interests, of the more narrow economic concerns. What the business liberals represent is the outlook and the interests of the newer propertied class as a whole.”
― C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite

“Have not these chief executives carried through a silent revolution, a managerial revolution from the top, and has not their revolution transformed the very meaning of property? Are not, in short, the old expropriators now expropriated by their salaried managers? Maybe the chief executives are trustees for a variety of economic interests, but what are the checks upon how fair and well they perform their trusts? And was it not the state, subject to the control of a free electorate, that was to be the responsible trustee, the impartial umpire, the expert broker of conflicting interests and contending powers?”
― C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite