In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Radical Nomad: C. Wright Mills and His Times
  • Alan Sica
Radical Nomad: C. Wright Mills and His Times. By Tom Hayden. Paradigm Publishers, 2006. 212 pages. $65 (cloth), $18.95 (paper)

A first glance at this book might give the impression of a nostalgia-fest for those of a certain age – born, say, in the mid 1930s – who were young enough to look up to Mills as a hero, but old enough not to be too damagingly swept into the '60s inferno themselves. Their ages also kept them from service in either WWII or Korea, and by the time Viet Nam erupted, they were too old to be drafted – in some ways a lucky generation. The first 53 pages of this 212-page book are given over to remembrances by three members of this cohort, Richard Flacks, Stanley Aronowitz and Charles Lemert; the book appears in a new series edited by the latter. Flacks' observations (19 pages) are straightforward and contextualizing, with "What Mills Got Wrong" taking pride of place. He acknowledges Mills' importance, but without adoration. Aronowitz's comments (6 pages) are autobiographical and pointed: "Radical Nomad is simply the best and fullest exposition and criticism of Mills' theory of power we have." (24). He knew Tom Hayden personally at the time the master's thesis, which became the book, was written.

Most interesting of the three prefaces is Lemert's, not only because of its relative length (27 pages), but due to its happily elegiac quality. It amounts in places to a prose-poem to memory, of a time that seemed in part incomprehensibly conformist – college sock hops and frat parties – but which turned into something quite different as the late '50s became the '60s. For readers who can understand subtle implication, there's a lot going on in Lemert's meditation, e.g., "At the limit of the absurd, some – who in the 1960s recused themselves to carrels to read Wittgenstein as a relief from Parsons – come forth with collected essays on how the sixties [End Page 1349] affected their thinking. One can only imagine!!"(29). Or, to choose from among many other possibilities, "An event like the death of Mills, a year like 1962, a conjunctural time like that of the 1960s, an enduring structure like that of the good half-millennium of the modern age are not so much the strain of incoherence toward a meaningful history as a clash of times (not, most certainly, of civilizations) that were once settled in far-flung places and today cannot keep themselves from joining together to kill or make love – the flatulence notwithstanding."(37)

The actual work on Mills composed by Tom Hayden when he was a political science master's degree candidate at the University of Michigan in 1962 begins on p. 71, after a few preliminary pages written recently by Hayden himself, and ends 131 pages later, including a long and useful bibliography regarding Mills. It is surely the best master's thesis I have ever read, and one which puts to shame what now passes at most universities for the same that one is reminded just how far the bar has been lowered for academic credentials since Hayden wrote it. (I say this having examined other master's theses of the same period, many of which were of similar length and seriousness.) Hayden's way of working is thorough, polite, firm and literate. He is also modest: "This is the first draft of an intellectual biography and a reflective essay."(193)

He begins with a welcome analysis of Mills' first published book, The New Men of Power (1948; reissued in 2001), appearing when Mills was 32. As ever fewer people know these days, it is a study of labor leaders between the 1930s and the postwar period. The principal worry that the leaders faced was how to maintain the labor radicalism of the '30s after the war ended and the seemingly inevitable GDP slump occurred. It was obvious to many observers that open collusion between FDR's government, large capital, and organized labor had made the war effort possible, and had reduced unemployment from 17.2 percent in 1939 to virtually zero...

pdf

Share