Permanent Stranger

"C. Wright Mills was one of the most fascinating personalities in recent American intellectual history," Daniel Geary observes in Radical Ambition. "However, a full understanding of his ideas and their historical significance has been obscured by a captivating caricature of him as a motorcycle-riding maverick, a lone dissident from the conservative complacency of the cold war era" (p. 1).

Geary is a good writer, a diligent researcher, and an honest scholar, all of which mark Radical Ambition as a departure. Mills has been the subject of ad hominem attacks, shoddy scholarship, and political simplification since his death in 1962. One has despaired of a decent study to argue over. Geary takes judicious measure of the historiography but builds his own portrait from letters, manuscripts, and autobiographical writings, published and unpublished. He offers assessments of Mills' major writings, giving special attention to his education at the Universities of Texas and Wisconsin as well as his later tutorials among European émigrés and New York intellectuals. And Geary makes an overdue case for Mills as a global thinker.

I have toiled in the same archives, grappled with the same sprawling oeuvre, and interviewed some of the same people. So believe me when I swear that emerging in such fine shape is no minor achievement. Mills is indeed "one of the most fascinating personalities in recent American intellectual history." He is also, by the same token, one of our most elusive subjects.

Radical Ambition is not the first book to challenge Mills' status as a radical icon, but it is the first to stand self-consciously beyond the New Left generation. Geary, a young historian who teaches at Trinity College, Dublin, argues against the image left by Stanley Aronowitz, Todd Gitlin, Tom Hayden, Russell Jacoby, James Miller, and other veterans of the 1960s. Their mythos may have been useful in the past, he says, but should be seen as a fiction in the clear-eyed present. "The common interpretation of Mills as a maverick traces the critical power of Mills's writings directly to his personal iconoclasm, his refusal to work within the parameters of the political categories or sociological thought of his time. Yet Mills's thought was far more characteristic of his era than has been recognized. If we see his ideas as emanating primarily from his heroic personality, then we miss their grounding in larger cultural and political trends" (p. 3).

Geary wants to put Mills in his time and place not to undermine the power of his thought or example, but to strengthen them by showing the conditions under which they operated. He refuses to assign a neat and tidy ideological label ("disillusioned radicalism" is the closest he comes), and he sees the methodological continuity of the sociology of knowledge all through Mills' writings. How many smug critics have derided Listen, Yankee: The Revolution in Cuba, as an instance of leftist psychopathology, evidence of anti-Americanism and totalitarian longing in the same measure? Geary has plenty of criticism for the book, but he still sees its origins in Mills' project on "the cultural apparatus." Here, as elsewhere, Radical Ambition refuses to take the cheap shot.

The argument itself is unconvincing, in part because the book is too short and its coverage is too uneven to sustain its premises. The first half, beginning in the 1930s and ending in 1948, traces the sources of Mills' mature thought, but leaves Geary with relatively little to say about the complicated dynamics of his popularity in the 1950s and 1960s, when relations between his thought, his personality, and his reputation took center stage. Geary disposes of The Power Elite and The Sociological Imagination in a nifty, thirty-five page chapter. All along he gives perfunctory accounts of Mills' health and personal habits, family relations, marriages, and friendships. "I leave the detailed study of Mills's personality to others in the hope that they recognize his rebellious personality as a carefully constructed persona rather than the full story of his life," he...