Radical Ambition: C. Wright Mills, the Left, and American Social Thought (review)

C. Wright Mills was first a gifted student of pragmatist philosophy. He then made himself into one of the leading sociologists of his generation (certainly the most notorious). Before he died in 1962 at the age of 45, Mills had metamorphosed again into a talented full-time political writer who challenged the institutional bases and cultural roots of domination for an increasingly alert public and in so doing contributed mightily to the intellectual foundations of the New Left. Daniel Geary selected an altogether interesting and timely subject for his first book.

Geary's distinctive aim is to interpret Mills' thought as being "far more characteristic of his era than has been recognized." (3) "Although Mills often found himself in the minority," Geary explains, "he nevertheless learned from others who shared his positions and frequently borrowed from mainstream discourse." (3) "Indeed," Geary avers, "Mills's ideas resemble even those of the liberal political thinkers who were his primary targets and against whom scholars generally contrast him today." (3)

Geary's version of Mills appears thus a pean to left-liberal sensibility and an effort to make Mills safe—safe and respected like he was in the 1960's, presumably. That Geary has produced 250-odd pages which ambitiously advances nothing new and certainly nothing radical about Mills and his writings—but nothing overtly wrong, either—says more, I think, about our own comparatively tepid intellectual and political climate than it does about the "major developments of midcentury intellectual life" (3), the true subject of Geary's intellectual history for which Mills serves as optic.

Let me be clear: by standard academic standards, Radical Ambition is a well-researched and well-written book. Geary makes deft use of archival material and grounds his study in much, although not all, of the best literature on Mills. Moreover, the book's six chapters and separate introduction and epilogue bespeak an often astute analysis of Mills' sociological oeuvre. My aim is not therefore to slight Geary's scholarship, nor do I wish to dampen his evident enthusiasm for Mills, which I share. It is a good thing that he and the late Mrs. Yaroslava Mills had tea together at her West Nyack home, and it is productive of good scholarship that Geary received advice from Kate and Nik Mills, who, with Pamela Mills, have done much to advance and facilitate serious and fair scholarship on their father and his work.

My concern, rather, is that Geary fails as measured against his own laudable standard. While manifestly opposed to the reduction of Mills to a "motorcycle riding maverick" or any similar "captivating caricature" (1), Radical Ambition provides inadequate antidote. Geary's banal conclusion captures the vacuum at the heart of his study: "The best way to continue Mills's legacy is to critically apply his insights to think for ourselves about the contemporary prospects for American sociology and the left in our own time." (219) Imagine Mills' reply to this clarion call or, for that matter, his reaction to being interpreted in terms of his proximity to "mainstream" and "liberal" thought. That Geary seems incapable of such radical imagination renders Radical Ambition a well-informed nullity. Too bad Geary did not reference much less engage the work of John H. Summers, the intellectual historian whose similarly recent but comparatively trenchant Mills scholarship eschews Geary's march into the academic void.