Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century

by Peter Watson

  Mills’s books were published in the following order: The New Men of Power (1948), White Collar (1951), The Power Elite (1956), and The Sociological Imagination (1959). All reflected his view that, in essence, labor had ceased to be the great question in society: ‘The end of the labor question in domestic politics was accompanied by the transformation of Russia from ally to enemy and the rise of the Communist threat. The end of utopia was also the end of ideology as the labor movement shifted from social movement to interest group. The defining political issue became totalitarianism versus freedom, rather than capitalism versus socialism.’ He felt that the automobile had made suburban living possible, with the housewife as the centerpiece, ‘a specialist in consumption and in nurturing a spirit of togetherness in the family.’41 The home, and the private sphere, rather than the workplace and the union hall, had become the center of attention. He believed the 1930s, with so much government intervention because of the depression, was the crossover point. He was also the first to consider ‘celebrities’ as a group.42 The result of all this, he said, was that the formerly ‘ruggedly individualist’ American citizens had become ‘the masses,’ ‘conformist creatures of habit rather than free-thinking activists.’43 Whereas in Organisation Man Whyte had found his interest in the middle orders of corporations, in The New Men of Power Mills concentrated on the leaders, arguing that there had appeared a new type of labor leader – he was now the head of a large bureaucratic organisation, part of a new power elite, part of the mainstream. In White Collar, his theme was the transformation of the American middle class, which he characterised as ‘rootless and amorphous, a group whose status and power did not rest on anything tangible … truly a class in the middle, uncertain of itself,’ essentially anomic and prone to take the tranquillisers then coming into existence.44 ‘The white collar people slipped quietly into modern society. Whatever history they have is a history without events; whatever common interests they have do not lead to unity; whatever future they have will not be of their own making.’45 ‘The idea born in the nineteenth century and nurtured throughout the 1930s, that the working class would be the bearers of a new, more progressive society,’ was laid to rest, Mills concluded. In a section on mentalities, he introduced the subversive idea that the white-collar classes were in fact not so much the new middle classes as the new working classes.46

  This reconceptualisation of American society culminated in 1956 in The Power Elite, a phrase and a thesis that many of the student revolutionaries of the 1960s would find congenial. Here Mills built on Max Weber’s ideas (he had helped translate Weber into English), seeing ‘the cohesiveness of modern society as a new form of domination, a social system in which power was more diffuse and less visible than in early forms of social order. Rather than the direct power exerted by the factory owner over his employees and the autocratic ruler over his subjects, modern power had become bureaucratised and thus less easy to locate and recognise…. The new face of power in mass society was a corporate one, an interlocking hierarchical system.’47 In traditional America, Mills wrote, ‘the family, the school and the church were the main institutions around which social order congealed. In modern America, these had been replaced by the corporation, the state, and the army, each embedded in a technology, a system of interlocking processes.’48

  The Sociological Imagination, Mills’s last book, took as its tide another clever phrase designed to encapsulate a new way of looking at the world, and at experiences, to help the modern individual ‘understand his own experience and gauge his own fate … by locating himself within his own period, [so] that he can know his own chances in life … by becoming aware of all those individuals in his circumstances’ (again, reminiscent of Mannheim).49 Like Hannah Arendt, Mills realised that as the old categories had broken down, so the nature of politics had changed; individual identities, as members of groups, had also collapsed and no longer applied; it was therefore, to him at least, part of the task of sociology to create a new pragmatism, to convert ‘personal troubles into public issues, and public issues into the terms of their human meaning for a variety of individuals.’50 Mills’s vision was invigorating, based as it was not on his prejudices, or not only on his prejudices, but on survey material. His analysis complemented others’, and his enthusiasm for using knowledge for practical purposes prefigured the more direct involvement of many academics – especially sociologists – in politics in the decades to follow. Mills was a kind of Sartrean homme revolté in the academy, a role he relished and which others, without the same success, tried to emulate.51

  A different version of the change coming over American society, and by implication other Western societies, was provided by the economist John Kenneth Galbraith. Galbraith, a six-foot-five academic from Harvard and Princeton who had been in charge of wartime price control and director of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, detected a major shift in economic sensibility in the wake of World War II and the advent of mass society. In the views he propounded, he was following – unwittingly perhaps – Karl Popper’s idea that truth is only ever temporary, in the scientific sense: that is, until it is modified by later experience.

  For Galbraith, the discipline of economics, the so-called ‘dismal science,’ had been born in poverty. For the vast span of history, he said, man has been bound by massive privation for the majority, and great inequality, with a few immensely rich individuals. Moreover, there could be no change in this picture, for the basic economic fact of life was that an increase in one man’s wages inevitably meant a decrease in another man’s profits: ‘Such was the legacy of ideas in the great central tradition of economic thought. Behind the façade of hope and optimism, there remained the haunting fear of poverty, inequality and insecurity.’52 This central vision of gloom was further refined by two glosses, one from the right, the other from the left. The social Darwinists said that competition and in some cases failure was quite normal – that was evolution working itself out. The Marxists argued that privation, insecurity, and inequality would increase to the point of revolution that would bring everything tumbling down. For Galbraith, productivity, inequality, and insecurity were the ‘ancient preoccupations’ of economics.53 But, he argued, we were now living in an Affluent Society (the title of his book), and in such a world the ancient preoccupations had changed in two important respects. In the wake of World War II and the ‘great Keynesian prosperity’ it had brought about, especially in the United States, inequality had shown no tendency to get violently worse.54 Therefore the Marxist prediction of a downward spiral to revolution did not appear to be on the cards. Second, the reason for this change, and something that, he said, had been insufficiently appreciated, was the extent to which modern business firms had inured themselves to economic insecurity. This had been achieved by various means, not all of them entirely ethical in the short run, such as cartels, tariffs, quotas, or price-fixing by law, all of which ameliorated the rawer effects of capitalist competition. But the long-term effect had been profound, Galbraith maintained. It had, for the first time in history (and admittedly only for the Western democracies), removed economic insecurity from the heart of human concerns. No one, any more, lived dangerously. ‘The riskiness of modern corporate life is, in fact, the harmless conceit of the modern corporate executive, and that is why it is vigorously proclaimed.’55

  This profound change in human psychology, Galbraith said, helped explain much modern behaviour – and here there were echoes of Riesman, though Galbraith never mentioned him by name. With the overwhelming sense of economic insecurity gone from people’s lives, and with the truce on inequality, ‘we are left with a concern only for the production of goods.’ Only by higher levels of production, and productivity, can levels of income be maintained and improved. There is no paradox that the goods being produced are no longer essential to survival (in that sense they are peripheral), for in an ‘other-directed’ society, when keeping up with the Joneses comes to be an important social goal, it does not matter that goods are not ess
ential to life – ‘the desire to get superior goods takes on a life of its own.’56

  For Galbraith there are four significant consequences of this. One is that advertising takes on a new importance. With goods inessential to life, the want has to be created: ‘the production of goods creates the wants that the goods are presumed to satisfy,’ so that advertising comes to be an integral aspect of the production process.57 Advertising is thus a child to, and a father of, mass culture. Second, the increased production – and consumption – of goods can only be achieved by the deliberate creation of more debt (in a telling coincidence, credit cards were introduced in the same year that Galbraith’s book was published). Second, in such a system there will always be a tendency to inflation, even in peace (in the past inflation had generally been associated with wars). For Galbraith, this is systemic, arising from the very fact that the producers of goods must also create the wants for those same goods, if they are to be bought. In an expanding economy, firms will always be operating at or near their capacity, and therefore always building new plants, which require capital investment. In a competitive system, successful firms will need to pay the highest wages – which must be paid before the returns on capital investment are brought in. There is, therefore, always an upward pressure on inflation in the consumer society. Third, and as a result of this, public services – paid for by the government because no market can exist in these areas – will always lag behind private, market-driven goods.58 Galbraith both observes and predicts that public services will always be the poor relation in the affluent society, and that public service workers will be among the least well off. His last point is that with the arrival of the product-driven society there also arrives the age of the businessman - ‘more precisely, perhaps, the important business executive.’ So long as inequality was a matter of serious concern, says Galbraith, the tycoon had at best an ambiguous position: ‘He performed a function of obvious urgency. But he was also regularly accused of taking too much for his services. As concern for inequality has declined, this reaction has disappeared.’

  Having set out his description of modern mass society, Galbraith went on to make his famous distinction between private affluence and public squalor, showing how it is the obsession with private goods that helps create the poor public services, with overcrowded schools, under-strength police forces, dirty streets, inadequate transport. ‘These deficiencies are not in new or novel services but in old and established ones,’ he says, because only in private goods can advertising – that is, the creation of wants – work. It makes no sense to advertise roads, or schools, or police forces. He concludes, therefore, that the truce on inequality should be replaced with a concern for the balance between private affluence and public squalor. Inflation only makes that imbalance worse, and things are at their very worst in local, as opposed to central, government areas (the local police are always underfunded compared to the FBI, for instance).59

  Galbraith’s solutions to the problems of the affluent society were twofold. One was taken up widely. This was the local sales tax.60 If consumer goods are the prime success story of modern society, and at the same time a cause of the problem, as Galbraith maintained, there is a certain justice in making them part of the solution too. His second solution was more radical, more unusual psychologically, and cannot be said to have been acted upon in any serious way as yet, though it may come. Galbraith noted that many people in the affluent society took large salaries not because they needed them but because it was a way of keeping score, a reflection of prestige. Such people actually enjoyed working; it was no longer a way to avoid economic insecurity but intellectually satisfying in itself. He thought what was needed was a new leisure class. In fact, he thought it was growing naturally, but he wanted it to be a matter of policy to encourage further growth. His point was that the New Class, as he called it, with initial capitals, would have a different system of morality. Better educated, with a greater concern for the arts and literature, having made enough money in the earlier parts of their careers, members of this New Class would retreat from work, changing the value attached to production and helping redress the social balance between private affluence and public squalor, maybe even devoting the latter part of their careers to public service.61

  The Affluent Society may have sparked other books, but many were in preparation at the end of the 1950s, born of similar observations. For example, in The Stages of Economic Growth, completed in March 1959 and published a year later W. W. Rostow produced a book that in some ways showed affinities with both Galbraith and Riesman. Rostow, an economist at MIT who had spent a great deal of time in Britain, mainly but not only at Cambridge, agreed with Riesman that the modern world had developed through stages, from traditional societies to the age of high mass consumption. He echoed Galbraith in regarding economic growth as the engine not just of material change but of political, social, and intellectual change as well. He even thought that the stages of economic growth had a hand – but only a hand – in wars.62

  For Rostow, societies fell into five stages. In the beginning, the pre-Newtonian world, there is the traditional society. This included the dynasties in China, the civilisations of the Middle East and the Mediterranean, the world of mediaeval Europe. What they shared was a ceiling on their productivity. They were capable of change, but slowly. At some point, he said, traditional societies broke out of their situation, mainly because the early days of modern science came along, with new techniques enabling individuals ‘to enjoy the blessings and choices opened up by the march of compound interest.’63 In this stage, the precondition for takeoff, several things happened, the most important being the emergence of an effective, centralised nation state, the lateral expansion of trade across the world, and the appearance of banks for mobilising capital. Sometimes this change was promoted by the intrusion of a more advanced society. What Rostow called ‘The Take-Off he regarded as the ‘great watershed of modern life in modern society.’64 This required two things; a surge in technology, but also a group of individuals, organised politically, ‘prepared to regard the modernisation of the economy as serious, high-order political business.’ During the takeoff the rate of effective investment and savings more than doubles, say from 5 percent to 10 percent and above. The classic example of this stage is the great railway booms. Some sixty years after the takeoff begins, Rostow says, the fourth stage, maturity, is reached.65 Here there is a shift from, say, the coal, iron, and heavy engineering industries of the railway phase to machine tools, chemicals, and electrical equipment. Rostow produced a number of tables that illustrate his approach. Here, two of the more interesting have been amalgamated:66

  Country Takeoff Maturity

  United Kingdom 1783–1802 1850

  United States 1843–60 1900

  Germany 1850–73 1910

  France 1830–60 1910

  Sweden 1868–90 1930

  Japan 1878–1900 1940

  Russia 1890–1914 1950

  Canada 1896–1914 1950

  Speculating on the sixty-year gap between takeoff and maturity, Rostow puts this down to the time needed for the arithmetic of compound interest to take effect and/or for three generations of individuals to live under a regime where growth is the normal condition. In the fifth stage, the age of high mass consumption, there is a shift to durable consumer goods – cars, refrigerators, other electrically powered household gadgets.67 There is also the emergence of a welfare state.68 But The Stages was a book of its time in other senses than that it followed Galbraith. This was the height of the Cold War (the Berlin Wall would go up in the Following year, with the Cuban missile crisis a year after that), and the arms race was at its height, the space race beginning in earnest. Rostow clearly saw his stages as an alternative, and better, analysis of social and economic change than Marxism, and he considered the stages of growth to be partly related to war. Rostow observed three kinds of war: colonial wars, regional wars, and the mass wars of the twentieth century.69 Wars tended to occur, he said,
when societies, or countries, were changing from one stage of growth to another – war both satisfied and encouraged the energies being unleashed at these times. Conversely, countries that were stagnating, as France and Britain were after World War II, became targets of aggression for expanding powers. His most important point, certainly in the context of the times when his book appeared, but still of great interest, was that the shift into high mass consumption was the best hope for peace70 – not only because it created very satisfied societies who would not want to make war, but also because they had more to lose in an era of weapons of mass destruction. He noted that the USSR spent far too much on defence to allow its citizens to profit properly from consumer goods, and he hoped its citizens would one day realise how these two facts were related and prevail on their governments to change.71 Rostow’s analysis and predictions were borne out – but not until more than a quarter of a century had elapsed.