PROFILE

The Power Elite and the Philadelphia Gentlemen

William Weston
Published online: 12 February 2010
# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010
In 1956 C. Wright Mills argued that American society was
controlled by a centralizing but irresponsible power elite
that was making cheerful robots of us all. Two years later E.
Digby Baltzell, a one-time student of Mills whose work
contributed to The Power Elite, published his answer, The
Philadelphia Gentleman: The Making of a National Upper
Class. Baltzell agreed that American society was centraliz-
ing and there was a danger that we would be left with an
irresponsible power elite. But he also saw a counter-force,
an upper class of families that, at its best, could direct that
elite into a responsible establishment that would serve the
common good from a sense of noblesse oblige.
Mills died young, in 1962, still railing against the
impersonal social structures and the irresponsible elite.
Baltzell, though the same age as Mills, would live three
decades longerlong enough to see the Sixties under-
mine Baltzells faith in a responsible national establishment.
The principled argument between Mills and Baltzell over
social leadershipof elite vs. establishmentis not tied to
a particular era or society. I will touch on the particular and
interesting parallel tales of how two eminent sociologists
made sense of post-war American society, especially in its
higher circles. In the end, though, I want to consider the
general issue of the nature of social leadership, and the
possibilities of creating a responsible establishment today
out of the various fragmented elites in our nation.
Mills: Railing Against the Elite
After the Second World War, C. Wright Mills wrote a
trilogy on the new configuration of power in the massive,
centralized, bureaucratic state emerging in America. He
might have written a similar book about all the industrial-
ized societies, including the Soviet Union.
He started with the workersor rather, with the new
leaders of the workers, the New Men of Power: Americas
Labor Leaders (1948). Union leaders are now an essential
part of the power structure of production. This was a slap at
political leftists and academic Marxists, who hoped the
workers would lead a revolution against the social structure.
With their leaders co-opted, the workers could do nothing
but fit in to the production machine.
In White Collar: The American Middle Classes (1951)
he broke new ground in describing the massive growth in
the middle layers of society. The white-collar layer
stretched from the bottom of the middle class to near the
top of the power structure. They are the cogs of both the
production machine and the consumption machine. White
collar includes the new categories of mass educated women
and college-educated G.I.s.
The Power Elite (1956) took the trilogy to the top of the
power structure. What was distinctive about Mills ap-
proach was that he thought the warlords were an equal
third of the power elite, and that the three powers
economic, political, and militaryinterlocked. Mills does
not offer a clear account of how the elite worked together.
More importantly, he did not offer much of an account of
what they did, what ends they were working toward. He
thought it enough to show that elite individuals in one
sphere had connections with elite individuals in another
sphere. It does not seem to cross his mind that he should try
to join the power elite, or train his students to try to join it.
W. Weston (*)
Centre College,
Danville, KY 40422, USA
e-mail: beau.weston@centre.edu
Soc (2010) 47:138146
DOI 10.1007/s12115-009-9289-3
His last important book, The Sociological Imagination
(1959), makes the case for understanding the larger social
forces that shape the world. He offers clear and hardheaded
analysis of how private troubles and public issues are
connected. Two generations of sociologists have found the
sociological imagination a paradigm of how to understand
the big world in order to change it. I find it ironic, therefore,
that Mills substantive sociology led him to understand the
world as something he could not change, as structured in a
way that there was no point in him trying to change it.
Baltzell: Promoting a Responsible Establishment
E. Digby Baltzell also wrote a trilogy about the social
organization of power in the United States. Whereas Mills
concentrated on developments since the Second World War,
Baltzell traced the century prior to the war. Baltzells
studies began with the stratum that Mills ended with: the
power elite. Baltzell then went on to explore the layer
above the power elite, the multi-generational upper class.
Baltzell and Mills agreed on several important points about
the top of the social structure. Both saw the power layer
becoming more unified and national after the war. In the
end, though, their differences about what the top layer of
the social structure was like, and especially their dispute
over the purpose of that stratum in social life, were more
important to sociology than their similarities.
The Philadelphia Gentleman: The Making of a National
Upper Class, published in 1958, was a revision of Baltzells
dissertation. The great sociology faculty at Columbia
influenced Baltzell after the war, including Paul Lazersfeld,
the young C. Wright Mills, Robert Lynd (who Baltzell
thanked for faith and encouragement), and his principle
intellectual influence, Robert Merton. For five decades,
starting with this study, Baltzell conducted an empirical
investigation of the circulation of the elites from the
inside. Baltzells work was, as he saw it, an application of
Tocqueville. If the upper class continues to absorb the new
elite individuals in an aristocratic process, it will renew
itself and earn its right to rule. If, on the other hand, it
becomes a closed caste, excluding the new elite and serving
only itselfas the pre-Revolutionary French upper class
didit will cease to rule, cease to serve, and invite its own
overthrow by a new upper class.
Baltzells best-known work, The Protestant Establish-
ment: Aristocracy and Caste in America was published in
1964. The book was written during the administration of
John F. Kennedy, whose election Baltzell saw as a
vindication of the principle of aristocracy over caste. As
he was finishing the book, Kennedy was assassinated,
which in retrospect looked like the beginning of the end of
the era of a coherent American upper class. Where
Philadelphia Gentleman traced how the First Families of
one city were absorbed into a national upper class,
Protestant Establishment examined how the culture of that
national upper classespecially their religious culture
was both a spur to leadership and a temptation to ugly caste
exclusions, especially of Jews.
Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia (1979) was
Baltzells magnum opus, a massively researched compara-
tive study of, as the subtitle said, Two Protestant Ethics and
the Spirit of Class Authority and Leadership. This book
was designed to discover why the Proper Philadelphians
Baltzells own classhad never made the contribution to
national leadership that Proper Bostonians had. To my
mind, this book is the best American example of the great
Weberian project of empirically studying the worldly
effects of contrasting religious ethics.
What drove all of these Baltzell studies was the
conviction that the elite was always in the process of turning
into a hereditary upper class. The main ethical problem for
this upper class was whether it would use its privileges for
social leadership, or instead turn in on itself and simply
consume the sweet lifeuntil displaced by a new elite. It
was not enough, Baltzell argued, that the elite have the
power that came from the institutions they ran. Society
needed the class that grew out of the elite to carry and foster
a long-term vision of social order and social betterment.
Mills and Baltzell: The Biographical Bridge
Wright Mills and Digby Baltzell crossed paths at a crucial
moment early in their careers. I dont want to make much of the
biographical background of either man. They both continue to
affect sociology through their published works, which stand on
their own. I want to compare their ideas as ideas. It seems
foolish, though, to entirely pass over their personal connection.
For a couple of years after the Second World War both
were in the great sociology department at Columbia
University, Mills as a new professor, and Baltzell as a
graduate student. Their mutual interest in the higher circles
in society gave them something to talk about, for a time. In
the end, though, their differences in social theory and
practical politics took them in different directions from their
shared starting point. Baltzell was trying to build up the
establishment, while Mills was trying to tear it down.
The pivot of the biographical comparison of Mills and
Baltzell, I think, is the fact that Baltzell is a year older than
Mills, yet Mills was the teacher and Baltzell the student at
Columbia. This came about because Baltzell volunteered for
the war, thus delaying his academic career, while Mills did not.
Baltzell was 26 when the war began, having graduated
from the University of Pennsylvania and begun a career in the
insurance business. His war experiences broadened Baltzells
Soc (2010) 47:138146 139
viewof society and set him on the path to sociology. In fact,
Baltzell explained in The Protestant Establishment, I
visualized the possibility of an ethnically mixed establish-
ment, which underlies the theory of American leadership
developed in this book, during my own experiences in the
ward rooms and officers clubs of the South Pacific. At any
rate, the American ideal of equality of opportunity in a
hierarchically organized social structure had never been so
nearly realized as in the selection of reserve officers who led
our armed forces during the Second World War (301). On
his discharge in August of 1945, just after the dropping of the
Bomb, he enrolled at Columbia in time to start the fall term.
Mills was 25 when Pearl Harbor was bombed, while he
was working on his dissertation at Wisconsin. He taught at
Maryland through the war, and then went to Columbia in
1946. Baltzell, who had already been a student in the program
for a year, must have been one of Mills first students there. In
that year Mills and Hans Gerth published From Max Weber,
probably the most influential collection of Webers writings
in English. Baltzell said that one of the two texts that he
read at Columbia that influenced him the most was Webers
Class, Status, Party, included in that volume. The other
was Alexis de Tocquevilles The Old Regime and the
Revolution, which he heard about from a visiting lecturer.
Baltzell said in later years that he thought Mills had
drawn on Baltzells own work without attribution. Those
who have read Mills notes say that he did not incorporate
Baltzells text directly. As a reader of both White Collar
(published in 1951) and Philadelphia Gentleman (based on
Baltzells 1949 dissertation), though, I see a point where
Mills sounds surprisingly like Baltzelland not so much
like Mills. Specifically, the Metropolitan 400 chapter of
White Collar draws on The Social Register and talks about
intermarriage in the upper class. These points are founda-
tional to all of Baltzells work. Mills comments on them in
this chapter, but does not connect these ideas to the rest of
his work. In particular, it is surprising to me that Mills does
not follow up on the connection between upper class families
and the power elite, as Baltzell did. Mills theory did not have
a place for families; Baltzells starts from families.
After only two years at Columbia, Baltzell returned to
Philadelphia and his alma mater, the University of Pennsyl-
vania, where he spent the rest of his career and life. In the
opening words of Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia
he wrote that he then lived a few blocks from where he was
bornsomething that few sociologists in our increasingly
rootless and disestablished society could claim. Mills, by
contrast, ended his days in the heart of the cosmopolitan
academy in Manhattan, socially as far as he could get in this
country from his hometown of Waco, Texas.
A decade after Mills early death, Baltzell placed Mills
in the larger historical context by comparing him with
another great antinomian figure of an earlier noisy age of
prose, the 1640s. It is indeed a fitting forecast of the shape
of things to come that, when he died in March, 1962, the
great disestablishmentarian guru, C. Wright Mills, the John
Lilburne of modern social science, was buried after a
Quaker memorial service. He, unlike Lilburne, died
unconvinced and an atheist, or as Mills himself would
have more dramatically put it, a Pagan (in The Protestant
Establishment Revisited, 209).
The Theoretical Argument
Elite vs. Establishment
Mills expresses the nub of The Power Elite in this oft-quoted
paragraph: These hierarchies of state and corporation and
army constitute the means of power; as such they are now of
a consequence not before equaled in human historyand at
their summits, there are now those command posts of modern
society which offer us the sociological key to an understand-
ing of the role of the higher circles in America. (5)
The elite are individuals at the top of the functional
hierarchies of power. On this point Mills and Baltzell agree.
The elite of society is an analytic category created by
sociologists, consisting of all the individuals at the top of all
the functional hierarchies. Elite individuals do not neces-
sarily have any connection with one another. The heads of
functional hierarchies in the same industry or social sphere
(in a broad sense) are usually competitorswhether they
work together, or have any personal relations at all, is an
empirical question. It is reasonable to think that the heads
of competing institutions normally do not work with one
another. It is even more reasonable to think that the heads
of institutions in different industries or social spheres will
not work together at all, or even know one anothers
identities. There is nothing about the elite that requires them
to be a permanent class, or even a temporary conspiracy.
The main point that Mills makes in The Power Elite is
that in the specific historical moment of the United States
after World War Two, the elite individuals at the top of the
corporate, political, and military hierarchies were becoming
more coordinated with one another than ever before. Since
the United States had emerged as the greatest power in the
world after the war, and perhaps the greatest power that had
ever existed, the American power elite had more power
with more control than any power elite had ever had. The
top positions of state, corporation, and army are not simply
the leaders of state, corporation, and army, but together
they constitute the command posts of American society
as a whole. To see what Mills is arguing for, it may be
helpful to see what he is arguing against.
The power elite position opposes the pluralist view, like
that of Robert Dahl, who argued that the various elites in the
140 Soc (2010) 47:138146
various social spheres are not coordinated into one power
elite. Instead the pluralists see several veto groups with just
enough power to prevent other elite individuals from always
getting their way at the expense of the other elites. Decisions
emerge from the compromise of veto groups, sometimes in
unintended ways. Pluralists think the power elite position is
too centralized and coherent in its view of power.
The power elite position also opposes the Marxist view
that state, corporation, and army are all tools of a unified
capitalist class that ruled American society. Marxist critics
thought Mills allowed too much autonomy to the military,
to political leaders, and to corporate managers (as opposed
to owners) in pursuing their own institutional ends. Marxists
think the power elite position is not centralized and coherent
enough it is view of power.
Mills answered the pluralists by arguing that the
depression, the war, and Americas superpower role after
the war, made it necessary for the state to coordinate the
other elites on a national level to an extent never seenor
neededbefore. There is a power elite now because crises
arose which could not be solved by local elites.
In response to the Marxists, Mills allowed that top
politicians always tend to be representatives of the corporate
rich, even without these large national crises. Mills followed
James Burnham in perceiving that the massive size and
complexity of modern corporations had created a manage-
rial revolution that transferred power from Marxs owners of
the means of production to a large layer of non-owning
managersand an even more massive layer of white collar
workers who were neither owners nor a Marxian proletariat.
Later critics have noted that Mills gave too much indepen-
dent power to the warlords, the military leaders. At the time
that Mills was writing The Power Elite, half the U.S.
governments budget went to defense, General Eisenhower
was president, and former generals and admirals had a role in
corporate life not seen before or since. I agree that Mills
claim that the military leaders form an equal third in the power
elite is the weakest part of his argument, and has not held up.
The military, though significant players in government and,
indirectly, in business, have been re-absorbed into the state. In
a larger sense, though, I think that this criticism does not really
undermine the theory of the power elite, but simply requires
some tweaking: the corporate elite includes some former
military leaders, and the state elite includes some active
military leaders.
Mills thus defends his view of the power elite from three
kinds of simplifying theories: The simple Marxian view
makes the big economic man the real holder of power; the
simple liberal view makes the big political man the chief of
the power system; and there are some who would view the
warlords as virtual dictators. Each of these is an over-
simplified view. It is to avoid them that we use the term
power elite rather than, for example, ruling class (277).
In a footnote to this statement Mills clarifies that he rejects
ruling class because it contains the theory that an
economic class rules politically. He would make similar
objections, presumably, to a claim that society always had a
command economy or was always a military dictatorship.
The crucial point is that whether the elite constitutes a
ruling class, a political directorate, or a military cabal is an
empirical question, not a premise for social analysis.
Understanding the power elite requires an act of
sociological imagination, a term Mills popularized three
years later. The power elite is made of individuals, but their
power comes from their institutional position, from the
various power hierarchies that they head and the complex
interactions of those institutions. We cannot infer the
direction of policy merely from the social origins and
careers of the policy-makers, (280) Mills contends. The
structural imperatives of the institutions that give these
individuals their power constrains the choices they make.
Mills is sometimes charged with having a conspiracy
theory of social organization. This is not quite true, if we
envision a conspiracy as the work of a secret organization
working for nefarious ends. By contrast, Mills thinks that
the power elite are more thrown together by structural
necessity than formed by seeking one another out.
Likewise, most of the work of the power elite is done in
the open, and the interlocking directorates that connect
them to one another are a matter of public record. The
power elite was not initially a conspiracy; however, once
created, they do tend to organize things.
The real weakness of Mills power elite theory, I believe, is
in his conception of how they are connected to one another
over generations, and what ends they use their power for.
Baltzells conception of the establishment, I believe, offers a
real advance on the theory of the power elite.
Early in The Philadelphia Gentleman Baltzell draws a
crucial distinction between an elite and an upper class: The
elite concept refers to those individuals who are the most
successful and stand at the top of the functional class
hierarchy. These individuals are the leaders in their chosen
occupations or professions. The upper class concept,
then, refers to a group of families, whose members are
descendents of successful individuals (elite members) of
one, two, three or more generations ago. These families are
at the top of the social class hierarchy (67).
Baltzell and Mills use the same concept of an elitethe
set of individuals at the top of the various power hierarchies.
This elite is an analytic category made by sociologists. The
elite may or may not form a living social unit.
The upper class, by contrast, is an organic social unit. The
great social function that an upper class of families ought to
perform is to assimilate the new men (and sometimes
women) who have risen in the elite, especially through
marriage. The upper class is highly intermarried with one
Soc (2010) 47:138146 141
another, as well. Baltzell even notes that Mills, in his review
of the Yankee City studies by Lloyd Warner and colleagues,
asked about the interrelations among business elites and
upper social circles, especially through marriage. Mills
himself did not pursue those family connections. Baltzell
offered the evidence of The Philadelphia Gentleman as a
partial answer to Mills question.
Mills believed that in the modern era powerful institutions
had displaced powerful families as the leading institutions in
society. He does not argue for or footnote this point, but takes
it as a given starting point for analysis. This is surely why he
did not follow up on his own questions about the connections
between the business elite and upper class families. Baltzell,
on the other hand, knew from personal experience that upper
class families were still intimately intertwined with the
business elite, as well as with the rest of the power elite.
Baltzell, like Mills and many other post-war sociologists,
noticed that centralized national institutions were displacing
local power centers. Mills focused on the federal govern-
ment and national corporations as the agents of centraliza-
tion. Baltzell likewise saw this nationalization of the elite;
since he also had the category of the upper class of families,
he could see the way in which local upper classes were
consolidating into one national upper class. Hence the
subtitle of the book, The Making of a National Upper
Class. In fact, when The Philadelphia Gentleman was
released as a paperback it was given the somewhat
misleading new title of An American Business Aristocracy.
Power vs. Authority
Both Mills and Baltzell saw that great power was
accumulating in the large centralizing institutions of the
corporation and the government. Mills, though, was limited
by this same theory of the power eliteit prevented him
from understanding authority as an important social force
beyond mere power. The command posts at the top of the
various formal institutions were as high as Mills social
structure could go. He did not see how there could be a
different source of authority because his conception of
society had no upper class that could stand against the
powerful institutions of corporation and state. Baltzells
theory of social leadership, by contrast, turns on the mutual
balancing of elite and upper class.
Mills sees the main theoretical advantage of defining the
elite in terms of major institutions as precisely this
emphasis on the way institutions shape individuals more
powerfully than whatever class they might come from. He
argues that:
1) The institutional positions men occupy throughout their
lifetime determines their chances to get and to hold
selected values;
2) The kind of psychological beings they become is in
large part determined by the values they thus experi-
ence and the institutional roles they play;
3) Finally, whether or not they come to feel that they
belong to a select social class, and whether or not they
act according to what they hold to be its interests
these are matters in large part determined by their
institutional position, and in turn, the select values they
possess and the characters they acquire. (Power Elite,
386 n.6.)
Note that Mills thinks the institutional position that elite
individuals rise into determines their values, determines
their personalities, and determines the social class they
come to feel they belong to. Socialization by the
institution beats socialization by the class they came from.
The possible power of the class that elite individuals are
being assimilated in to in shaping their social responsibil-
ities is not even on the table. Indeed, it seems to me
possible that in making his third point Mills had his
discussions with Baltzell in mind about the relative power
of institution and class.
Mills has a narrow conception of who can exercise power.
The thrust of the stratification trilogy and their epilogue, The
Sociological Imagination, is that no one has the freedom to
exercise real power in society except those at the very top.
And what does the top man (no women in Mills power
elite) do? In his Power Elite chapter on The CEO he
names that worthys main task as making The Judgment
the big strategic decision that guides the institution he heads.
Top management is drawn from the broad men who see a
way for the institution to profit, not the specialists who
implement The Judgment.
The broad men at the top promote other broad men like
themselves, because the business world at its highest layers
depends on trust. Pierre Bourdieu makes a point like this in
his account of the value of cultural capital. Mills could have
gone on to consider how the broad men get their education
in class-specific institutions. This insight, in turn, would
lead one to see that the elite-producing institutions lead to
intermarriages and connections over generations that
produce the vast cousinage, as Nelson Aldrich calls it,
of the upper class. Mills does not follow this path, though,
because his theory limits him to look for power in the main
command institutions of societycorporations, the state,
and the military. He thus misses the vast array of counter-
institutions of class authority.
Baltzell, by contrast, has a much richer conception of the
functions of the upper class in relation to the elite. He
names four primary functions in Philadelphia Gentlemen:
1) To maintain a continuity of control over important
positions in the world of affairs;
142 Soc (2010) 47:138146
2) To provide a primary social organization within which
the informal aspects of the normative social orderthe
folkways and moresmay operate as effective agents
of social control;
3) To provide an autonomous power in the community as
a protection against totalitarian power; and, finally,
4) To provide a more or less primary group social world
within which the younger generation is socialized. (60).
Like any class, the upper class provides continuity,
socializes and informally controls its members, raises their
young. The upper class has further, unique functions: the
primary function of the upper class is the exercise of
powerthe power of leadership in order to limit the
power of individual leaders (60). The upper class, when it
is functioning well, has the collective authority to check
and balance the power of elite individuals.
The upper class is a self-aware group of interconnected
families. It is a class in and for itself. Indeed, the upper class is
probably the only class in the nation small enough and
interconnected enough to function as one cosmopolitan
national class. All classes below them, from which new elite
individuals might rise, are divided into more parochial
fractions. Those elite individuals who were raised in the
upper class have an advantage, a body of cultural capital, over
those who come to the elite as adults. Baltzell demonstrates
that a disproportionate number of the elite did, indeed, come
from the social upper classin his studies, a hundred times
more than their proportion of the total population.
Many rising individuals do not even realize that there is an
upper class, or that it has power and authority functions. Too
often we focus on the lifestyles of the rich and the famous and
the excesses of the leisure class. Even scholarly studies are
often content to gaze upon the privileges of the monied and
merely list the interconnections among the eliteas Mills
does. As Baltzell often laments, Americans have been
concerned to succeed rather than lead. We thus miss the
authority function of the upper class.
Yet the main task of the leadership class is to make final
decisions about important things. Upper classes are built on
wealth, especially inherited wealth. But wealth is not enough,
and is certainly not the point. As Baltzell argued early and
often, the intellectual, professional and statesmanlike
accomplishments of the money-makers descendants have
always been recognized as the final flowering and ultimate
justification of the existence of that wealth. (PG 130)
Baltzells two main inspirations were Max Weber and
Alexis de Tocqueville. In dialogue with each he developed
and extended the theory of the American upper class as an
authoritative leadership institution.
The difference between power and legitimate power
authorityis central to Webers discussion of the different
kinds of power in society. Weber contrasted the traditional
authority of premodern societies with the dominant rational/
legal authority of modern societies. Webers third type,
charismatic authority, is a wild form that could break out in
any kind of social order. Baltzell noted that traditional
authority in society as a whole is primarily carried by the
upper class, whereas rational/legal authority is carried in
bureaucratic institutions of corporation, state, and military.
Rather than seeing rational/legal authority as superceding
traditional authority, though, Baltzell set them up as checks
on one another in modern societies. Indeed, in the summa
of his trilogy he contended that: It is my central thesis that
class lies at the very core of the authority structure of any
society and, moreover, that it is the proper function of an
upper class in any healthy society to wield authority not
through manipulation, force, or fraud but through the
respect it commands throughout society for the accomplish-
ments and leadership qualities of its members over several
generations (Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia, x).
When Baltzell began his study of the circulation of the
American elite, the upper class still exercised traditional
authority. After the anti-authority revolution of the Sixties,
Baltzell developed a further nuance: Broadly speaking,
hierarchy, authority, and leadership are necessary characteristics
of all civilized communities; however, a normative culture that
stresses the desirability of hierarchy, class, and authority will
instill in its members a far stronger desire and capacity to take
the lead in both community building and community reform
than a normative culture than emphasizes equality and
brotherly love, explicitly rejecting the need for hierarchy,
class, and authority (Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadel-
phia, 6). This distinction is why he compared the hierarchical
culture of Puritan Boston, which did so much to lead the
nation for centuries, with the egalitarian culture of Quaker
Philadelphia. At that moment in the 1970s an egalitarian
culture that rejected all authority seemed to have triumphed in
the nation as a wholethreatening, Baltzell thought, decline
in the whole social order.
From Tocqueville, Baltzell saw that the upper class was
perpetually threatening to turn into a self-serving caste. To be
well ordered, the upper class needed to perpetually engage in
what Baltzell called the aristocratic process of assimilating
the elite individuals who had risen to power. In a democratic
society, there would seem to be a conflict between even an
aristocratic upper class and the premise of democratic social
equality. What Tocqueville noted was that Americans did not
rely on Great Men, as in Britain, or the state, as in France, to
do what needed to be done in society. Instead, Americans
create voluntary associations of citizenscommittees, clubs,
councils, leagues, orders, societiesto solve social prob-
lems. Baltzell saw that the American upper class took a
disproportionate role in organizing, leading, and funding
these associations. Unlike European aristocracies, the Amer-
ican upper class did not assume this leadership by right.
Soc (2010) 47:138146 143
Rather the American upper class makes itself into a
leadership class by earning its authority through voluntary
community service, as well as through the formal institutions
of power. It is the genius of Americans, Baltzell
contended, to have replaced aristocratic with associational
noblesse oblige, expressed today through the exercise of
leadership in nonprofit organizations (in Judgment and
Sensibility, 113).
Baltzell wrote about the upper class as an interested
insider. Most sociologists, I expect, write about some
salient social category that they themselves are part of,
especially in their first studies. Baltzell was only unusual in
the class he came from, and his ability to plow that same
furrow so fruitfully for five decades. Since he was an
insider to the higher circles of social authority, if not to the
top reaches of power, he was able to see the people and
informal social institutions that held the upper strata
together better than most outsider sociologists. Looking
back on the studies that flowed from The Power Elite in
1981, a quarter century later, Baltzell offered a helpful
corrective about the social sources of mere power as
contrasted with real authority: A large number of social
scientists have conspiracy theories about interlocking
directorships and the power structure, largely because of a
lack of an historical imagination or first-hand knowledge of
the real world or real people. the richness, variety, and
freedom of our society has depended on the very few men
and women in each generation and community who are
willing to shoulder the burdens of responsibility and
leadership (in Judgment and Sensibility, 119).
Irresponsible Intellectual vs. Responsible Cultivated Person
An important test of any stratification theory is where the
theorist places him- or herself in the social structure.
Intellectuals do almost all stratification studies, yet it is a
peculiarity of intellectuals that they like to deny that they fit
in the social structure. Theywelike to imagine that they
stand outside the social structure, able to comprehend it all
without being limited by our parochial perspective. Mills
criticizes intellectuals for becoming tools of the power
structure. Indeed, one may read his stratification trilogy,
and even The Sociological Imagination, as primarily a
critique of his fellow intellectuals for not criticizing and
correcting the drift of society. Baltzell, by contrast, saw
himself as responsible intellectual precisely because he was
heir to the cultivation and privilege of the upper class. Mills
saw his intellectual attainments as freeing him from the
social structure; Baltzell saw his intellectual attainments as
binding him to social leadership.
Wright Mills makes the most extraordinary claims for his
own intellectual project: The sociological imagination is
becoming, I believe, the major common denominator of our
cultural life and its signal feature (Sociological Imagina-
tion, 14). Yet who can bear the sociological imagination
and the task that comes with it? Not the poor, or the blue-
collar workers, nor the vast army of cheerful robots who
wear the white collar. The power elite use intellectuals to
carry out The Judgment, but are not themselves intellectu-
ally concerned with solving the problems of the old or new
masses. Is it not obvious, Mills asks, that the ones to
confront them [the problem of the Cheerful Robot], above
all others, are the social scientists of the rich societies?
(Sociological Imagination, 176).
So who are the intellectuals who bear this large
responsibility? They are, he argues in the happily named
Brains, Inc. chapter of White Collar, the most classless
and heterogeneous of middle class groups, blessed more
with the intellectual than the social graces. They have no
common origin and share no common social destiny
(Sociological Imagination, 142). His definition of intellec-
tuals has a wonderful moral purity: as intellectuals they
live for and not off ideas (143). Mills believes that when
the intellectual was invented as a social type in the glory
days of the Enlightenment, they were free. But no more.
The power elite now co-opts intellectuals to create
ideological legitimation for their power. This legitimation
is as important to mollify those who work within the
bureaucracy as it is to pacify those without. The several
kinds of knowledge workers have committed the treason
of the clerics in one way or another: What must be called
the Christian default of the clergy is as much a part of this
sorry moral condition as is the capture of scientists by
nationalist Science-Machines. The journalistic lie, become
routine, is part of it too; and so is much of the pretentious
triviality that passes for social science (Sociological
Imagination, 184). Ralph Miliband, in his memorial
appreciation of his friend, said that Mills did not blame
the power elite, who were merely acting out the role cast
for them by the social setting in which they were allowed to
wield power. What angered him most were defaulting
academics and intellectuals (in C. Wright Mills and the
Power Elite, 5) Mills, Miliband contended, had an intense
respect for the intellectual as the high priest of reason
and truth (6).
Intellectuals do not wish to face their cooptation and
irresponsibility. One tactic is to retreat into objectivity,
academic value-freedom, and the bureaucratic claim of
thats not my department. Followers of Mills such as the
Sociological Imagination Group reject this dodge. Mills
was equally critical of alienation as a fashionable middle-
brow way of admitting defeat without taking responsibility
for giving up. Both approaches, Mills asserts, are fit
moods and ideologies for intellectuals caught up in and
overwhelmed by the managerial demiurge in an age of
organized irresponsibility (160).
144 Soc (2010) 47:138146
It is hard to shake the feeling, though, that Mills himself
retreated into alienation. He was not miserable about ithe
describes himself as actually rather cheerful. Still, his
description of the system of organized irresponsibility
that extended from the power elite down to the invisible
bottom of society had no place for C. Wright Mills, and
people like him, to act responsibly to achieve a better
society. He eschewed all social institutions, even the ones
he was nominally part of, that might act upon society.
One of the criticisms of Mills is that he cannot really
offer an account of how the leaders of society ought to use
their power because he has a thin conception of power, and
an even thinner conception of human nature. His analysis of
the organized irresponsibility of the power elite keeps
falling back into cynicism because he has no standard of
what organized responsibility would do. As A.A. Berle
wrote in his critique of The Power Elite, if Mills is going to
criticize the higher immorality, he has a duty to articulate
the higher morality (in C. Wright Mills and the Power
Elite). The Millsian intellectual has a difficult time stepping
up to shape society, because all he can offer to the iron cage
of a hyper-rationalized society is a hope of more rationality.
Mills never offers an account of why non-intellectuals act
as they do, other than from a desire to conform. Even David
Riesmans The Lonely Crowd, Mills great competitor in
social analysis at the time of White Collar, could at least
offer the contrast of inner-direction being replaced by other-
direction by way of explanation.
Digby Baltzell, on the other hand, thought, those who
perform the intellectual functions of any society are
primarily concerned with values, morals, and ideas, in the
large sense, or the normative and creative aspects of social
life (Philadelphia Gentlemen, 32). The job of intellectuals
is not simply to criticize, but to help translate the
fundamental values of society into practical action. The
deepest task of intellectuals is to understand how the
fundamental religious understanding of a society shapes
how the leaders of society should use their power
responsibly.
Baltzells empirical analysis of social leadership is richer
than Mills because Baltzell attends to the details of the
conception of human nature and social order that different
kinds of leadership classes enacted. In Puritan Boston and
Quaker Philadelphia, Baltzell could ground the different
leadership cultures of the two cities in the contrasting
conceptions of human naturethe theological anthropolo-
giesof the two founding faiths. Whereas both the
Puritans and the Quakers recognized the absolute authority
of God, the Puritans for theological reasons, assumed that
sinful man needs an earthly and institutionalized hierarchi-
cal authority structure; the Quakers argued that perfectible
man needs no such system but is capable of approaching
God directly(95).
How to Really Make the World Better
In the last paragraph of his most influential book, The
Sociological Imagination, C. Wright Mills offered this
inspiring, but enigmatic, vision of his approach to improv-
ing the world: What I am suggesting is that by addressing
ourselves to issues and to troubles, we stand the best
chance, I believe the only chance, to make reason
democratically relevant to human affairs in a free society,
and so realize the classic values that underlie the promise of
our studies. (194). That phraseto make reason demo-
cratically relevant to human affairsis pregnant with
possibility. It is a task in which a politically engaged
intellectual, especially in the social studies, could take the
lead.
It is harder to see from Mills work, though, just what
sort of institutions could make reason democratically
relevant. The main power centers of the state, corporation,
and military have been taken over and integrated by the
power elite. The state and corporation have superceded the
family and church. The university makes a partial showing
as a place in which critical reason might be made relevant,
though universities are not especially democratic and in any
case have largely been incorporated as cogs in the Brains,
Inc. machine. The vast array of voluntary associations that
Tocqueville (and Baltzell) thought were the glory of
American democracy barely make an appearance in Mills
picture of society. The contrast with Baltzell makes it
particularly clear that Mills does not consider a social class
a possible agent of social change, much less of democratic
reason.
Mills tool for improving society is the critical book.
E. Digby Baltzell, on the other hand, is centrally
concerned with the empirical institutions of social
leadership. In his greatest book, Puritan Boston and
Quaker Philadelphia, Baltzell laid out his vision this way:
It is the central thesis of this book that no nation can long
endure without both the liberal democratic and the
authoritative aristocratic processes (7).
Specific and very concrete institutions carry out the
democratic and aristocratic processes. School, business,
government, and the many voluntary associations lift talent
democratically. The clubs, associations, religious institu-
tions, and most especially the families of the upper class
assimilate talent aristocratically. The point of the elite is to
use power; the point of the upper class is to use power
responsibly for the good of the whole. When the upper
class is doing its job, and does it over time, it can become
an establishment.
Baltzell argues that both political parties of leadership
should come from the same establishment. This is an idea
so out of the liberal and egalitarian stream that most
sociologists today find it hard to grasp what Baltzell is
Soc (2010) 47:138146 145
really saying. The traditional authority of any ruling class
in the long run depends on its producing leaders of more
than one party or set of political convictions. This point,
Baltzell allows, has always been hard for Marxists to
understand (Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia,
147). Mills, more a populist than a Marxist, has a similar
problem seeing institutions as the bulwark of freedom, least
of all an institutionalized establishment as a bulwark of
freedom.
G. William Domhoff has continued Baltzells emphasis
on empirical study of the higher circles, while at the same
time incorporating Mills commitment to resisting the
power elite. In his 1968 critical assessment of The Power
Elite and its critics, Domhoff proposed Baltzells work as
the empirical bridge between pluralists and Marxists while
retaining the power elite concept. Domhoff said that he
wrote Who Rules America? to fill in the blanks in Baltzell
about political control. Contrary to Mills, Domhoff thought
the corporate rich do form the core of the power elite, and
in general policy the power elite serves corporate interests.
He thus offered this new definition of the power elite:
politically, economically and culturally active members of
the social upper class and high-level employees in
institutions controlled by members of the upper class
(276).
Mills and Baltzell were, in a sense, fighting the last war.
They were worried about a unified and centralized military/
industrial state that crushed opposition and eliminated
freedom and individuality. It is not hard to see that they
were each concerned, in their social theory, to fight fascism.
Both saw alienation as a problem.
Mills did not offer much of a practical solution to the
problem of fascism and alienation beyond promoting
reasoned analysis and intellectual resistance. Baltzell offered
the establishment and traditional authority as a bulwark
against a charismatic leader coming to power through
bureaucratic means. Both Mills and Baltzell analyze society
within a Weberian framework. Baltzell, going beyond Mills,
saw a way to employ Weberian means, along with Tocque-
villes voluntary associations, as a secondary source of
power, to check the problem of the iron cage.
Neither Mills nor Baltzell were well prepared, though, to
fight the next war of social order, the antinomian cultural
revolution of the Sixties. Mills died in 1962. He is widely
hailed as a radical. One might think that he would have been
a leader in the social revolutions of the late 1960s and early
1970s. Yet Mills, for all his dissent, was a reason-loving
intellectual. It is hard for me to see how the sociological
imagination would lead one to days of rage, or the
theatrical anti-politics of the counter culture. It is impossible
to know, of course, but I think Mills reputation as a radical
would have been greatly complicated by his likely dissent
from the radicalisms of the era just after his death.
Baltzell lived through the Sixties and was disheartened
by them. He was at low ebb, I think, in 1976s The
Protestant Establishment Revisited. Perhaps I was overly
nave and optimistic at the time, (1964) in believing that
the establishment could be renewed. What remains of the
Protestant establishment has been watered down beyond
recognition (76). His response was a bit more evenhanded
a decade later, in The WASPs Last Gasp. When I
compare Philadelphia fifty years ago with today, he wrote
after the Reagan years, I am bound to conclude that, while
social justice has definitely improved, social order and
communal authority have just as definitely declined (in
The Protestant Establishment Revisited, 35). Disestablish-
ing communal authority does not end the need for social
order. We have not brought on the rule of individual liberty,
but instead have inspired conspiracy theories.
When Digby Baltzell died in 1996 he was not hopeful
about renewing the social establishment in America. We
value individual success, but not social responsibility. Yet I
believe there are resources in Baltzells analysis that should
give us hope. In his earlier work, Baltzell contended that if
the upper class does not rule, the new ruling class would
eventually replace it. I believe this is true.
The changes in the economy that we have come to see as
post-industrial, and even post-modern, are generating a new
elite. The rules of liberal democratic elite-making have
changed, too. People of all sexes, races, religions, and
nationalities are routinely drawn into the meritocratic
escalator of our educational, corporate, and even state
institutions. Marriage practices are following a similar
pattern, though more slowly. I think we are regrowing an
establishment because we always need one. The new
establishment will rest on mastery of knowledge technol-
ogy and on marriages open to talent.
Further Reading
Aldrich, N. W., Jr. 1988. Old money the mythology of Americas upper
class. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Bourdieu, P. 1984. Distinction: The social critique of the judgment of
taste. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Domhoff, G. W., & Ballard, H. B. (Eds.). 1968. C. Wright Mills and
the power elite. Boston: Beacon.
Gillam, R. 1975. C. Wright Mills and the power of truth: The Power
Elite revisited. American Quarterly, 27(4), 461479.
Gillam, R. 1981. White collar from start to finish: C. Wright Mills in
transition. Theory and Society, 10(1), 130.
William (Beau) Weston is Van Winkle Professor of Sociology at
Centre College in Danville, KY. He studies the intersection of religion,
family life, and social class
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