The Power Elite C. Wright Mills Business / Economics,Political Science & Theory,Sociology

New York: Oxford University Press, 1956. First Edition. Octavo; publisher's cloth in pictorial dust jacket, clipped but retaining original price ($6.00); [6],423pp. Light wear to jacket margins, spine panel toned, brief soil to top textblock edge, corners nudged, else a Very Good, internally clean and sound copy. One of the sociologist's most influential works, an examination of the interconnected interests of military, corporate, and political elements in American society. The works opens with the dismal statement, "The powers of ordinary men are circumscribed by the everyday worlds in which they live, yet even in these rounds of job, family, and neighborhood they often seem driven by forces they can neither understand nor govern." Met with eye-rolls at the time of publication (most famously, perhaps, by Arthur Schlesinger), the work has since been held up as an example of post-War prescience regarding where society was headed.