C. Wright Mills was one of the most salient political intellectuals of the twentieth century, reaching broad audiences through a variety of media outlets. In The Sociological Imagination, his best known book published in 1959, he gives a powerful account of the purpose of sociological enquiry: it serves to “translate private troubles into public issues, and public issues into the terms of their human meaning for a variety of individuals.” In the following note Mills pens the beginnings of what would come to be “Letter to the New Left,” in which he welcomed the end of ideology.
To Walter Klink
West Nyack, New York
March 13, 1961
Dear Walter:
Do, by all means, plan to come out when you can, phoning Yaro a day or so ahead.
Yes, perhaps more people than one might believe share my view of Cuba, or at least are capable of listening to it with attention; we’ve sold over 370,000 now and are considering another large printing.
But the one thing I have learned from the entire experience is a terrible thing: that the moral cowardice of the American intelligentsia is virtually complete. I don’t of course mean that they should agree with me, but I do demand that they face the moral ambiguity, indeed agony is not too strong a word, which any violence involves. This is what you are talking about in your letter: I agree with you fully about that, even though I have never to my knowledge killed anyone. In LY, which more and more I come to see as a pivotal book for me, and not merely a pamphlet, I do confront this ambiguity. The critics, as in Dissent and in Encounter, are cowards: they will not even confront it; they take the easy way out. I am extremely embittered at this, and even more embittered that I should allow such cowards to waste my energy in mere bitterness when there are so many real problems to solve.
My heart disease “comes and goes” in a rather irritating way, and I have not been able even to read in any systematic way, much less write. Often I can only lie all day and think in unsystematic ways…But then, in the end, one way or another, time is an enormous force.
See you soon as you like and have the time.
Wright
From C. Wright Mills: Letters and Autobiographical Writings. Edited by Kathryn Mills with Pamela Mills. Berkeley: University of California Press (2000) p. 328.
Notes: Yaro was Wright’s nickname for his wife, Yaroslava Surmach.
LY is the acronym for Mills’s most recently published book at the time: Listen, Yankee: The Revolution in Cuba.
FURTHER READING
Stanley Aronowitz on Mills’s legacy in sociological enquiry.
The tenets of The Sociological Imagination.
“Letter to the New Left,” which Wright was writing at the time.