Outline: Week Seven, Sociology 2111

I. C. Wright Mills: 1916-1962

C. Wright Mills commuting to work at Columbia University.

A. Background

1. University of Wisconsin--Mills and Gerth: From Max Weber

2. Columbia University
a. Colleagues and opponents
b. Public intellectual

3. Popularity after his death as the Vietnam War escalated and protest movements became stronger

B. Mills' Sociology

1. Major works
a. The New Men of Power
b. White Collar
c. The Power Elite
d. The Sociological Imagination

Basic Trend in American Society: More centralized power, less democracy

2. Stratification, power, and social change

a. Power elite: dfn
b. Factors that unify the power elite

1). Social origins
2). Schools and clubs
3). Career patterns
4). Sources of wealth
5). Belief system: "What's good for the private corporate economy is good for America."

Nixon tapes

Not a conspiracy!

2. Factors in the absence of democratic control

a. Role of the media: Politics as entertainment

The Big Ten Mass Media Conglomerates: "The Nation"

b. Secrecy in the national interest}
c. Two-party, winner-take-all political system]
d. Lack of serious public debate

3. Implications of his analysis for foreign policy

a. Power elite goal: create a world safe for American business

b. Highly unconventional perspective on the cold war

c. American military interventions in Asia, Central and South America... why would we support dictators who abused the human rights of their own citizenry? e.g. our intervention in Chile, to depose their elected president, Salvador Allende

Do a Google search on Chile and ITT

4. Why not a Marxist?

a. Politics and economics as equally important spheres

b. Solution: the sociological imagination and an activist citizenry

II. Sociological autobiographies: my discovery of Mills

III. Video: "Inside the School for Assassins"

IV. Social theory and the war on terrorism

Benjamin Barber: Jihad vs. McWorld

A. Jihad

1. Within many interpretations of Islam, jihad refers to the struggle with oneself to reach spiritual goals.

2. A second meaning, claimed by people like Osama Bin Laden: a holy war against the infidels

3. Barber's meaning: jihad becomes his term from every variety of religious/ethnic fundamentalism=we are right and they are the devil... many variants--Christian, Hindu, Islamic.... (a connection here to what Weber called status groups)

Examples: the PJP, now the ruling party of India, despite India's constitution guaranteeing religious freedom and tolerance

4. The domination of jihad in this sense means bloody conflict not only between nations but within nations.

a. "The startling fact is that less than 10 percent of the modern world's states are truly homogeneous (in terms of cultures). In only half is there a single ethnic group that comprises even 75% of the population."

b. The role of colonialism in creating the boundaries of so many modern nation states (Iraq an example). The former Soviet Union another good example.

 

B. McWorld: Barber's term for the domination of the world by the transnational corporations, global markets, and the cultural values of capitalism, in which you are what you own.

1. As he puts it in the introduction to his book: "fast music, fast computers, fast food--MTV, Macintosh, and McDonald's--pressing nations into one homogenous global them park, one McWorld tied together by communications, entertainment and commerce. Caught between Babel and Disneyland, the planet is falling precipitously apart and coming reluctantly together at the very same moment."

2. Capitalism recognizes no boundaries, national, cultural or religious. Find the cheapest workers and the cheapest raw materials, develop markets for your products everywhere, remove all systems of national protection. "The cheap price of its commodities is the battering ram with which it (capitalism) breaks down all Chinese walls." Marx

"Shopping has a common signature throughout the world."

3. Barber: "In Europe, Asia, and the Americans such markets have already eroded national sovereignty and given birth to a new class of institutions--international banks, trade associations, transnational lobbies like OPEC, world news services like CNN and the BBC, and multinational corporations... Without an address or a national affiliation, they are altogether beyond the devices of sovereignty. Even products are becoming anonymous; whose national workforce do you fault on a defective integrated circuit labeled:

Made in one or more of the following countries: Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, Mauritius, Thailand, Indonesia, Mexico, Philippines. The exact country of origin is unknown."

4. Is there a connection between democracy and capitalism ("democratic markets," as Clinton liked to put it)? Barber points out that some of the fastest growing capitalist economies in the world are in authoritarian states. China the prime example.

C. Democracy. What Jihad and McWorld have in common is that they are both in the long run anti-democratic forces, if by democracy we mean a constitutional system in which the majority make decisions under the guidance of law with civil rights for all.

"...it is harder to believe that the clash of Jihad and McWorld will issue in some overriding good. The outcome seems more likely to pervert than to nurture human liberty. The two may, in opposing each other, work to the same ends, work in apparent tension yet covert harmony, but democracy is not the beneficiary."

1. One reading of U.S. history: the progressive democratization both of capitalism (progressivism and the New Deal) and of religious/ethnic difference(the first Catholic president, the Civil Rights movement).

2. But both Jihad and McWorld now at work on a world stage and the interdependence of the world--in terms of resources, in terms of environmental destruction, in terms of epidemics, in terms of weapons of mass destruction and their consequences--convinces Barber that only a democratization that goes well beyond nations has any chance of bringing them under control.

3. Barber's framework as a lens on the U.S. response to the terrorist attacks of September 11