Power elite
The concept of the "power elite," introduced by sociologist C. Wright Mills in 1956, refers to a small group of interconnected leaders who hold significant influence over American society through their control of political, economic, and military institutions. These elites often share similar backgrounds, including education and social networks, allowing them to collaborate across different sectors. Within this framework, members of the power elite can include military officials, corporate executives, and political leaders, who, despite operating in distinct institutions, frequently interact, share resources, and shape policies that impact the broader public.
Mills argued that the power elite's interlocking nature undermines traditional mechanisms of checks and balances in government, as economic entities often exert financial influence on political campaigns, thereby diminishing the effectiveness of democratic processes. This concentration of power tends to obscure minority interests and creates a superficial appearance of pluralism, as public opinion is often shaped by the media, which is also influenced by the elite. Although this model highlights significant issues related to power dynamics, it has generated discussions about the implications of elite influence on social mobility, public perception, and potential avenues for social change.
In essence, the power elite concept provides a framework for understanding how a small but powerful group can shape societal values and norms, challenging the notion of a truly democratic and egalitarian society.
Power elite
SIGNIFICANCE: In 1956, C. Wright Mills introduced the notion of the power elite—the interconnected leaders of political, economic, and military institutions in American society. This analysis offers insight into class and race relations in the contemporary United States.
The concept of a “power elite” in modern American society involves the idea that the leaders of a combination of economic, political, and military institutions together wield tremendous power and control over society. Each of the separate institutions within these areas of society possesses its own ruling class. Formal groups of Pentagon officials, including generals, admirals, and appointed officials, govern the military hierarchy. Likewise, boards of directors provide both leadership and control for the large corporations that dominate the economic sphere, along with institutions such as the securities markets, the Federal Reserve Board, the banking system, major investment funds, and other large sources of capital. Within politics, elected officials join with career bureaucrats and other appointees to direct the national government. Each of these institutions creates its own elite group of leaders, and each of these elite groups exercises considerable power and influence over a variety of affairs within American society.
The Power Elite Concept
Sociologists have identified a high degree of overlap among these distinct elite groups, and American sociologist C. Wright Mills, in his influential book The Power Elite (1956), coined the term that has been widely used to describe them. The power elite concept points to several characteristics of the overlapping elite groups. The members of the power elite tend to share many life experiences, such as education and class notions of responsibility. Many of them know one another, even across institutional lines. For example, politicians and corporate executives not only create policies that affect one another’s institutions but also socialize together, share loyalties to the same schools, join the same clubs, attend the same functions, and contribute to the same causes. Also, members of the power elite possess extensive personal resources in addition to their control over larger societal resources.
As the power elite in the United States has grown in influence, traditional institutions such as family, education, and religion have assumed lesser roles in determining values and orientations. In the case of education, advanced degrees do not confer or limit membership in the power elite. Even when certain affiliations arise between graduates of certain universities (especially Ivy League law schools), more importance may well be attached to membership in certain campus clubs reserved for elites than to factors such as academic performance and degrees earned. Likewise, regional concerns diminish in comparison with the national (and international) perspectives of the elites, who tend to be urban (or suburban) rather than rural in their perspectives.
The presence of a power elite correlates with the creation of celebrity. Some persons attain high celebrity and name recognition through their personal wealth, their corporate leadership, their political position, or their military prominence. Again, this celebrity is related not to any sort of objectively measured “success” but rather to power and influence. The corporate chief executive officer (CEO) who turns the highest profit ratios is not necessarily a member of the power elite, but the chairs of the largest corporations probably are. Similarly, politicians do not receive celebrity for high efficiency or great service, but instead for their ability to persuade and influence others with power. Celebrities become well known throughout the culture, both inside and outside their particular group of institutions. For example, many Americans do not know the names of their own senators or congressional representatives, but most could name several prominent politicians from other states who have attained the celebrity accorded those members of the power elite who seek it.
The American power elite forms an entrenched class of leaders. Though celebrity attaches itself to many of them, most work behind the scenes, attaining celebrity for only brief periods of time, if at all. Examples include a corporate lawyer who wields extensive power over decades but gains fame only during a cabinet appointment late in life. Even though partly enshrouded, the power elite controls most sectors of social existence. The interlocking nature of the power elite allows for interchange between different sorts of institutions, maintaining and strengthening the power of each. This co-optation of elites from one field to another furthers the connections between different sectors of power.
In theory, the United States government contains a series of checks and balances. The typical understanding of government that emphasizes checks and balances between different branches of the federal government, however, fails to recognize the interlocking nature of political, economic, and military power throughout the society. The same economic entities that exert direct financial influence on the lives of many citizens not only participate in the military-industrial complex but also donate sizable funding to the political campaigns of congressional and presidential candidates. This reduces the effectiveness of any true balances within the political system itself. At the same time, the power elite fractures the nonpowerful classes into dispersed minority interests. This appearance of pluralism obscures the power of the elite, who often exercise their power subtly through the creation of a mythical “common interest” of the majority, against which the minority interests are doomed to fail. Such a common interest often does not reflect the wishes of any true majority but instead serves as an expression of the power of the dominant group. The mass media, controlled by the same interlocking forces of the power elite, play an increasingly significant role in the creation of such “majority” opinion. They become lenses that control public perceptions of reality and create public desires. This in turn creates “public opinion.”
Context
Mills’s development of the concept of the power elite followed earlier notions of power systems within American society and reacted against them. The nineteenth-century French political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville provided an early statement on American power; he emphasized the affiliational elements and the possibility of social mobility. Despite the great degree of accuracy in his description of the post-revolutionary United States, Tocqueville’s analysis grew seriously out of date as power became more entrenched in the hands of a few and as social mobility declined. During the early twentieth century, other notions of power became prevalent. Conservative theorists often devised conspiracy theories that rooted power in devious groups of hidden actors working for personal gain. Mills, however, argued that the United States is ruled by a class or group of power elites with interlocking but not synonymous goals. At the same time, liberal theories of power emphasized the importance of common people and thus the impotence of power groups to affect public opinion. Mills asserted the naïveté of such positions and demonstrated that these views obscured and justified the true nature of power in American society.
The notion of the power elite also drew on other social concepts. Against many eighteenth-century social theories, the power elite model assumes the irrationality of social actors, seeing them as influenced more by power than by thought. This incorporates essentially Freudian ideas about human behavior into a larger model of social action and organization. Likewise, the power elite model assumes that ideas about reality are socially conditioned. Because members of the power elite occupy social positions of influence, they can affect people’s assumptions about reality and thus enhance their own capacity for power.
Power elite models maintain a certain popularity within sociology. These models did not give sufficient attention to the processes by which power elites reorganize themselves internally and to the related processes by which the power elite brings about (and reacts to) social change, however. The power elite joins disparate groups from different social institutions such as politics, the economy, and the military, but not all elites are equals: not all elites experience the same opportunities for upward mobility or horizontal mobility into other social institutions. At the same time, some power elite models tend toward static functionalism, overemphasizing the ability of elite groups to maintain their systems of privilege. This overstatement can limit understanding of how elites not only cause change but also must react to changes in the social situation.
Although it may finally raise more questions than it answers, Mills's power elite model laid the foundation for further research into such subjects as elite pluralism, decision-making, corporatism and capitalism, potential costs of elite power, power structures and elite networks, gender and elitism, cohesion and loyalty, reputation, reproduction of elites, elite spaces from the local to the global, and the increasing role of technology in producing elites.
Bibliography
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