The Power Elite has had a wide emotional appeal because of its rhetoric and its tough-minded "unmasking" of naïve, Populist illusions about democratic checks on power. But a detailed, textual analysis of the book shows a loose and confusing use of terminology. Its conceptual scheme draws from European experiences which do not apply in American life. Its method is static and ahistorical. Power, as Mills defines it, is violence, but this avoids more problems than it illuminates. The book fails to deal with the nature of interests or to define the character of political decisions.
Daniel Bell (Sat,) studied this question.
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