Afterword. Mills as Classic?

Summary

For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.

– The Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Galatians

By way of conclusion, it may be useful to consider three points quite briefly: the currency of Mills's work 100 years after his death; the tight links in his writings between knowledge and power, political legitimacy and the political responsibility of intellectuals; finally, the strengths and limits of this book.

In his Munich lecture of 1917 on science as a vocation, Weber claimed that unlike art, science is “chained to the course of progress.” He concluded that any scientific achievement will be outdated in “ten, twenty, fifty years” (Weber 1946, 138). On the last point he was surely mistaken. Although J.M. Keynes's The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936) appeared some 80 years ago, controversies over the book abound, with economists debating its merits as if the author were still an active even if quite senior fellow of King's College, Cambridge, attempting to dominate a latter-day Bretton Woods conference on the international monetary system. Comparable claims hold for Weber himself. Academic careers continue to be made by investigating his work, some of it – including The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism – first published more than 100 years ago. As the appearance of the critical German edition of his early methodological and philosophical essays is finally in sight, it is clear that much of what he wrote in these studies covers territory for which our maps of Weberiana are seriously inaccurate or incomplete (Treiber 2015; Wagner 2015; Wagner and Härpfer 2015).

Texts are of course not self-interpreting artifacts. Questions of how they are understood and assessed are decided by their reception. Mills's work does not constitute a legacy the meaning of which can be read on its face. In his lifetime, the gods that determine academic reputation and prestige smiled on him – a reception that belies the dissatisfaction expressed in his correspondence, complaints that became increasingly bitter as his work assumed a more strident tone.