When C. Wright Mills's The Power Elite was published in 1956 the prevailing academic position on the structure of political power was described as “pluralism.” Many political scientists and sociologists acknowledged that economic power had become highly concentrated during the twentieth century. But the prevailing wisdom was that the economic and political spheres were largely autonomous; at most, large industrial corporations were included among the welter of influence groups seeking to influence Congress, the agencies of the executive branch and state governments, but under no circumstances was the United States dominated by a ruling class or a coalition of fairly complementary interests. Best articulated in Robert Dahl's Who Governs? (1961), power in the United States is dispersed among a plethora of interest groups. On specific issues, one or more groups may exercise dominant influence, but Dahl denied that in general a national power structure exists. Mills did not dispute the “vector analysis” of power but insisted that it operated chiefly at the local level. He argued that the chief function of the American state is to implement foreign policy. In the Cold War era, social reform must compete with the imperatives of permanent war that demand that the preponderance of taxes be devoted to maintaining a large military equipped with technologically advanced weapons and a large number of military bases in Western Europe, surrounding Eastern Europe, in Latin America and in Southeast Asia. These regions were viewed by a highly concentrated power elite as radical or revolutionary threats to US and European security. Mills also disputed the prevailing liberal Democratic claim that America could afford both guns and butter, a major theme of Adlai Stevenson's 1956 presidential campaign.

Needless to say, Mills's theory of economic and political power more than dissented from the prevailing pluralist thesis. It contradicted it and offered a comprehensive alternative that, while not ignoring the validity of plural struggles for incremental domestic social reform, argued that America's global interests both drove state policy and limited the effectiveness of liberal democratic politics. Indeed, Mills claimed that there was no democracy at the national level. First he placed the top officers of the largest corporations as a crucial component of a power elite. He also argued for the concept of a coalition of power that dominates the key elements of national policy.