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 He concluded that any scientific achievement will be outdated in “ten, twenty, fifty years” (Weber 1946, 138).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.

C. Wright Mills was born in Waco, Texas, on August 28, 1916. In the 1940s the governor of Texas observed that the frontiersmen who settled the wilderness that became Texas carried an ax, a rifle and a Bible (Powers 2015, 29). When Mills became an Ivy League professor and a New York intellectual, he was not averse to embellishing his Wild West provenance, solidifying his image of the intellectual who wrote by riding and shooting. Playing the part of the outlander, he kept his distance from the pretensions of the Claremont Avenue set and the cultural refinements of Morningside Heights in the neighborhood of Columbia University, where he taught in the undergraduate college. Mills seems to have believed that he forged in the smithy of his soul – if not the uncreated conscience of his race, then at least his own identity – creating himself ex nihilo. In fact, he received an excellent education at the University of Texas, especially in philosophy with George Gentry and David Miller. Both had doctorates from the University of Chicago, where they had studied with George Herbert Mead. Mills studied economics with Clarence Ayres, another Chicago doctorate in philosophy who taught institutional economics. Compared to contemporary graduate education in Anglophone sociology – where training in philosophy and economics ranges from primitive to nonexistent outside the subdisciplines of economic sociology and what is loosely called methodology – Mills's education was remarkably comprehensive and thorough. Yet he devoted much of his career to puncturing the mythologies, illusions and self-deceptions of his contemporaries.

Autobiographical fictionalizations aside, Mills was a protean and endlessly restless thinker.

American Nihilism

White Collar was C. Wright Mills's first popular success, the book in which he achieved entrée to the broader readership outside academia that he coveted. In the introduction, he wrote an impressionistic survey of the mentality of the white, middle-class, salaried employees who were his contemporaries – generally living in cities or suburbs and for the most part employed by large organizations. The material poverty suffered by industrial workers of the nineteenth century had been replaced by moral and psychological impoverishment. The man of the middle classes – Mills did not mention women at this point – had no “firm roots or sure loyalties to sustain his life and give it a center.” Without direction, he lived frenetically; but he was also “paralyzed with fear,” exhibiting “the most profound apathy of modern times” (Mills 1951, xvi). Was this the inner world of postwar US affluence: the generation of young adults enjoying liberal funding for higher education, easy credit and low interest rates, high levels of employment and income, home ownership, family formation and upward mobility – Americans living the American dream? It seems implausible. Yet, Mills was convinced not only of the social pathology of “apprehensiveness, pessimism, tension” and “‘spiritual disillusionment’ with the social order” (329). He was confident he had discovered its source. The certitudes of an earlier era had collapsed. “No new sanctions or justifications for the new routines we live, and must live, have taken hold.” Because the postwar middle classes had no commitments or ideals, they were “morally defenseless as individuals and politically impotent as a group” (xvi).

Within a year, Mills, ever alert to the marketing value of arresting phrases, had a name for the new pathology. In an article for the New York Times Magazine of November 23, 1952, entitled “A Diagnosis of Our Moral Uneasiness,” he christened it “the higher immorality.” Reprising his ideas in White Collar, he claimed that although “the older values and codes of uprightness no longer grip us, they have not been replaced.” The fall of the traditional moral order created an ethical vacuum in both public and private life, leaving individuals confused about the meaning of their personal troubles and incapable of translating them into issues of public affairs – matters they regarded with indifference.

The Apotheosis and Decline of the Old Middle Class: A Millsian Primer

In the genre of sociological analysis as narrative, perhaps only Max Weber's account of the genesis and transformations of “the spirit of capitalism” is more widely known than C. Wright Mills's historical sketch of the American middle classes in White Collar. In its general outlines – and Mills painted in very broad strokes – his story of the old middle class can be simply told. An engaging story, both inspiring and tragic, it also seems to be largely false.

Once upon a time in America – the time was the nineteenth century – modestly capitalized farms and businesses flourished in a rural and smalltown economy. In the main, people who were employed owned the means of production with which they worked, the definitive characteristic of the “society of small entrepreneurs.” Mills claimed that before the emancipation of slaves, as many as 80 percent of the free population who were employed owned economically productive property. Thus “the society as a whole was a middle-class society” (Mills 1951, 7). An implicit welfare function was built into Mills's analysis of the old middle class, and it may be useful to make this function and its chief assumptions explicit. Economic welfare, on which total human welfare depends, was a function of ownership of productive property in markets where exchanges were coordinated by competition and the price mechanism. This function rested on three main presuppositions: (1) property holdings were relatively small and there were no barriers to entry; (2) each economic actor controlled an insignificant market share and was thus incapable of influencing prices; (3) markets were immanently coordinated by virtue of their own structure and dynamics: it was essential to Mills's conception of the old entrepreneurial economy that it rebalanced market fluctuations by selfadjusting. Thus the economy was not coordinated politically, administratively or bureaucratically. Although the economic powers of the state were indispensable, they were limited to the responsibility of ensuring that the integrity of competitive markets was not compromised.

Mills ascribed considerable importance to the dispersion of property in the old middle class. It was the economic structure of smallholdings that underpinned the competitiveness of markets, ensuring the security of “the masterless individual,” the “‘absolute individual’, linked into a system with no authoritarian center, but held together by countless, free, shrewd transactions.”

The reception of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is littered with the corpses of critiques that fell stillborn from the press, dead on arrival because they attacked positions Weber did not hold or otherwise employed arguments irrelevant to his case. One of the virtues of Malcolm MacKinnon's critique of The Protestant Ethic is that it does not fall into these perennial errors. Concerning his critique and the project of refuting Weber's account of the relationship between the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism, I would like to make two points.

Weber developed two analyses that tie the Protestant ethic to the spirit of capitalism: the first in the two Protestant Ethic essays of 1904- 1905, the second in his series of essays on American Protestant sects. What is the relation between The Protestant Ethic and Weber's subsequent essays on the Protestant sects? What is the relation between The Protestant Ethic and Weber’s subsequent essays on the Protestant sects?

Weber's argument in The Protestant Ethic may be sketched as follows. According to the Calvinist doctrine of predestination, God has chosen a small segment of the human race as recipients of His grace. These He has selected for salvation. The rest He has chosen to damn. Because of the abyss that separates the transcendence of God from the wretchedness of the human sinner, the unalterable decretum horrible is ultimately unintelligible to the human understanding and incomprehensible from the standpoint of human conceptions of justice.