The Power Elite was an extremely interesting book for several reasons. I had to keep checking the date is was published throughout my readings. It offered a good history of power and its capacity for violence, but at the same time it served as a foreshadow to what we have today. Throughout the book, I kept thinking about power and what and who it erases. Women, for example were a very uncommon topic in this book. When mentioned, they were the socialites who were uneducated and looking to marry a rich man so that they could vacation in the Hamptons. This made me think of the number of educated women today, not only educated but members of the power elite, as Mills talks about. What are Mills' arguments about the power elite and gender? How different are things now? Where do people like Condoleezza Rice and Hilary Clinton fit into this equation? Where would they be situated in the power elite of Mills' book and where are they going? What does their rise to power say about the power elite? How does gender play a role in the power elite?
In light of the discussion we had during our advisee meeting on Friday about being strategic in our means as critical scholars I was struck by the words of Lenin who emphasizes the role of the intellectual. He says, "The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade-union consciousness, i.e., it may itself realize the necessity for combining in unions, for fighting against the employers and for striving to compel the government to pass necessary labor legislation, etc. The theory of socialism, however, grew out of the philosophic, historical representatives of the propertied classes, the intellectuals." (pg. 74) This idea of the bourgeois socialist intelligentsia as an instrument of raising consciousness and fomenting dissent is an ideal one I am sure but in contemporary times we, the academics, forming a substantial part of the "intellectual elite", occupy a unique position which forces us into &
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