Volume 4, Number 3 · March 11, 1965
C. Wright Mills and the Pragmatists
By Henry David Aiken
Sociology and Pragmatism: The Higher Learning in America
by C. Wright Mills, edited with an Introduction by Irving Louis Horowitz
Paine-Whitman, 475 pp., $7.95
The greater part of this book, which contains among other things a version of C. Wright Mills's doctoral dissertation, is worth reading. It has the benefit of two revisions: one, doubtless to its advantage, by its author, the other by its editor. It should be said in his defense that Professor Horowitz lacks the full courage of his intrusions. For instance he informs us in his Preface that 'the title of the dissertation, A Sociological Account of Pragmatism, has been changed to Sociology and Pragmatism: A Study in American Higher Learning.' That this is not the title he has actually given the book, anyone but Professor Horowitz can see. A minor point. In extenuation of this (or that) alteration, the following has occurred to Professor Horowitz: 'This is not only a commercially more viable title, but better reflects Mills's main concern in the dissertation, the professionalization of philosophic education in the United States, and also his enormous indebtedness to the work of Thorstein Veblen.' Characteristic, and not so minor. My guess is that, under its original title, the book would have sold like hot-cakes, real higher learning and all; as it is it will undoubtedly have to be remaindered before the year is out. Mills's indebtedness to Veblen is genuine, but it is not much in evidence here. Nor is the book's chief concern with the professionalization of philosophical education. What it is concerned with, when Mills finally gets down to business, is the development, under various pressures, of the pragmatic tendencies in the writings of Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey.
Review, 4289 words
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