The Dark Sid e of Power andi the Intellectual:
VI Wright Mill*s and Gerald D. Berreinan
Elvi W%hittaker
Two ways: One is to suffer; the other is to become a professor of the fact that another
has suffered.
--Soren Kierkegaard
Intellectuals, as Kierkegaard suggests, are by virtue of their calling always at
the crossroads of a moral dilenmm. Does academic life, in monastic fashion, allow a
comfortable and pious sequestering from the world? Is it enough to produce
knowledge that others might by chance discover and convert to usefulness? What
moral commitments does a scholar have both to the people studied and to the
problems raised? These are enduring questions for the intellectual. Despite much
theorizing to the contrary, the mirage called value-freeness remains sacrosanct, and
objectilvity continues to be widely adm-ired. Even for those who abandoned the idyllic
possibility of unfettered knowledge long ago, academic culture still has many ways of
discouragiing scholars from activism beyond the confines of universities. Academics
can abdicate without censure from the responsibility of maigtheir work useful and
even view this abdication as necessary for the quality of their work. Many seek
refuge behind this wall of security. But not all.
A few intellectuals passionately defy the comfortable majority as well as
disciplinary propriety. For thern knowledge without political commitment is an
immoral act. They feel little kinship for the disassociated scholar who, in their eyes,
and as Nietzsche would argue, resembles "an instrument," with "no purpose in
himseIlf" For Nietzsche the ""objective man is in truth a mirror.: accustomed to
prostration before everything that wants to be known, with such desires. only as
knowing or 'reflecting' imply." His own persona evades him and he "'calls up the
recollection of 'himself' with an effort, and not infrequently wrongly" (1965:152).
Such scholars, he continues, impoverished in spirt as they are, dilute any troubles
they may confront in their research by jumping immediately to the "6general case"-
safe, objective, and emotionless. In contrast, the independence of mind exercised by
radical colleagues places them outside the canons of routine scholarship and orthodox
professorship. They refuse to accept the imposed doctrines of compronuse and., far
too often, come to know the heavy cost of such boldness. Such dissenters join a select
g;.I-roup of public intellectuals, expatriates of the university's ivory towers, who speak
out boldly. They claim the right to the dignity of their own experiences, write
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Whittaker
305
persuasively and directly from their convictions and from -their own brand of moral
and civic cynicism. The obvious names jump to mind: Noam Chomsky, Susan
Sontag, David Suzuki, Helen Caldicott, Desmond Tutu, Bertrand Russell, Lionel
Trill'ing, Kate Millett, Edmund Wilson, Ralph Nader, Rachel Carson, Jean-Paul Sartre.
The contemporary concerns of these activists range through issues as diverse as the
machinations of foreign policy, the enviromment, the status of women, human rights,
genetic testing, the Third World debt, human clonilng, gay and lesbian rights,
indigenous land rights, world trade, consumer and patient rights, globalization, and the
human condition generally. Their agenda has two stages: to render visible the dark
si'de of the power that offends, and thereby to activate for change.
This essay deals with the contributions of two such intellectuals, whose
careers, when taken together, span the years since World War H. One is C. Wright
Mills, a sociologist whose research and writing was done in the 1940s anld 1950s. The
other is Gerald D. Beffeman, an anthropologist whose work spans the decades from
the 1960s to the present. They are scholars of different academic and polit'ical
generations. Mills, a professor at Columbia University, died in 1962 in his forty-fifth
year. At this time Beffeman was in the fi-rst years of his first permanent academic
position at the University of California, Berkeley. They never met.
Yet they are drawn together by a strain of powerful ideas that link publ'ic and
intellectual spheres. TheirT truths are political, strongly aesthetic, and supersede
seemingly logical conventions. They recognize compatriots across the lines of
d'iscilplines, languages, and nationalities. Mills observed on first reading a biography
of Thomas Wolfe: "sMy God that man is my brother" (Mills and Mills 2000:305). It 'is
this kind of ki nshilp that Gerald Berreman undoubtedly felt on discover'ng the writings
of Mills, in particular the book The Sociologi'cal Imagination (1959). He wn'tes of
Mills as "my favorite social scilentist," anld of the stance descnibed by Millls as the
"(politics of truth" and "an adequate defmition of reality," in short, the undeniable
political relevance of knowledge and the responsibility of the social scientist in
addressing human problems (Berreman 1979a:xiv-xv). He remains faithful to these
basic ideas through several decades of writing. In honor of his intellectual predecessor
Berreman confers the title 7he Politics of Truth (I1981la) on the book which reports on
some of his own activist work in the 1960s anld 1970s.
The truth that draws Mills and Berreman together appears to be that things are
really not as they seem; things are not as they should be. Clearly each believes in
acting according to his conscilence, irrespectilve of- the bureaucratic structures within
which he resildes and makes his living. Mills assertively proclaims that "it's a writer's
responsibility to orient modern publics to the catastrophic world 'in which they
Ilive ... he cannot do this if he remains a mere specialist. To do it at all, he's got to do 'it
big!" (fly-leaf of Millls and Mills 2000). Beffeman echoes similar sentiments: "I think
the crucial thing 'is that we act as human beings and as social scient'ists according to
our consciences and our knowledge-for the two are inseparable-and that we not be
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scared off by the myth of value-freedom. Our acts can have direct effect and can
serve as examples to others. If we do not act, our science will die" (1968:395). They
encounter the familiar conflict between conscience, passion, and the artificial
inhibitors of the knowledge of which they are a part. Dealing with these conflicts
demands considerable personal courage.
Both Mills and Berreman found themselves as university professors in the
quagmire of highly political times. They freed themselves from the yokes of
academic bureaucracy demanded by their disciplines, entered into the political process
and ultimately became important figures in the beginnings of a radical social science.
Tahe 1940s and 1950s, when Mills came to academic maturity, followed a
global conflict where the United States and the rest of the world was attempting to
recreate some of the stability of earlier years as quickly as possible. The emergn
stability of the late forties and the quiet fifties, the frightened and silent generation as
they came to be known, were reflected in a status quo sociology of structural-
functionalism and Grand Theory. Talcott Parsons, who dominated this intellectual
period, was deemed the sociologist who provided the theoretical intelligence that
supported the bureaucratic establishment of the day. Parsonian. sociology was
admired not only by the orthodox but also by the majority. His sociology, widely
taught and practiced at the time, is now criticized for its stationary perspective, for
being inelastic in accommodating change, and for not recognizing the creative
impetus for change. Mills came to see Parson's social system as the bedrock that
supported the establishment, the ultimate conservative view. Its analytic offering was
to become a rallying call for later intellectual and radical critiques of, or against, the
military-industrial complex.
C. Wright Mills threw the first stones at establishment sociology and its
relationship to American politics. He was a passionately unrelenting critic refusing to
compromise or "to make the excuses that others were makingexcuses mislabeled
descriptions and analyses-for what was happening to their country" (Swados
1963:40). These analyses were, for him, examples of the emperor without clothes.
""The fact is that it is not read'ily understandable; the suspicion is that 'it may not be
altogether intelligible.... To many of those who claim to understand it, but who do not
like it, it is a clumsy piece of irrelevant ponderosity" (Mills 1959:26). For the
advocate it was a "wondrous maze, fascinating precisely because of its often splendid
lack of intelligibility" (26).1 There was a serious breach in social science, Mills
observed, not only between those "who would observe without thinking" and those
"who think without observing," but also in what "kinds of Lhikin, what kinds of
observing, and what kinds of links, if any, there are between the two" (Mills 1959:33).
His own chosen path was clear. "I have a big responsibility to thousands of people all
over the world to tell the truth as I see it and to tell it exactly and with drama and quit
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The Dark Side of Power and the Intellectual
307
this horsing around with sociological bullshit" (Mills and Mills 2000:326). Clearly he.
saw himself as called to lead the revolt.
These sentiments were supported by Mills' choice of research topics. His
academic concerns can be summed as power, politics, and knowledge-power and
powerlessness. He was very keen on having a wide readership for his pointedly
critical intelligence on these issues. To him the crucial perpetrators of power, the ones
that continually drew him in almost everything he wrote, were authoritarianism,
totalitarianism, and bureaucracy. At first these matters interested him as they existed
on the American scene, but later he extended his concerns to the Soviet sphere.
After a dissertation derived from an interest in pragmatism, in the work of
George Herbert Mead and Karl Mannheim, and centered in the sociology of
knowledge as an analytic (published posthumously as Sociology and Pragmatism in
1966), he turned to an investigation of labor leaders, The New Men of Power (1948).
He was particularly interested in the power that originated with the working class. He
placed a great deal of hope on the power of labor leaders to implement change of the
non-establishment kind. This hope was to be dashed, however, as it became clear to
hmthat union officials increasingly began to adopt the cultural attributes of the
already powerful, shunning those of the working class.
He followed this with a classic work which revealed the powerlessness of the
middle class, White Collar (1953), a convincing chronicle of the malaise of the times.
In particular he devoted a chapter to intellectuals, observing that intellectuals in the
post-war period were in a moral slump. They had not protested the war and now,
fur-ther alienated, they "broke with the old radicalism and became in one way or
another liberals and patriots, or gave up politics altogether" (1953:147), inclinations of
which he did not approve. Further, the conditions of thelir lives were set by state and
business bureaucracies, which in turn had become their manconsumers as well as
employers. Even in large universities academics were controlled by a "vague general
fear" which was conveniently labeled "discretion" and "good judgment" (1953:15 1).
He described this state of afaiLrs as a "defeat of the free intellectuals" by an enemy not
clearly definable. In short, intellectuals were in a spiritual void. Obvilously he was
keenly aware of his own position, if only by virtue of his chosen calling, in this
spintual wasteland.
He completed the trilogy of his excursion into class and power when he
produced The Power Elite (1956), an examination of the centralization of the power
and knowledge that affected the lives of ordinary men and women. A powerful and
controversial book, it demonstrated effectively that. a power elite ruled America-the
metropolitan 400, the very rich, the chief executives, the corporate rich, the
celebrities, and those who ruled the Pentagon-a self-perpetuating power elite.
Through each of the three parallel volumes he attempted to show, mostly by example,
what issues should concern intellectuals. What particularly angered him were the
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intellectuals who were defaulting on what he saw as their moral mission, who were
devoid of moral passion, and who were "sophisticated apologetics for the
inexcusable ... as shields of orthodoxy and bellboys of authority" (Miliband 1968:6).
The Power Elite sold very well and was read by those of varying political persuasions.
Reportedly among his disciples were Tom Hayden, the left wilng radical and later the
politician, and Dwight Eisenhower, who initiated in one of his speeches the active use
of the term "the industrial-military complex." It also brought him to the attention of
the press, which began to feature him as an intellectual celebrity, clad in leather and
goggles, riding his motorcycle, and also to g'ive attention to his squabbles with his
colleagues. The sociological establishment was hardly forgiving. Despite the
grounding of his work in all of the acceptable scholarly procedures-he had actual
data-he received a barrage of unremitting criticism. Nor were the granting
bureaucracies forgiving when all but one turned down his requests for research funds.
He had emerged as an active crit'ic and intellectual agitator, determined not to be
beaten into conformity. He saw no alliance with the liberals of the time. In fact, he
had a very low opini'on of American liberalism, its false promises, flabby principles,
fawning apologetica, and enslavement to other powers. In a letter to his closest friend,
Harvey Swados, who was wounded from a review, he wrote that Swados was not "to
allow the shit-liberal types of reviews ... to bother him- or hurt him. They are
inevitable: would be same if book being reviewed were half blank paper or great
American novel. It is a good book... so fuck them all" (Mills and Mills 2000:327).
Though Oxford University Press had published two of his social class and
power books and Harcourt Brace the other, he chose to publish his activist prose in the
leftist periodicals-Labor and Nation, Partisan Review, The New Leader, 7he New
Republic, Thze Unionist and Public Forum, LaRevue Socialiste, and The New Left
Review.
Of his eleven books, tmso were direct incursions into the political strongholds
of the country. In 1958 he published The Causes of World War Three, a war that he
felt would inevitably come. He argued that it would be total, and also absurd, brought
about by the power elite of the United States and the Soviet Union. Surely a dreaded
war, as well as the hoped-for peace, warranted concerted reasoning and action.
Consequently he called for the United States to abandon its "military metaphysic," its
monolithic doctrine of capitalism, and to recognize that the "only realistic military
view is the view that war, and not Russia, is now the enemy" (1 958: 1 01). Two-thirds
of the world exists in poverty, he noted, and consequently he suggested that
industrialization should not be allowed to become the new metaphysic, the new fetish.
Rather, it should be a means to give humanity a suitable standard of living. He
advocated coexistence as the new metaphysilc. In addition to these crucial directives
he asked Washington to remove security and loyalty restrictions in the conduct of
scientifilc research, to help in the training of scientists, and to remove all scientifilc
research and development from the private economy. These sound like familiar
arguments reappearing in different intellectual generations. In particular, he directs
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the last suggestion to the intellectual. "Every time intellectuals have the chance to
speak yet do not speak, they join the forces that train men [and women] not to be able
to think and imagine and feel in morally and politically adequate ways" (1958:134).2
The book sold in the hundreds of thousands, an unprecedented sale for sociological
writig.
Inspired by political hope, Mills, along with many intellectuals, had supported
Castro at the time of the Cuban Revolution. It was a moral cause. As Mills and
others saw it, here was a revolution brought about by intellectuals and it had the
ongoing support of many American and European intellectuals. Norman Mailer, Jean-
Paul Sartre, Truman Capote, James Baldwin, and others signed a "Fair Play for Cubai"
petition. In particular, Mills hoped that developing countries such as Cuba would not
succumb to either a Soviet or American model. In 1960, after visiting Cuba and
taping interviews with Fidel Castro and others, he published Listen Yankee: The
Revolution in Cuba, a rather remarkable book finished in six weeks. Mills wrote of
the revolution as a Cuban revolutionary might see it. This work brought even-more
criticism from academics than his previous works. Yet it sold an unprecedented
quarter of a million copies. He was attracting the type of attention that, he hoped,
might balance the influence of the power elite. He-trusted that other intellectuals
would join his efforts (Scimecca 1977: 19).
The book that solidified his intellectual reputation more than any other was
The Sociological Imagination (1959), which was angry, philosophical, hopeful, soul-
searching, full of intellectual and emotional truths, critical, liberating, provocative,
manpulative, interdisciplinary, and above all, sociologically enterprising. In it he
attacked established sociology, its "bureaucratic techniques" and "pretensions." He
suggested that the social scientist's chief task was political and intellectual: "to make
clear the elements of contemporary uneasiness and indifference" (1959:13). Above
all he advocated a "sociolo&Xcal imaiation," a form of self-consciousness by which
it would be possible to grasp "what is going on in the world" as well as understand
what was happening to the individual. Intellectuals with this sociological imaiDnation,
he suggested, should address their work to three ends: firstly, to those with power and
those with an awareness of having power; secondly, to those whose actions have such
consequences; and, thirdly, to those who are troubled but powerless and confined, in
this hopeless state, to the prison of the everyday (1959:185). Sadly, the role of the
intellectual, a subject to which Mills gave considerable attention in his thinkinge and
his writing, was to be the subject of the book that he did not live to write. Much of
what he had begun to collect on the topic, most intriguingly in the form of letters to an
imaginary Soviet colleague called Tovarich, remains unpublished. Together with his
coffespondence, published and unpublished, these short vignettes on the culture of the
intellectual are the closest to what would have been his only autobiography.
*
r
qb
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Gerald Berreman began his early work in the context of the embattled
Berkeley of the 1960s, during years when that campus became increasingly more and
more involved in the many merging and cross-cutting struggles that faced the United
States and the world. The Berkeley campus had become politicized very quickly into
an arena for protests against the House of Un-American Activities Committee
hearings, the gathening momentum of the war in Vietnam, counterinsurgency in
Southeast Asia and in Latin America, and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Equally
important were the ongoing and growing support given to the continuing national
struggles for civil rights in the southern states and elsewhere, and the open activism on
behalf of peace. These broad national issues were interlaced with more localized
protests for freedom of speech on campus, against the draft, against Defense
Department funding for academic research and against university and city attempts to
downplay populist rights in the fonm of the Hippie and Flower Child movement and
People's Park. While the struggles began in the early part of the 1960s, they
continued into the 1970s. Many radical groups founded at this time were a presence
at Berkeley and other such politicized campuses: Students for a Democratic Society,
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Student Mobilization Committee to
Stop the War in Vietnam, the Black Panthers, and the Free Speech Movement. These
were unprecedented times in North America, turbulent times in the history of
intellectual activism, confrontational times in the history of anthropology, and
certainly exciting times for those of us who lived through them. This era was a
backdrop for Berreman's early writing and activism. In most ways that one can thinJk1
of, the Zeitgeist was almost opposite to those quieter times about which Mills
agonized and in which he wrote. It is interesting to speculate that if Mills, who had
been unhappy at Columbia and for many years had wished to go to Berkeley, had
been granted this wish, what he would have said and how he would have directed his
energies. Unfortunately even before his death in 1962, he was already ill with heart
disease and his writing had not come to reflect what was undoubtedly his awareness
of the growing cilvil rights struggle and the other fronts on inequality and justice on
which liberal intellectuals were beginning to be involved. The outrage and activism
on the part of academics like Beffeman against the war in Vietnam, in particular,
would have confirmewd some of his most fervent hopes for the nommimn  n
participation of intellectuals. Thus, in a sense, Beffeman carried on his work.
As if attuned to a synchronized intellectual program, Gerald Beffeman's
oeuvre does seem to continue where that of Mills ended. Like Mills, Berreman found
himself in a conservative discipline, with few texts that turned a critical eye on the
whole anthropological enterprise itself, let alone the world in which the discipline was
situated. He wrote that:
many of us are equally silck of anthropology as it is exemplified in
most of our journals, books, and courses   cven those we have
ourselves perpetuated ... the malaise that is affecting our discipline,
our professional association, our department, our students,, our
Whittaker               The Dark Side of Power and the Intellectual  31 1
faculty-in short ourselves...the malaise is close ... to the heart of the
troubles faced by intellectuals in America today....It is variously
described as anomie, alienation, anti-intellectualism, unscientific
attitude, disrespect, laziness, know-nothingness, narcissism, being
stoned, or being on the forefront of a new era. It is often described as
a manifestation of radicalism, radical chic, impertinence, or a counter
culture. It seems chaotic, but I don't think it is. Rather, it is coherent
and comprehensible. [ 1972a: 83-841
Beffeman's work and that of others in the 1960s was to change that. By the end of the
decade in both sociology and anthropology there were critical analyses of the roots
and intents of the disciplines to join the few lonely texts already in existence such as
Robert Lynd's classic, Knowledge for What? The Place of Social Science in Amnerican
Culture (1967[1939]). Among these new works were Gouldner's reflections on "the
myth of a value-free sociology" (1962), Wrong's critique of the "over-socialized"
person common in sociology (1961), Nader's suggestion that anthropologists should
"study up" instead of continuing to "study down" (1972), and Gough's proposal of the
idea of anthropology as the "child of imperialism"' (I1968). Of particular importance is
the volume edited by Dell Hymes, Reinventing Anthropology (1972), based on papers,
including one by Berreman, previously delivered at the annual meeting of the Kroeber
Anthropological Society. The volume itself was an open call for a radicalized
anthropology.
In accounting for the early stages of his preoccupation with inequality of all
kids and social justice in its many forms, Gerald Berreman relates the story of his
two years of military service at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama.
He witnessed many acts of racial bias and worked in defense of a soldier charged on
racially based grounds. He and an African American colleague, using their social
science background, decideds to document racism and racial segregation at the base.
T'he resulting reports, unsolicited and no doubt totally unwelcome, were presented to
the military and civilian authorities. These were significant years for Berreman in
molding his anthropological interests. They were further gelled on reaching India,
where he was struck by the similarities in ascribed powerlessness. Here began a
iffelong commitment to write about caste and other forms of social inequality.
Working with race in the United States, the Aleuts, and examining the case of the
Burakumin of Japan provided a contrast of a small society with essentially an
egalitarian pattern, yet placed within a colonizing and dispossessing larger frame. To
that exner'ience he added his knowledgye of the ongyoing ineoualities between large-
scale national societies to formi a palette for the comparative study of inequality,
which he sees as the most inhumran, basic, and unnecessary form of social injustice.
The problem of inequality is of such crucial importance for Berreman that he
has devoted an integral part of his career to explicating its horrors and unpacking the
malevolent source of its powers. He does not offer the reader "lifeless descriptions of
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human life," for a discipline "which does not reflect and convey or illuminate the
human experience is no anthropology at all ... too much contemporary anthropology is
this nonanthropology" (1972a:93). Not only does he accuse the discipline of lack of
concern for experience-curious in a discipline that purports to understand just that-
but he also accuses it of a static and lifeless epistemology (1966).
These are not the only attributes of anthropology to come under his critical
gaze. He argues that the insulan'ty of anthropology, where commitments to area
studies and single ethnographic cases are the ritually proper way to enter the discipline
as well as to remain in it, works to provincialize anthropologists and isolate them from
one another. This insularity thus inhibits them from turning their attention to the
cross-cultural issues that really matter. Caste, race, gender, and other inequalities, he
suggests, are important enough to deserve the widest possible informed audience and
the comparability that this would ensure. "At professional meetings, let's read our
papers in sessions on social organization, stratification, culture change, and economic
anthropology whenever we can. Otherwise we Indianists will continue to talk only to
one another and ultimately, no doubt, only to ourselves" (1979b: 123).
If the anthropologist, or anyone else for that matter; should have doubts about
the importance of the study of inequality, Berreman reminds us that "the welfare of
the most powerful and privileged of people and nations, and the future of us all,
cannot be isolated from that of the poorest, most vulnerable, most wretched of the
earth. Human rights and self-interest, social justice and survival, are now one and the
same" (1981b:39). Moreover, should one doubt this, he thinks the problem worth
focusing on "because it is an entirely cultural, learned, man-made phenomenon which
could be drastically reduced or eliminated, were people to decide to do that" (37).
Throughout his career Berreman has kept a critical eye on national policy.
Frequently he made his analyses public, writing, as indeed did Mills, in the type of
publications where those in power might read them or, conversely, the powerless be
made aware of their situation. His writings appeared in The Nation, The Daily
Californian, International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs Documents, Cultural
Survival, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and The Newsletter of the American
Anthropological Association; he spoke at symposia as widely distributed as High
Technology and Its International Impact (1979) and the International Congress on
Applied Systems Research and Cybernetics (198 1).  His highlighting of the
questionable and controversial aspects of governmental policy ranged through many
topics. He points critically to the much-admired Peace Corps as yet another fori of
colonialism, to Defense Department funding of the Himalayan Border Countries
Proiect, to the connections between the CIA and AID (American International
Development), to activities of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (an arm of the
Defense Department), as well as to private institutions like the Rand Corporation.
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In short, he advocates an awareness of the political baggage which
accompanies the research undertakings of any social science researcher. In 1976 he
alludes to the legacy of "Vietnam, the CIA, Nixon, Locheed, Rand Corp., Aramco,
Project Camelot, the Bay of Pigs, the Asia Foundation, ex-Ambassador Moynihan and
the like. When we work at home cross-culturally we are likely to be visited by the
ghosts of Watergate, J. Edgar Hoover, social indicators, pollsters, the Bureau of Indian
Affairs, the Moynihan Report, behavior modification, Jensenism, and the entire
history of American race, class, and ethnic antagonisms and exploitation" (reprinted
1981a:77).3
He sees no anthropologist as innocent. To this end, throughout his career and
especially during and in the aftermath of Vietnam and the counterinsurgency in
Thailand and elsewhere in Southeast Asia (see also Wakin 1992), Berreman has
devoted much attention to the ethics of research. "Some of the most sordid instances
of social science complicity in the destruction of cultures and peoples are hidden
in ... reports and occasionally as well in the secret files of powerless ethics committees
or timid executive committees of professional organizations such as that of my own
profession" (1981a:96).  His relationship with orthodox anthropology and his
perception of the political stance of his colleagues was to-become even more strained
in the high noon of the Vietnamese war and the insurgency problems in Southeast
Asia. Not only in the case of commitment to the study of inequality but, even more
pointedly, in the involvement in national policy, he could scarcely countenance the
notion that world events and national events were seen as clearly irrelevant to the
professional concerns of anthropologists.
Thus, much of Berreman's activism centered in the affairs of the American
Anthropological Association in both the fornial code of ethics of the association and
in the informal practices of its leaders. He has argued that the code should include
clauses which demanded that: 1) the anthropologist's paramount responsibility be to
those they study; 2) no secret research should ever be undertaken; 3) anthropologists
have the responsibility to speak out publicly on what they know through their
specialties; and 4) anthropologists be held accountable for their actions by the
association (Beffeman 1991; 1993). It is important to note that, despite the obvious
need for these four articles of faith, the code in existence today, the Revised Principles
of Professional Responsibility, has no clause on secret and clandestine research.
In addition to their radical stance on the politics both within their respective
disciplines and at the national level, Mills and Beffeman had many mutual academic
interests and concerns. Among them were critical questions about procedures in
research and about theoretical preferences. Both had a commitment to pragmatism of
the American variety. Mills' dissertation in sociology and anthropology at the
University of Wisconsin focused on pragmatism, was located in the sociology of
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knowledge, and was inspired by the work of George Herbert Mead. It was published
posthumously with a preface by one of Mills' disciples, Irving Louis Horowitz (1964),
who pointed out the unique contribution and the existing, relative poverty of
philosophical work in the sociological realm. The admiration for Mead may well
suggest that Mills resembled other followers of the social philosopher and was a
symbolic interactionist, the fori that American pragmatism took in the sociological
realm. Indeed, some symbolic interactionists claim Mills' early work as being of their
genre. It is clear that Mills had a concern and interest with the "self," one of the main
concerns in the symbolic interactionist camp, now also enjoying rapid growth in
anthropology (Whittaker 1992a).  His early work on "situated actions and
vocabularies of motive" and on institutions and persons was reprinted in an
interactionist reader (Manis and Meltzer 1967), while his book with Hans Gerth,
Character and Social Structure (Gerth and Mills 1953), strengthens the claim to
kinship in its preoccupations with self. In addition, the notion of "situated actions,"
another central symbolic interactionist concern, was an analytic prerequisite
throughout much of his work.
Berreman, on the other hand, is probably the strongest proponent of
interactionst methodology/theory (if these two should ever be separate entities) within
the discipline of anthropology (Whittaker 1994:.383-84). Early in his career he
produced a classic work both in symbolic interactionism and in ethnographic
methodology, Behind Many Masks (1962). He has continued to evoke in his works,
either overtly or in a taken-for-granted sense, many facets of the symbolic
interactionist platform: the interactionist creation of identity, sense of self, bestowal of
stigma, and the importance of these in acculturation generally (1964; 1973a; 1983);
the idea that status and social categories are produced through interaction (1967a;
1972b:401-02; 1972c); and the exclusiveness of interaction within the cultures of
caste systems (1967a; 1973b). In presenting the notion that caste is process, in the
same sense that Blumer argues_Jhat society is symbolic interaction, Berreman uses
perhaps one of the strongest of all interactionist ideas (1967b).
Both Beffeman and Mills have declared themselves solidly on the side of
qualitative inquiry in social science. Mills had the harder battle as the research
climate of the times supported abstracted empiricism, a broad acceleration of
quantitative analyses, and hard-nosed, statistically significant, scientific versions of
social science. It was also a time when there were almost no voices raised about the
misplaced rigor that such analyses might promote. Except for Mills. He rejected that
social science had come to "a set of bureaucratic techniques which inhibit social
inquiry by 'methodological' pretensions, which congest such work by obscurantist
conceptions, or which trivialize it bv concern with nunorDproblems unconnected with
publicly relevant issues" (1959:20).
Beffeman, being in anthropology, was freed from some of these battles, and
he is able to write the following:
Whittalcer
The Dark Side of Power and the Intellectual
315C
Working as we anthropologists do, with people, they become friends
and confidants rather than statistics or economic resources, for we
know them to be as real, thoughtful, humorous, sensitive to happiness
and sorrow, as proud, fearful, loyal, resentful, fallible, insightful, as
concerned with their families, as devoted to their traditions and
pleasures, as are the people we know best at home ... impersonality
cannot survive the intimacy of anthropological research. And it is
hard to lie to yourself about them, or to participate 'in exploiting them.
[1980:4]
His particular battles, methodologically speaking, are (and were) against the blatant
disregard of the need to investigate the imperatives which underscored ethnographic
thinking and writing. His call for "an ethnography of ethnography" was a familiar one
in his teaching as well as in his writing. Happily neither he nor Mills had ever to fight
to liberate himself from the personal demons of an upbringing of a value-free or
scientifilc imperialism kind.
Comparative analysis was a basis for the most powerful work by both men.
Berreman's most convincing writings on inequality made the strongest impression
because they were viewed comparatively, such as caste in India against race in
America, the comparative status of women, or the class system and the caste system.
Mills' enterprise of finding the comparative locus of power depended on exam0ining
all three American social classes. Indeed, comparability was woven into his proposal
for the sociological imagination:
that imagination is the capacity to shift from one perspective to
another from the political to the psychological; from the
examination of a single family to comparative assessment of the
national budgets of the world; from the theological school to the
military establishment; from considerations of the oil industry to
studies of contemporary poetry. It is the capacity to range from the
most impersonal and remote transformations to the most intimate
features of the human self and to see the relations between the two.
[Mills 1959:7]
For both scholars the comparative view is the most pressing imperative and even the
most compelling for of their analysis. It was also the foundation of their political
agenda. Clearly what continued to drive them, politically and morally, was the
comparison between what was, as they saw it, and what ought to be.
More hidden than visible is the commitment that both scholars appea'r to have
for considering the nature of the human as ascribed by social science. Usually such
assignations are done silently wilthout acknowledgement, and, in most cases probably
completely without examination. This most crucial epistemological question is rarely
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asked in the social sciences and no open inferences about it are made.. Clearly both
Berreman and Mills, however, were concerned about this. Berremian constructed an
existential, self-conscious, choosing, and potentially free creature in his writings. This
imagery was inevitable considering his preference for phenomenological and
symbolic interactionist interpretations. Mills also decried the passive spectator image,
the creature at the mercy of seeniingly inanimate social forces, the archetype behind
much of sociological, structural-functional, and grand theory rationality. Given the
pragmatist interests of his youthful career with Max Weber, Karl Mannheim, and
George Herbert Mead, Mills viewed the person as liberated but also alienated.
Further, given this assumption, he could then address himself to the pow'ers that
restrained and alienated the free irnage. Obviously without the notion of the free,
choosing person folded into the epistemology, the radicalism of Mills and Berreman,
which depended on reaching and convincing the public, a self-determining public,
would not be possible. The hurling of bombs always suggests not only a frustrated
last resort but also the only possible alternative in a society of robotic archetypes, of
non-choosing individuals, and of "over-socialized" persons.
The radicalism shared by Mills and Berreman seemed to spring from their
awareness of being, on the one-hand, in peculiar social times demanding intervention
and, on the other, their conviction that academic life as practiced was not politically
responsible. And, obviously, they believed all academics should be. Mills writes to
the imaginary Tovarich in 1959 that:
The most immediate problem we face is the nationalist smugness and
political complacency among the dominant intellectual circles of our
own countries. We confront a truly deep apathy about politics in
general and about the larger problems of the world today. [Mills and
Mills 2000-:277]
He feels that intellectuals owe loyalty to something that is "bigger than any
government"" (Mills and Mills 2000). Similarly, Beffeman argues that: To say
nothing is not to be neutral. To say nothing is as much a significant act as to say
something (1968:392). He continues., quoting Douglas Dowd., that the alternatives are
not "neutrality"" and "advocacy."' To be uncommnitted is essentially to be committed to
the status quo.
As radical intellectuals they had much in common. They openly supported
other self-declared radicals: Mills offered support to Trotsky and to Fidel Castro;
Beffeman to Daniel Berrigan and Robert Coles. Both admired James Agee, Mills for
Agee"'s capacity for indignation (Mills and Mills 2000:15), Beffeman for his proposal
for the partnership of courage, reason, and passion, and that ultimately each individual
is "above all else responsible for his own soul" (Berreman 1981la: 43, 186).5 They
addressed the issues that plagued their times. Each had little optimism about the
American military, the bureaucracy of the Federal government, and its products.
Whittaker
The Dark Side of Power and the Intellectual
317
Both gained fame within their disciplines and outside. Though their work was
separated by a couple of decades, Berreman and Mills were given almost the exact
same social accolades and social labels: intellectual hero, existential hero, prophet,
seeker of utopia, romantic, cult figure, maverick, traitor, visionary of the brave new
world, Marxist (see also Berreman 1979a:xiv). At times certain labels came with a
derogatory valence. In the case of Mills, the Marxist appellation was applied at a time
when the writing of Marx had not yet emerged onto the intellectual scene as a specific
cultural world with its own language, disciples, and characteristic analysis. The
distinctions between radicalism and Marxism, between leftist views and Marxism, had
yet to become clear. Mills in particular had an interesting relationship with the
Marxists-sometimes drawn to them (he sometimes called himself a "plain Marxist"),
sometimes in dispute with them. One of the disputes was over the notion of the
"6power elite." Mills refused to accept the Marxist concept of "the ruling class"
proposed to him. Even though he rejected the label of Marxist, his last book dealt
with Marxists (Mills 1962). It offered itself as a primer on types of Marxism for those
who were learning to understand Marxism and an attempt to dispel the notion that
Marxism was synonymous with communism.
Both paid a price for their radicalism. Berreman was targeted by the CIA and
its supporters. Mills reported being watched by the FBI. They were often seen as
being anti-capitalist. In the rhetoric of the many trying to understand the few, the
simple, straight-forward conclusion was that those who positioned themselves
somewhere on the left had to be opposed automatically to all western economic
policies. Undoubtedly, these affiliations were very complicated, as Noam Chomsky
observes, in answer to a question that asks if he is opposed to Western capitalism:
I'm not opposed to Western capitalism. Look around the world and
you will fmd various systems that differ in many respects. Some have
better features than others,.,and that includes the U.S. The U.S., for
example has more provision for freedom of speech than probably any
other country, but there has never been a country that allows any kind
of democratic involvement on the issues. There has never been a
society like that. [Chepesiuk 1995: 144]
Both men relied on freedom of speech, however difficult it may have been to actualize
it, and both remained in their positions as university professors, part of the intellectual
elite whose scholarly perks, such as academic freedom, depended on their capitalist
govemment.
Mills was heavily censured by a long list of scholars, the "power elite" of
sociology at the time: Seymour Martin Lipset, Daniel Bell, Edward Shils, Talcott
Parsons, and Neil Smelser. Shortly after Mills' death, Shils, who disliked Mills both
academically and personally, wrote of him in the Spectator as:
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A demogogic simplifier ... he had a singularly incurious mind...[he
wrote] vigorous and cloudy rhetoric. Now he is dead and his rhetoric
is a field of broken stones, his analysis empty, his strenuous pathos
limp. He was a victim of his own vanity and of a shriveled Marxism
which will not die and which goes on requiring the sacrifice of the
living. [Tilman 1984: 11 ]
It is the irony of ideological intellectual history that it is Shils who has faded and the
work of Mills has inspired an enormous literature and, in particular, The Sociological
Imagination lives on, in high regard, several academic generations later. At the time,
however, with the sociological ruling class in opposition to him, Mills often referred
to the pain this ostracism caused him. While he spoke of his loneliness in one breath,
he renewed his own assault on sociological orthocloxy with ffie next.7
Berreman faced his own critics for his comparative views on social
inequality--caste, race, age, gender, class, and ethnicity (see Beffeman 2002 and
many other writings), and the allocation of power and powerlessness that was implied.
He makes the point in his writings that in birth-ascribed subjection to discrimination,
exploitation, and to a stigmatized identity, there is cross-cultural similarity in how the
micro-process of subordination actually works. Critics argued on the principle that
such comparisons defied many of the underpinins they considered important, such
as the religious ones of the caste system in India in the case of Dumont (see Sharma
1994; Freeman 1980). In raising the ultimate questions about this cross-cultural
similarity in structure, process, and experience, which throws light on the labels and
the essences used, such as race, caste, ethnicity, and gender as well as on the
rationales attached thereto, Berreman points to an important epistemological matter.
He pleads the case for an examination of the imperatives of essentialism generally, a
very pressing contemporary issue.8 In short, he makes a strong case by forcing the
analysis which points to how social entities are arbitrarily labeled and become reified.
What powers bring about such reifications? What social powers are served thereby?
In 1970 Berreman was nominated for the presidency of the American
Anthropological Association from the membership at large, specifically Robert
Murphy and Steve Polgar and their respective colleagues. This placed him in
opposition to the three candidates that the Nominating Comm-ittee had put forth. He
was the left wing, anti-war candidate, critical of some association decisions, especially
the ones on the ethics code. He found himself face to face with the orthodoxy of the
silent majority of anthropologists on most of the issues that he raised the war in
Vietnam, the counter-insurgency in Southeast Asia, and the necessity for non-secret
,anthropological research. So vowerful was the conservative element in the leadershiD
of the association, so forceful the secretive, behind-the-scenes pressures that
essentially narrowed the three conunittee-chosen candidates down to one, that
Beffeman was out-maneuvered and lost the election to Anthony Wallace. More than
anything else, these covert actions against the radical left showed not only the power
Whittaker
The Dark Si'de of Power and the Intellectual
319
of the threat posed by radicals, but also the high price radicals must pay for their
beliefs.
When the rumbling dies down Mills and Berreman will be remembered for
articulating the sentiments of what was to be the coming radical phase of both the
sociological and anthropological disciplines.9 They put their pens to the "politics of
truth" by seeking the sources of inequality, of power and powerlessness. Both
decided that the answer should be in the social scientific study and comparative
analysis of social stratification. Mills began with class, Berreman added caste, race,
and gender. They believed in taking the responsibility for spreading their own
uneasiness. Together they took a stand on matters as diverse as the United Coal
Miners, the Peace Corps, Cuba and Castro, counterinsurgency in Thailand, the
military elite, government funding of research, FPuerto Rican immigrants, female
oppression, and the Chipko Indian environmental movement. They fervently believed
that the task of being the moral barometer of their respective times, of witnessing
abuses and of making the power elite responsible, belonged to committed
intellectuals. Social justice was properly situated under this stewardship. Mills and
Beffeman exemplified an American conscience. They believed in holding a nation to
its promise. They believed in holding social science to its promise.
Acknowledgements
Gerald Berreman has been generous beyond the call of any duty during my
sojourn as a student under his tutelage at Berkeley and in the decades since, and I
thank him for his support on this essay. I have long noted that he seldom writes
without a reference to, or quote from Mills. The decision to write a tribute to him via
Mills suggests much more hutzpah than I actually possess. Can we ever, I continually
remind myself, be happy with another's interpretation of our work, especially in
situations where there is no recourse except to smile? I also thank Joanne Richardson
and Neil Eaton for conversations on public intellectuals.
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As someone who learned sociology at the knee of a student of Parsons, Kaspar Naegele, I
feel an inordinate nostalgia for thie special intricate code through which Parsonian sociology
operates. It seems almost like an offence to substitute "46need," the suggested sanity, for the
more Parsonian "need disposition orientation patterns."
2 In deference to Mills, who wrote in times not yet sensitive to the fact that "man" no longer
constitutes a covering term for all people, I have inserted "and women." Interestingly, the
cadence of reading gender-insensitive l950s and 1960s material is interrupted in many of
Mills' works when he deliberately inserts "men and women." This was a sensitivity before its
time.
3 I do not want to leave the impression that Cand is without its own ghosts. The claimed
innocence of thie researcher is challenged by widely held beliefs such as those about the
Department of Indian Affairs, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in its undercover activities,
residential schools, church orphanages, Philippe Rushton (Can ada's Arthur Jensen), James
Bay, non-negotiated land claims, Oka, and Clayoquot Sound, as well as whatever is added
from the American scene by association.
4 Clearly on the world social science research scene secret research is considered both
inappropriate and unethical (see Whittaker 1999).
5 James Agee has contributed to many a social science text. He has been much more than the
writer of screenplays and the movie reviewer for Time. Widely acclaimed for many a social
virtue, he can also be acclaimed for ethnoeraphic brilliance and a humanistic ethical
comnuitnent to those he writes about (Whittaker 1978).
6 In 1971 May Diaz taught a course in social theory, entitled Comparative Societies, in the
undergraduate program at Berkeley. Apparently Marx was introduced in this course for the
first time at Berkeley. In the 1950s the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, with little apology,
confiscated from university students books written by Marx. M~ills wrote in Th1e Marxists
(1962) that "there is today no 'marxist social science' of any intellectual consequence. There
is just-social science: without the work of Marx and other marxists, it would not be what it is
today; with their work alone, it would not be nearly as good as it happens to be. In the United
States, the intellectual influences of niarxism are often hidden ... many [social scientists] are
often unaware of the source of their own methods and conceptions" (1962:. 11).
7 Despite his sense of intellectual lonliness, M~ills had many disciples, most of whom appeared
in print after his death. Among them are Horowitz (1964; 1983); Domhoff and Ballard (1968);
Press (1978); Scimecca (1977); and Tilman (1984). Many devoted articles in honor of Mills
have been writtenby Anatol Rapoport, Ernest Becker, Erich Fromm, Alvin Gouldner.,
Marvin Scott, and Peter Worsley (see Horowitz 1964).
8 On the question of essentialism--a critique of its impact has been argued in the age of
deconstruction, particularly among feminist scholars addressing the essentialism in the notion
of womanl (see Fuss 1989), but also in other social science reifications (Whittaker 1992a;,
1992b).
9 In 1972 Anthropologists for Radical Political Action was formed, some years after the
Radical Caucus had emerged at the American Anthropological Association. Journals like
Insurgent Sociologist and Critical Anthropology were created. Books such as Radical
Sociology, edited by David Horowitz, appeared in 197 1, and Radical Sociology, edited by J.
David Colfax and Jack L. Roach in 197 1.
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