Postmodern Cowboy: C. Wright Mills and a New 21st-century Sociology

This book explores what contemporary sociology can learn from Mills. Mills, exploring foundations for social solidarity during his times, turned backward just as we now turn backward toward Mills. Mills, however, was not content to allow the dead to speak for the living, recognizing that midcentury America, while sharing historical links to past times, also possessed people and structures that moved beyond what sociology of old was prepared to engage. At the start of the twenty-first century, we too must understand it is time to take from Mills what we can, but like Mills, we must learn to move forward and confront the problems of our own age. It is not argued that Mills should be forgotten; only that if Mills is to be relevant to contemporary sociology, a forward-looking vision must be drawn from his work rather than the nostalgic glance backward characteristic of much of Millsian scholarship. Exploring the impetus for Mills's statements on American culture, these pages are partly a biographical exploration into Mills's first 20 years and how these formative years shaped the scope and concern of Mills's later formulation of the emerging 'œpostmodern'� world. In exploring Mills's early experiences and how these later reappear in his academic work, the book examines previously unpublished'”and in some cases previously unknown'”primary documents, and shows what contributions a forward-looking Millsian scholarship could provide to an ailing contemporary sociology.

Keith Kerr is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. His research interests include social and cultural theory.