ABSTRACT
This history of sociology in America illustrates a striking fact of social science in this country as a whole: how few of its significant practitioners crossed over from a purely professional to a larger public frame of reference. Mills's career violated professional totems and taboos. He had an extraordinary ability to cross over from a discipline to larger public concerns. Mills's life was part of the American public dialogue in ways that resonated Eisenhower's 1959 farewell presidential address: warning against American rearmament and the military-industrial complex. Although of Roman Catholic origin, Mills never cast in the mold of St. Francis of Assisi. He was a human figure, the ordinary sort one sees about the Academy. What Mills chose to ignore is that the basis of state power is as national in the East as in the West. The dialogue he saw did not permit his precious ordinary, plain folks the measure of liberty he so desperately craved for them.
