Abstract
No sociological study of the exercise of American power has matched the provocative influence of
The Power Elite
(1956), which was published when radical criticism of foreign policy was extremely rare. C. Wright Mills claimed that an interlocking directorate had assumed unprecedented authority since Pearl Harbor. He argued that, in making decisions of war and peace, key officials in the executive branch, leaders of the largest private corporations, and the dominant figures in the military constituted a cohesive group that could ignore popular will and the public interest. Mills was undoubtedly right that the emergence of the Pentagon in particular marked a discontinuity in the history of federal authority and of the balance of power in Washington. But no empirical evidence supports the thesis of
The Power Elite
, not only in the historical instances that he himself mentions, but in subsequent conflicts like the military intervention in Vietnam. Mills nevertheless merits praise for having challenged comforting assumptions about the benign and democratic direction of American statecraft.