Explore "White Collar" by C. Wright Mills on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
IN the world of the small entrepreneur, selling was one activity among many, limited in scope, technique, and manner. In the new society, selling is a pervasive activity, unlimited in scope and ruthless in its choice of technique and manner.
The salesman's world has now become everybody's world, and, in some part, everybody has become a salesman. The enlarged market has become at once more impersonal and more intimate. What is there that does not pass through the market? Science and love, virtue and conscience, friendliness, carefully nurtured skills and animosities? This is a time of venality. The market now reaches into every institution and every relation. The bargaining manner, the huckstering animus, the memorized theology of pep, the commercialized evaluation of personal traits-they are all around us; in public and in private there is the tang and feel of salesmanship.