Explore "White Collar" by C. Wright Mills on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
During booms, success for the American individual has seemed as sure as social progress, and just as surely to rest on and to exemplify personal virtue. The American gospel of success has been a kind of individual specification of the middle-class gospel of progress: in the big, self-made men, rising after the Civil War, progress seemed to pervade the whole society. The ambitious springs of success were unambiguous, its money target clear and visible, and its paths, if rugged, well marked out; there was a surefootedness about the way middle-class men went about their lives.
The idea of the successful individual was linked with the liberal ideology of expanding capitalism. Liberal sociology, assuming a gradation of ranks in which everyone is rewarded according to his ability and effort, has paid less attention to the fate of groups or classes than to the solitary individual, naked of all save personal merit. The entrepreneur, making his way across the open market, most clearly displayed success in these terms.