Explore "White Collar" by C. Wright Mills on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
OF all middle-class groups, intellectuals are the most far-flung and heterogeneous. Unlike small businessmen, factory workers, or filing clerks, intellectuals have been relatively classless. They have no common origin and share no common social destiny. They differ widely in income and in status; some live, residentially and intellectually, in suburban slums; others, in propaganda bureaus of continent-wide nations. Many intellectuals are members of the old middle class; they work a specialized market made up of editors and business managers, as entrepreneurs using their education and their verbal skills as capital. Others are primarily new middle class: their styles of life and of work are set by their position as salaried employees in various white-collar pyramids.
Many professional people, by virtue of their education and leisure, have a good chance to become intellectuals, and many intellectuals earn their living by practicing some profession. Moreover, people of professional skills form a substantial proportion of the intellectuals' public. So what happens to professional and technical groups also affects the intellectuals' conditions of work and life.