Explore "The Sociological Imagination" by C. Wright Mills on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
‘Power,' as the term is now generally used in social science, has to do with whatever decisions men make about the arrangements under which they live, and about the events which make up the history of their period. Events that are beyond human decision do happen; social arrangements do change without benefit of explicit decision. But in so far as such decisions are made (and in so far as they could be but are not) the problem of who is involved in making them (or not making them) is the basic problem of power.
We cannot assume today that men must in the last resort be governed by their own consent. Among the means of power that now prevail is the power to manage and to manipulate the consent of men. That we do not know the limits of such power-and that we hope it does have limits-does not remove the fact that much power today is successfully employed without the sanction of the reason or the conscience of the obedient.