The power elite is C. Wright Mills's term, from his 1956 book of that name, for those who occupy the command posts of the three institutional orders that had come to dominate mid-century America — the great corporations, the executive branch of the federal state, and the military establishment. Mills's decisive move was to locate power in institutional position rather than in personal attributes. The elite are powerful not because they are cleverer, richer or more ruthless than others, but because they command hierarchies whose decisions carry national and international consequence. Wealth without a command post is merely wealth; the chairman of a corporation, by contrast, disposes of resources, employment and livelihoods on a scale that no private fortune could match.

Around this core Mills built a three-level picture of the American political order. At the top, a compact and increasingly unified elite makes the decisions that matter — war, investment, the shape of the economy. At the middle levels sits the visible drama of politics: Congress, parties, organised interests, the professions. At the bottom lies a mass society of publics that have become fragmented, unorganised and politically inert. The book is therefore as much a diagnosis of political decay as a study of the powerful.

The three domains and their coincidence of interest

Mills called the three groups the corporate rich, the political directorate and the warlords. Their rise was structural. Economic power had concentrated in a few hundred corporations; political power had migrated from legislatures and local governments to a permanent federal executive; and the Second World War followed by the Cold War had installed a military ascendancy at the centre of national life in a country that had previously kept soldiers at the margins. The three orders enlarged together, and as each grew its decisions became inseparable from the others' — armament programmes are simultaneously military policy, budget policy and corporate opportunity.

Mills insisted that this was not a conspiracy. What binds the elite is a coincidence of interest, a shared definition of reality, and the interchangeability of personnel — the executive who becomes a cabinet secretary, the general who joins a corporate board, the corporate lawyer who becomes an ambassador. Reinforcing this are common social origins, similar schooling, metropolitan clubs, intermarriage, and what Mills called the higher immorality: a moral insensibility at the top that no longer registers its own corruption because success has become the only standard.

The middle levels and the mass society

The middle levels of power are, for Mills, where political science of his day mistakenly looked for the whole of politics. Congress, parties and pressure groups do bargain, but over secondary questions; the result is a semi-organised stalemate that produces drift rather than direction. Below, Mills contrasts a community of publics — small, discursive, capable of forming opinion through argument — with mass society, in which far more people receive opinion than form it, the media supply ready-made identities and the ordinary person has no effective way to answer back. Political passivity is thus not apathy of character but a structural condition, the counterpart at the base of concentration at the summit.

Against Pareto, Dahl and the ruling class

Mills's account is best fixed by contrast. Vilfredo Pareto explained elites psychologically, by superior residues and qualities, and saw history as an endless circulation of elites; Mills's elite is a product of institutional concentration, and could in principle be dismantled by reorganising institutions. Robert Dahl, writing two years later, denied that a ruling elite had been demonstrated at all: to show one, he argued, you must identify a well-defined minority and show that its preferences prevail over those of others in a fair sample of key decisions. His New Haven study found instead dispersed inequalities — different resources counting in different issue areas — the core of pluralism. Marxists attacked from the other side. Paul Sweezy and later Ralph Miliband held that Mills had substituted institutions for classes, leaving out ownership of the means of production, and so produced a description of the ruling class without a theory of it. Mills, they said, saw the ascendancy but not its roots in capital.

The Indian application

Indian scholarship has produced parallels rather than translations. Pranab Bardhan's account of dominant proprietary classes — industrial capitalists, rich farmers, and the professional and bureaucratic white-collar stratum — describes a coalition too fractious to rule decisively yet strong enough to block redistribution, which echoes Mills's stalemate while resting on class rather than command posts. Studies of the licence-permit era traced dense political-business-bureaucratic networks in which discretionary permissions, party finance and administrative careers were exchanged, a system in which the senior civil service supplied continuity while ministers and industrialists supplied demand. The Vohra Committee report of 1993 described the further entanglement of these networks with criminal syndicates. Against a simple Millsian reading, however, India's competitive elections, federalism, an assertive judiciary and the political rise of intermediate and subordinate castes have repeatedly disrupted elite continuity — and the Indian military has never occupied a command post remotely comparable to the American one.

Criticisms

Beyond the pluralist and Marxist objections, three charges recur. Mills relies on inference from social background and career mobility rather than on evidence of decisions actually taken, so the unity of the elite is asserted more than demonstrated. Talcott Parsons argued that Mills treats power as zero-sum — a possession held over others — rather than as a collective capacity generated by society to achieve its ends. And later work on the state, from Nicos Poulantzas to students of bureaucratic politics, has shown far more conflict inside the state and between agencies than Mills's smooth image of the summit allows. What survives is his method: study the institutions in which power is lodged, and study the recruitment that circulates people among them.

For the UPSC answer

Open by fixing Mills's definition precisely — the power elite occupy the command posts of the corporate, political and military orders, so power is institutional position, not wealth or personality. Then use the three-level architecture (top, middle levels, mass society), and state explicitly that the unity rests on coincidence of interest and interchangeability of personnel, not conspiracy, since examiners reward that distinction. Set Mills against Pareto's psychological elite, Dahl's pluralism and the Marxist ruling class in a single comparative paragraph. Close with the Indian material — Bardhan's dominant proprietary classes and political-business-bureaucratic networks, qualified by electoral competition and caste mobilisation — to show the concept's reach and its limits.

References & further reading

  1. Mills, C. W. (1956). The Power Elite. Oxford University Press.
  2. Dahl, R. A. (1958). A Critique of the Ruling Elite Model. American Political Science Review, 52(2).
  3. Domhoff, G. W. (1967). Who Rules America? Prentice-Hall.
  4. Bottomore, T. (1964). Elites and Society. Watts.
  5. Miliband, R. (1969). The State in Capitalist Society. Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
  6. Bardhan, P. (1984). The Political Economy of Development in India. Basil Blackwell.