Breaking down the question
This is a short-note question naming a specific concept: C. Wright Mills' idea of the power elite, developed in his 1956 book of that title. The task is to explain what Mills meant, why the concept was significant, and how it fits within the broader debate on the distribution of power. There is no command word, so a compact, well-organised account is expected rather than an extended argument.
The essential move is to grasp that Mills locates power not in individuals or in personalities but in institutional command posts. His claim is that the key decisions of American society are made by a small, interlocking set of people who occupy the commanding positions in three great institutional hierarchies. A good note conveys this structural argument, names the three domains, and closes with a brief evaluation. Our notes on the power elite and political institutions develop the framework further.
How to approach it
Begin by defining the power elite and situating Mills within elite theory, as a critic writing against the pluralist orthodoxy of mid-century American political science. State that his argument is institutional: power belongs to those who occupy the top positions in the major hierarchies.
Then identify the three interlocking domains — the corporate economy, the political executive and the military — and explain the mechanisms that bind their occupants together: similar social origins, overlapping careers, intermarriage and shared interests, producing what he saw as a unified elite. Contrast this with the condition of the mass below, and end with a short critical assessment noting the response of pluralists such as Dahl.
Model answer
In "The Power Elite" (1956), C. Wright Mills advanced an influential structural account of the distribution of power in modern American society. Against the prevailing pluralist view, which held that power was dispersed among many competing groups, Mills argued that the major decisions affecting the nation were in fact made by a small, cohesive elite occupying the command posts of the country's dominant institutions.
The heart of Mills' argument is that power is an attribute of institutional position, not of personal quality. Those who command the great hierarchies are able to exercise consequential power precisely because they occupy the strategic positions within them. Mills identified three such hierarchies whose summits had become closely interlocked: the major corporations, which control the economy; the executive branch of the federal government, which directs the political order; and the military establishment, whose importance had grown enormously in the Cold War. The people at the top of these three domains — the corporate rich, the political directorate and the warlords — together constitute the power elite.
Mills held that this elite was unified rather than fragmented. Its members are drawn from similar upper-class and privileged backgrounds, educated at the same institutions, and linked by intermarriage, social clubs and shared outlook. Careers move between the three domains — the executive who becomes a cabinet officer, the general who joins a corporate board — producing an interlocking directorate whose members recognise a community of interest. What Mills called the coincidence of interests among these hierarchies, expressed in the growing military-industrial complex, gives the elite a coherence that allows it to act in concert on the decisions that matter most.
Beneath the elite Mills placed two further levels: a middle level of countervailing but subordinate interest groups, visible in the legislature, whose bargaining pluralists mistook for the whole of politics; and, at the base, a fragmented and increasingly manipulated mass, politically fragmented, poorly organised and largely powerless. In this mass society ordinary people are reduced to spectators, their opinions shaped from above, and the traditional public of informed, participating citizens has withered.
Critically, Mills' thesis was a powerful corrective to a complacent pluralism and drew needed attention to the concentration of institutional power and the militarisation of politics. Yet pluralist critics such as Robert Dahl argued that Mills asserted rather than demonstrated a unified elite, confusing the potential for power with its actual exercise, and that empirical studies of concrete decisions revealed more competition and fragmentation than his model allowed. Marxists, conversely, faulted Mills for grounding domination in institutional position rather than in ownership of the means of production and class relations. Despite these disputes, the concept of the power elite endures as a seminal contribution to the sociology of power and a lasting challenge to pluralist accounts of democracy.
Examiner's perspective
In a 20-mark note the examiner rewards precision and structure over length. The answer must name the three institutional domains correctly and, crucially, explain the mechanisms of elite cohesion — common origins, overlapping careers, shared interests — since it is the claim of unity that distinguishes Mills from ordinary observations about powerful people. Candidates who treat the power elite as merely rich or influential individuals miss the institutional core of the argument.
The mark of a strong script is the placing of Mills within the pluralist-versus-elitist debate, with at least a sentence on Dahl's rejoinder and, ideally, a note on how Mills differs from Marxist accounts. A closing line on mass society and the erosion of the public completes the picture and shows that the candidate grasps not only the elite but the condition of those it dominates.