Thai Jones, "Socially Conscious Art and Its Social Contexts"
C. Wright Mills created the concept of a "power elite;" he imported the term "New Left" from Europe to the United States, and he was among the first to catch the phrases "paradigm" and "postmodern." A global thinker in a square era, he was everything postwar America was not: radical, original, and hip. His work depicted a "distracted, shallow, banalized" mass society manipulated by secretive, but mediocre, masterminds. If this image of docile conformity seems like a truism it is largely because his analysis shaped how those years are understood today: Mills made the Fifties just as surely as they made him.
