C. Wright Mills, the Bureau for Applied Social Research, and the Meaning of Critical Scholarship

This article argues that C. Wright Mills's time at Columbia University's Bureau for Applied Social Research provided a crucial intellectual and institutional basis for his later work, and it uses Mills's career as an allegory for the history and self-understanding of modern-day, self-described "critical" scholars. Mills's own published writings, along with those of his biographers, encourage a view of his time at the bureau as an aberration. Yet, a careful examination of his letters and his work reveals that the critical position for which Mills is famous was actually nourished by his use of surveys, statistics, research teams, and other trappings of administrative research while at the bureau. The article explores the implications of this history for our own understandings of critical research today.