Episode Details

In this episode, I talk with Clyde Barrow, a professor of political science and the author of several works, including a recent Jacobin article, “Reading C. Wright Mills in the Age of Trump.” I wanted to talk with Clyde about Mills, including his biography and works, his theory of democracy and a democratic state, and his impact on the New Left, including on Tom Hayden and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). We also touch on the work of Nicos Poulantzas, Charles Beard, J. Allen Smith, Gaetano Mosca, and other historians and sociologists. Finally, we discuss why the US Constitution matters to all of these discussions.

Several books and articles are mentioned in the conversation, including Thorstein Veblen’s The Higher Learning in America'; Mills’s The Power Elite, Listen, Yankee!, White Collar, The Sociological Imagination, The Marxists, and “Letter to the New Left”; J. Allen Smith’s The Spirit of American Government; and Barrow’s More than a Historian: The Political and Economic Thought of Charles A. Beard.