By Br. Bede Vincent

Consider C. Wright Mills, probably the first American scholar to bother tracking the elites in the US and to theorise about decision-making outside the formal legitimating rituals of elections etc. His 1956 book the Power Elite—published ten years before Quigley’s—was entirely marginalised[1]. His argument was that there is actually a complex institutional structure for class formation in the US and this is still the fundamental taboo in all US political and social science, class. Dwight Eisenhower would allude to this in his farewell address as the “military-industrial complex”. However Mills concept was far broader. The competing theories and the ones essentially maintained even on the Left in the US are Popper, Bell and Schlesinger[2].

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