ON INTELLECTUAL CRAFTSMANSHIP(1952)
by
C. Wright Mills

(Reprinted from SOCIETY, January/February 1980. This essay is a fascinating "self-portrait"of C. Wright Mill's own sense of intellectual craftsmanship which was to become the cornerstone of his much acclaimed, THE SOCIOLOGICAL IMAGINATION. It makes us appreciate why Mill is one of the foremost social scientists in the 20th century.His highly-acclaimed works include THE SOCIOLOGICAL IMAGINATION, THE POWER ELITE, THE MARXISTS, WHITE COLLAR, among others.)

        Everyone seriously concerned with teaching complains that most students do not know how to do independent work. They do not know how to read, they do not know how to take notes, they do not know how to set up a problem nor how to research it. In short, they do not know how to work intellectually. Everyone says this, and in the same breath asserts: "But then, you just can't teach people how to think,"which they someties qualify by: "At least not apart from some specific subject matter,"or "At least not without tutorial instruction."

        There is the complaint and there are the dogmatic answers to the complaint, all of which amount to saying: "But we cannot help them much." This essay is an attempt to help them. It is neither a statement of formal method nor an attempt to inspire. Perhaps there are already too many formal discourses on method, and certainly there are too many inspirational pieces on how to think. Neither seem to be of much use to those for whom they are apparently intended. The first does not usually touch the realities of the problem as the beginning student encounters them: the second is usually vulgar and often nonsense.

        In this essay, I am going to try candidly to report how I became interested in a topic I happen now to be studying, and how I am going about studying it. I know that in doing this, I run the risk of failing in modesty and perhaps even of claiming some peculiar virtue for my own personal habits. I intend no such claims. I know also that it may be said: "Well, that's the way YOU work; but it's not of much use to me." To this the reply seems quite clear; it is: "Wonderful. Tell me how you work." Only by conversations in which experienced thinkers exchange information about their actual, informal ways of working can "method" ever really be imparted to the beginning student. I know of no other way in which to begin such conversations, and thus to begin what I think needs to be done, than to set forth a brief but explicit statement of one man's working habits.

        I must repeat that I do not intend to write about method in any formal sense, nor, under the guise of methodology, to take up a statesman-like pose concerning the proper course for social science. So many social scientists nowadays, it seems to me, seem always to be writing about something; and, in the end, to be thinking only about their own possible thinking. This may indeed be useful to them and to their future work. But it seems to me rather less than useful to the rest of those at work in the social studies, to those who are just beginning their studies, or to those who have lived with them for quite a while.

        Useful discussions of method and theory usually arise as marginal notes on work in progress or work about to get under way. In brief, "methods" are simply ways of asking and answering questions, with some assurance that the answers are more or less durable. "Theory" is simply paying close attention to the words one uses, especially their degree of generality and their interrelations. What method and theory properly amount to is clarity of conception and ingenuity of procedure, and most important, in sociology just now, the release rather than the restriction of the sociological imagination.

        To have mastered "theory" and "method," in short, means to have become a self-conscious thinker, a man ready for work and aware of the assumptions and implications of every step he will take as he tries to find out the character and the meaning of the reality he is working on. On the contrary, to be mastered by "method"and "theory" means simply to be kept from working: from trying, that is, to find out about some area of reality. Just as the result of work is infirm without insight into the way it was achieved, so is the way meaningless without a determination that the study shall come to an end and some result be achieved. Method and theory are like the language of the country you live in: it is nothing to brag about that you can speak it, but it is a disgrace , as well as an inconvenience, if you cannot.

        I forget how I became technically concerned with "stratification", but I think it must have been by reading Veblen. He had always seemed to me very loose, even vague about his "business" and "industrial" employments, which are a kind of translation of Marx for the academic American public. Marx himself, I think it must be agreed, is quite unfinished and much too simple about classes; he did not get to write a theory of classes, although Max Weber finished one version which I believe Marx would have liked. When in the early forties I began, with Hans Gerth, to translate some of Weber's writings --it was the first essay we published--certain conceptions were cleared up for me.

        I then wrote a book on labor organizations and labor leaders -- a politically motivated task; then a book on the middle classes--a task primarily motivated by the desire to articulate my own experience in New York City since 1945. It was thereupon suggested by friends that I ought to round out a trilogy by writing a book on the upper classes. I think the possibility had been in my mind: my plans have always exceeded my capacities and energies. I had read Balzac off and on during the forties, and had been much taken with his self-appointed task of "covering" all the major classes and types in the society of the era he wished to make his own. I had also written a paper on "The Business Elite", and had collected and arranged data about the careers of the topmost men in American politics since the Constitution. These two tasks were primarily inspired by seminar work in systematic American history.

        In doing these several articles and books and in preparing courses on different strata of modern society, I had accumulated a residue of ideas and facts about the upper classes. It is especially difficult in the study of social stratification to avoid going beyond one's immediate subject, because "the reality" of any one stratum is in large part its relations to the rest. Accordingly, I began to think of a book on "The American Elite."

        And yet that is not "really" how the project arose. What really happened is that the idea and the plan came out of my files; for all projects with me begin and end with them, and books are simply organized releases from the continuuous work that goies into them. Presently, I shall explain what these files involve, but first I must explain the ideal of intellectual craftsmanship that lies back of them and keeps me at work on them.

Life and Work

        In joining the scholarly community, one of the first things I realized was that most of the thinkers and writers whom I admired never split their work from their lives. They seemed to take both too seriously to allow such dissociation, and they wanted to use each for the enrichment of the other. Yet such a split is the prevailing convention among men in general, deriving, I supposed , from the hollowness of the work which men in general now do.

        I recognized that insofar as I might become a scholar, I would have the exceptional opportunity of designing a way of living which would encourage the habits of good workmanship. It was a choice of how to live as well as a choice of career; whether he knows it or not, the intellectual workman forms his own self as he works towards the perfection of his craft. And so, I came early to the conviction that to realize my own potentialities and opportunities I had to try to construct a character which had as its core the qualities of the good workman. Somehow I realized that I must learn to use my life experience in my intellectual work: continually to interpret it and to use it. It is in this sense that craftsmanship is the center of oneself and that one is personally involved in every intellectual product upon which one may work.

        To say that one can "have experience", means, in part, that past experience plays into and affects present experience, and that it limits the capacity for future experience. But I have to control this rather elaborate interplay, to capture experience and sort it out; only thus can I use it to guide and test my reflection and in the process shape myself as an intellectual craftsman. A personal file is the social organization of the individual's memory; it increases the continuity between life and work, and it permits a continuity in the work itself, and the planning of the work; it is a crossroads of life experience, professional activities, and way of work. In this file the intellectual craftsman tries to integrate what he is doing intellectually and what he is experiencing as a person. Here he is not afraid to use his experience and, as it were, to cross-classify them with various projects which he has under way. It is the link between life and work; in it the two become one.

        By serving as a check on repetitious work, my file enables me to conserve what little energy I have. It also encourages me to capture "fringe-thoughts": various ideas occur, which may be byproducts of everyday experience, snatches of conversation overheard on the street, or for that matter, dreams. Once noted, these may lead to more systematic thinking, as well as lend intellectual relevance to more directed experience.

        I have often noticed how carefully accomplished thinkers treat their own minds, how closely they observe their development and codify their experience. The reason they treasure their smallest experiences is because, in the course of a lifetime, a modern man has so very little personal experience, and yet experience is so important as a source of good intellectual work. To be able to trust one's own experience, even if it often turns out to be inadequate, is one mark of the mature workman. Such confidence in one's own experience is indispensable to originality in any intellectual pursuit, and the file is one tool by which I have tried to develop and justify such confidence.

        If the intellectual workman is a man who has become self-confidently aware of himself as a center of experience and reflection, the keeping of a file is one way of stabilizing, even institutionalizing, this state of being. By the keeping of an adequate file and the self-reflective habits this fosters, one learns how to keep awake one's inner world. Whenever I feel strongly about events or ideas I try not to let them pass from my mind, but instead to formulate them for my files and in so doing draw out their implications, show myself either how foolish these feelings or ideas are, or how might be developed into articulate and productive shape. The file also maintains the habit of writing. I cannot "keep my hand in" if I do not write something at least every week. In the file, one can experiment as a writer and thus develop one's own powers of expression.

Arrangement of File

       Under various topics in this file there are ideas, personal notes, and excerpts from books; there are bibliographic items and outlines of projects--it is, I suppose, a matter of arbitrary habit, but I have found it best to blend all these items into a master file of topical projects, with many subdivisions. The topics, of course, are frequently changed. For instance, when as a student I was working toward the preliminary oral examination, the writing of a thesis, and , at the same time, doing term papers, files were arranged in these three focal areas of endeavor. But after a year or so of graduate work, I began to reorganize the whole file in relation to the main project of the thesis. Then as I pursued my work I noticed that no one project ever dominated my work, nor set the master categories in which the file was arranged. In fact, the use of this file encouraged an expansion of the categories with which I was actively thinking. And the way in which these categories changed, some being dropped out and others being added, was an index of my own intellectual progress and breadth. Eventually, the file came to be arranged according to several larger projects, having many subprojects, which changed from year to year.

        All this involves the taking of notes. It is my habit to take a very large volume of notes from any book I read which I feel worth remembering. For the first step in translating experience, either of other men's symbols or of one's own life; into the intellectual sphere is to give, it form. Merely to name an item of experience often invites us to explain it; the mere taking of a note from a book is often a prod to reflection. At the same time, the taking of a note is an additional mechanism for comprehension of what one is reading.

        My notes seem to be of two sorts. In reading certain very important books i try to grasp the structure of the writer's thoughts, and take notes accordingly. But more frequently, in the last ten years, I do not read whole books, but rather parts of many books, from the point of view of some particular theme in which I am interested, and concerning which I usually have plans in my file. Therefore, I take notes which do not fairly represent the books I read. I am using this particular passage, this particular experience, for the realization of my own projects. Notes taken in this way form the contents of memory upon which I may have to call.

Use of File

        But how is this file -- which so far must seem to the reader more like a journal -- used in intellectual production? Well, the maintenance of this file is intellectual production, one step removed from daily musing, and one step removed from the library and "the field"; it is a continually growing store of facts and ideas, from the most vague to the most finished.

        The first thing I did lupon deciding on a study of THE AMERICAN ELITE was to make a crude outline, based on a listing of the types of people I wished to understand. The next step was to examine my entire file, not only those parts of it which obviously bore on the topic, but also many others which seemed to have no relevance whatsoever. For imagination and "the structuring of an idea" are often exercised by putting together hitherto isolated items, by finding unsuspected connections. I made new units in the file for this particular range of problems, which , of course, led to a new arrangement of other parts of the file.

        As I thus rearranged the filing system, I found that I was loosening my imagination. This apparently occurred by means of insight deriving from merely trying to combine various ideas and notes on different topics. It is a sort of logic of combination, and "chance" sometimes plays a curiously large part in it. In a relaxed way, as it were, I tried to engage my intellectual resources, as exemplified in the file , with the new themes.

        I also began to use my observations and daily experiences. I thought first of experiences I had had whichs bore upon such problems, and then I went and talked with those who I thought might have experienced or considered the issues. As a matter of fact, I began now to alter the character of my routine so as to include in it (1) people who WERE the phenomeon, (2) people in contact with the phenomenon, and (3) people interested in them. I do not know the full social conditions of the best intellectual workmanship, but certainly surrounding oneself with a circle of people who will listen and talk -- and at times they have to be imaginary characters--social and intellectual--which I think might lead me into thinking well along the lines of my work. That is one meaning of my remarks about the fusion of personal life and intellectual work.

        My kind of work is not, and cannot be, made up of one clear-cut empirical "research." It is, rather, composed of a good many small-scale studies which at key points anchor general statements about the shape and the trend of the subject. So the decision -- what are these anchor points?--cannot be made until existing materials are reworked and general hypothetical statements constructed.

        I found in the files three relevant types of "existing materials": several theories having to do with the topic; materials already worked up by others as evidence for THOSE theories; and data already gathered and in various stages of accessible centralization, but not yet made theoretically relevant. Only after completing a first draft of a theory with the aid of such existing materials as these can I efficiently locate my own pivotal assertions and so design researches to test them -- and maybe I will not have to, although, of course, I know I will later have to shuttle back and forth between existing materials and my own research.

        I make it a rule -- picked up, I suppose, from philosophical reading which led me into the sociology of knowledge -- that any final statement must not only cover the data so far as the data is available and known to me, but also in some way, positively or negatively, take into account the available theories. (This is one of the things I mean by the methodological consequences of the sociology of knowledge). Sometimes this "taking into account" of a theory is easily done by a simple confrontation of the theory with overturning or supporting fact; sometimes a detailed analysis or qualification is needed. Sometimes I can arrange the available theories systematically as a range of alternatives, and so allow their range to organize the problem itself. But sometimes I allow such theories to come up only in my own arrangement, in quite various contexts. At any rate, in THE AMERICAN ELITE, I will have to take into account the work of such men as Mosca, Schumpeter, Veblen, Marx, Lasswell, Michel, Pareto, and I am now at work on them.

        In looking over some of the notes of these writers, I find that they fall into three general types of statement: (1) I learn directly, by restating systematically, what the man says on given points or as a whole; (2) I accept or refute these statements, giving reasons and arguments; (3) I use the book as a source of suggestions for my own elaborations and projects. This involves grasping a point and then asking: How can I put this into testable shape and then test it? How can I use this as a center from which to elaborate -- use it as a perspective from which descriptive details will become relevant? It is in this handling of existing theory that I feel myself in continuity with previous work. Here are two excerpts from preliminary notes on Mosca, which may illustrate what I have been trying to describe:

        "In addition to his historical anecdotes, Mosca backs up his thesis with this assertion: It's the power of organization that enables the minority always to rule. There are organized minorities and they run things and men.There are unorganized majorities and the are run. (There are also statements in Mosca about psychological laws supposed to support his view. See his use of the word NATURAL. But this isn't central, and, in addition, it's not work considering). But: why not also consider the apparent opposite? In fact, why not the full scale of possibilities?