Rather than answer Thomas Ashton point-by-point, I prefer to wear his critique (Chronicles, November 1985) as a badge of honor. I am struck, in the history of people and ideas, by the frequency of the distinction between personalities and their thoughts. The Rousseau of The Confessions and the Rousseau of The Discourse on Inequality being perhaps the classic case. Civility as well as common sense dictates an appreciation of disjunctions as well as conjunctions.

If being charged with “antipsychological” is equated with coarse ad hominem remarks like “C. Wright Mills chased the future even more feverishly than he pursued his female graduate students,” then I stand rightly accused. It is precisely why, despite years of personal association with Mills, I chose not to highlight a Hollywood-type gossip-column approach to someone whose career must ultimately be measured by his contributions to social research rather than public exhibition.

My book on Mills attempts to be fair and balanced. It is quite critical of his later phases and equally praising of his pioneering early efforts at reexamining stratification and power in American society. I would only point out that the critical references to Trilling, Hofstadter, and Kirk, mentioned by your reviewer, derive from my text. I would submit sir, that this in itself indicates the essential balance and fairness of the text.

To present a strident condemnation (or celebration) of an individual (Mills) dead for nearly a quarter century would serve no useful scholarly purpose. I describe my book as a sociological biography—precisely to avoid the rampant emotionalism exhibited by a reviewer who speaks of seeing Mills “taking off on his motorcycle with a good-looking blond on the backseat.” And to add that Mills “did not look much like a scholar. He looked more like a bear that had lost a fight with a lawnmower” shows what reviewing in the service of animus can lead to: hubris.

        —Irving Louis Horowitz
Rutgers State University

Professor Ashton Replies:

Prof. Horowitz tells us that he is “struck” by “the distinction between personalities and their thoughts”; his readers, however, have no choice but to be dumbstruck. Clinging to the notion that what people think and what they do may be severed is academic indulgence at its worst. And even worse is the intention of modern liberalism to free itself of moral evaluation by taking the so-called high road that bypasses the bankruptcy of its agenda. We can learn a great deal more about badges of honor in The Scarlet Letter than in the “fair and balanced” “sociological biography” before us. These works can only be thought of as precursors to studies of Hitler’s intellectual life subtitled fascism without the holocaust. Stalin sans gulag is sure to follow.