C. Wright Mills died in 1962 at age forty-five, from the last of a string of heart attacks. The author of such enduring classics as The Power Elite, White Collar, The New Men of Power, and The Sociological Imagination, he was one of the world’s foremost social scientists as well as the leading intellectual influence on the emerging New Left until his tragically early death. As an academic, Mills was committed to the rigors of scholarly inquiry, but this did not mean that he thought that intellectual work should be value-free. Far from it. In a 1959 address at the London School of Economics that harshly criticized contemporary US society, he provided his audience with an intellectual disclaimer that succinctly characterizes the spirit of his work: “You may well say that all this is an immoderate and biased view of America, that this nation contains many good features . . . Indeed that is so. But you must not expect me to provide A Balanced View. I am not a sociological bookkeeper.”

Although he has been dead for close to fifty years, Mills remains a towering intellectual figure whose work merits close attention today. Many of the problems and questions he raised continue (unfortunately) to be highly relevant to a world amid major overlapping social, economic, and ecological crises. Of particular note for those of us who choose to remain on the Left in these trying times is his 1960 “Letter to the New Left.”

Initially addressed to the British New Left and subsequently circulated in North America, this short and fragmentary but highly suggestive piece is, characteristically, epigrammatic in its prose and dizzyingly broad in its political and intellectual aspirations. It remains famous for its definitive takedown of the complacent formulations peddled by the end-of-ideology crowd that held sway during the 1950s (“Its sophistication is one of tone rather than of ideas; in it, the New Yorker–style of reportage has become politically triumphant”). But here I want to focus on two aspects of the Letter that I think most concern us today – what it means to be on the Left, and the seeming collapse of the historic agencies of change identified by and with the Left, particularly the labor movement. The problem of agency is especially relevant to what remains of the Left today, and it is the part of Mills’ letter that is the most problematic.