In 2000, Oxford University Press gave C. Wright Mills’ classic statement in political sociology, The Power Elite (1956), a face-lift. Gone from its cover were the somber black-and-white and clichéd Davy Crocket-like floating hats of yesteryear. The New Edition’s fresh look is given by a cover wallpapered with photographs of The White House, Pentagon, and Wall Street, the hyperascendancy and anti-democratic integration of each sphere of national power therein symbolized described by Mills 50 years ago as having formed an emergent mid-century institution, a now-hidden, now-visible, American power elite that, swollen with hubris, often played God. In a wobbly lexicon that would become characteristically his own, Mills not only described a sociology of power in an increasingly bureaucratized United States, he also proceeded to identify the baleful, sobering consequences of this development, including particularly a world-historical irrationality of bureaucratic rationality that he believed stood back of the rapid, unchecked movement of the United States—together with its partner in nuclear brinkmanship, the Soviet Union—toward a perverse socio-political convergence and, quite possibly, finally, to each other’s mutually assured destruction. The sympathetic reader might simply note that, in 1956, it was understandably difficult for the then 40-year-old Mills to see through the shadows cast back and forth between Max Weber and the coming Cuban Missile Crisis.

Which of the following can be inferred that the author of the passage believes regarding Mills’s depiction of the “power elite?”

A. Mills based some of his description of the power elite on those who worked on Wall Street.
B. Mills always portrayed the relationship between the U.S. and the Soviet Union as a dangerous one.
C. For at least some of the factors surrounding the power elite, Mills was ill-informed.



Select the sentence in the passage in which the author comments on Mills’s use of language.





In the context in which it appears, “played” most nearly means

A. wagered on
B. competed against
C. acted as
D. fiddled with
E. exploited