Join us on Thursday 9th April for the first installment of TASA's Social Theory Thematic Group Webinar Series, "Learning from C. Wright Mills on the Causes of World War Three: Rethinking military metaphysics for our new military industrial complex," which will be presented by Brad West.
Despite the standing and influence of C. Wright Mills in contemporary sociology, he has one work that is largely underappreciated and infrequently debated: The Causes of World War Three (1958). In this presentation I outline the book, positioning its argument and reception in relation to Mills' earlier work on the 'power elite' and sociological theory’s general inattention to the military as a social institution. I then outline the contemporary relevance of Mills' assessment of military metaphysics and the military-industrial complex in the context of liberal democratic nations now seeking to ramp arms production as a response to the return of Great Power competition. However, in this endeavour I point to the need to go beyond Mills' assessment to appreciate how neoliberlism has altered both industry-military and civil-military dynamics.
Defence industry advertisement will be used to illustrate this shift, pointing to the prominence of post-human projection of national security and the unintended dangers for peace associated with the marginalisation of the military from civil sphere narratives.
Event Details:
Date: Thursday 9th April 2026
Time: 12:30pm - 13:30pm (AEST)
Format: Zoom Webinar
Webinar
Cost: complimentary
Your Speaker
Brad West, Adelaide University
Brad West is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Adelaide University, a Faculty Fellow in the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University and previously co-President of the International Sociological Association's Research Committee on Sociological Theory (2018-2023). His recent books include Finding Gallipoli: Battlefield Remembrance and the Movement of Australian and Turkish History (winner of the Steven Crook Memorial Prize for the best authored book in Australian Sociology) and the co-edited collections Militarization and the Global Rise of Paramilitary Culture and The New Australian Military Sociology. In recent years he has been an advocate for the development of a 'strong program’ of research on the interconnections between war, the military and the civil sphere, part of which has included co-founding the Military Organisation and Culture Studies Group (www.militaryculture.org).