> Has anyone written illuminatingly on C. Wright Mills's The Power Elite?
Your old pal Stanley Aronowitz was recently entrusted with editing a three volume collection of essays on Mills. He recently wrote a fairly long article on Mills and his context (perhaps his introductory essay to that collection) for an online journal called Logos:
http://www.logosjournal.com/aronowitz.htm
I haven't read it. But bibliographic essays like this are usually Stanley's best suit and it could possibly be helpful.
I also have on my shelf a book I used to study for the political theory comps back in the late 80s called _Powers of Theory_ by Robert Alford and Roger Friedland. They try to group all mainstream political theory into 3 perspectives, the pluralist, the managerial and the class perspectives. I remember them being fairly useful in bringing order to the first two, which includes all the writers we don't remember because they bored us (and thus was very useful for test prep). They have a few pages on Mill placing him into the context of debates with Dahl and Domhoff that are pretty good. I'd be glad to lend you my copy and you can see if those few pages are at all useful to you. Their extensive bibliography might also be helpful.
But the short answer is: I think Mills' virtues and vices are pretty clear on first reading, and they don't change much even after you think about them for a while. So the secondary work never really got anywhere.
Michael