Wealth & Money Quote by C. Wright Mills

Mills is skewering a modern aristocracy that doesn’t bother pretending it’s about bloodlines, refinement, or even money. “Hierarchy of publicity” lands like a cold diagnosis: status now accrues to whoever can command attention at scale, and attention is treated as a kind of inherited right. The subtext is that publicity isn’t merely a tool celebrities use; it’s the organizing principle of the whole social ladder, a replacement ideology that naturalizes inequality while claiming to be open to anyone “discovered.”

The line works because it compresses a historical regime change into one sharp substitution. Descent and wealth are old, legible forms of power; they come with institutions and taboos. Publicity feels lighter, more democratic, almost playful. Mills insists it’s just as hierarchical, just harder to see because it arrives through images, gossip columns, and the apparently voluntary act of paying attention. Celebrity becomes an authority without credentials: fame as a credentialing system.

Context matters. Mills is writing in mid-century America, when mass media had matured into a national stage and “The Power Elite” was naming how corporate, political, and military leadership fused. Celebrity culture is not a side-show in that framework; it’s a parallel track of legitimacy, training the public to accept prominence as proof. Even “great wealth” is demoted here: money still matters, but it increasingly needs publicity to become socially real. Visibility doesn’t just reflect power; it manufactures it.