Milieu

Milieu (pronounced mil-yoo, meel-yoo or mee-lyœ (French))

(1) Surroundings, medium, environment, especially of a social or cultural nature.

(2) A group of people with a common point of view; a social class or group.

(3) In psychotherapy, as "milieu therapy" a controversial form of community-based psychotherapy in which patients are encouraged to take responsibility for themselves and others within the unit, based upon a hierarchy of collective punishments.

(4) In linguistics & human communications, as "milieu control", tactics that control environment and human communication through the use of peer pressure and group language.

1795-1805: From the twelfth century French milieu (physical or social environment; group of people with a common point of view (literally “middle place”)), from the Middle French milieu, meilleu, & mileu, from the Old French milliu, meillieu & mileu (middle, medium, mean),  from the Latin medius, formed under the influence of the primitive Indo-European root medhyo (middle) + lieu (place), thus understood as the Latin medius (half; middle) + locus (place, spot; specific location) and the French construct mi- (mid) +‎ lieu (place) mirrors that.  English speakers have used milieu for the environment or setting of something since the early-1800s but other "lieu" descendants are later including lieu itself and lieutenant, in use since the fourteenth century.  By the mid-nineteenth century milieu was in use in English in the sense of “surroundings, medium, environment: and had become a fashionable word among scholars and writers.  A micromilieu is a subset of a milieu.  Milieu is a noun; the noun plural is milieux or milieus.

In the milieu of the industrial baroque, Lohan Nightclub, Iera Odos 30-32 | Kerameikos, Athens 104 35, Greece.

In the twentieth century, milieu was adopted by the emerging discipline of sociology as a technical term.  The US sociologist Charles Wright Mills (1916–1962; professor of sociology at Columbia University 1946-1962) contrasted the immediate milieu of an individual’s life with the over-arching social, political and economic structure, highlighting the distinction between "the personal troubles of milieu" and the "public crises of social structure".

Mills' best known work was the much criticized but also influential The Power Elite (1956), a work much focused on the construct of the milieu which is the repository of power in the modern capitalist West.  Mills took a structuralist approach and explored the clusters of elites and how their relationships and interactions works to enable them to exert (whether overtly or organically) an essentially dictatorial control over US society and its economy.  Mills, while acknowledging some overlap between the groups, identified six clusters of elites: (1) those who ran the large corporations, (2) those who owned the corporations, (3) popular culture celebrities including the news media, (4) the upper-strata of wealth-owning families, (5) the military establishment (centred on the Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs of Staff) and (6), the upper echelons of government (the executives, the legislatures the judges, the senior bureaucracy and the duopoly of the two established political parties.  The overlaps he noted did not in any way diminish the value of his description, instead illustrating its operation.  Had he lived, the French sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) probably wouldn't much have differed from Mills but in his era he was more concerned with an individual's personal formation and the relationship of that to the enveloping milieu in which they existed.  He described the "big" structure as the milieu social, asserting it contained internalized expectations and representations of social forces & social facts which, he argued, existed only in the imaginations of individuals as collective representations.  Phenomenologists, structuralists at heart, built two models: society as a deterministic constraint (milieu) or a nurturing shell.