Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Tables
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction American Faust
- Chapter 1 C. Wright Mills on Law and Society: Hidden in Plain Sight?
- Chapter 2 Mills on the Economics of the Old Middle Class
- Chapter 3 Revisiting C. Wright Mills on the Militarization of Postwar American Society
- Chapter 4 A Critical Assessment of the Historical and Economic Underpinnings of C. Wright Mills's The Power Elite
- Chapter 5 Mills as Ethical Theorist: The Military Metaphysics and the Higher Immorality
- Chapter 6 C. Wright Mills and Latin America
- Chapter 7 For a Feminist Sociological Imagination: A Personal Retrospective on C. Wright Mills
- Chapter 8 The Sociological Imagination: A Reductionist Reading
- Chapter 9 Recent Changes in the Shape of Power
- Afterword. Mills as Classic?
- Contributors
- Index
Chapter 8 - The Sociological Imagination: A Reductionist Reading
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 June 2017
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Tables
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction American Faust
- Chapter 1 C. Wright Mills on Law and Society: Hidden in Plain Sight?
- Chapter 2 Mills on the Economics of the Old Middle Class
- Chapter 3 Revisiting C. Wright Mills on the Militarization of Postwar American Society
- Chapter 4 A Critical Assessment of the Historical and Economic Underpinnings of C. Wright Mills's The Power Elite
- Chapter 5 Mills as Ethical Theorist: The Military Metaphysics and the Higher Immorality
- Chapter 6 C. Wright Mills and Latin America
- Chapter 7 For a Feminist Sociological Imagination: A Personal Retrospective on C. Wright Mills
- Chapter 8 The Sociological Imagination: A Reductionist Reading
- Chapter 9 Recent Changes in the Shape of Power
- Afterword. Mills as Classic?
- Contributors
- Index
Summary
The Promise
C. Wright Mills began The Sociological Imagination with the claim that in his time, men often feel that their private lives are a “series of traps.” Bounded by their “private orbits” and “close-up” scenes of job, family and neighborhood, these “ordinary men” cannot understand their lives. Ultimately this is the result of “impersonal changes” in the structure of large-scale societies. “Seldom aware of the intricate connection between the patterns of their own lives and the course of world history, ordinary men do not usually know what this connection means for the kinds of men they are becoming and for the kinds of history making in which they might take part.” What these men need is a “quality of mind” that will help them to capture “the interplay of man and society, of biography and history, of self and world” (Mills 1959, 3–4).
Mills called this quality of mind the “sociological imagination” because he thought that “the first fruit of this imagination” had been embodied in the most elementary lesson of social science: “No social study that does not come back to the problem of biography, of history and of their intersections within a society has completed its intellectual journey” (Mills 1959, 5–6). He did not find the most advanced level of sociological imagination in contemporary sociology, which he criticized mercilessly in later chapters of the book, but rather in the works of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century sociological classics. Thus he argued in support of continued commitment to this tradition, because he was convinced that “the qualities of mind that constitute it are becoming a common denominator of our general cultural life” (21).
Mills claimed that in “every intellectual age one style of reflection tends to become a common denominator of cultural life.” Within the framework of such a common denominator, men can state their strongest convictions, while other styles of reflection seem mere vehicles of escape and obscurity. During the “modern era,” physics has been “the major common denominator of serious reflection and popular metaphysics in Western societies”; especially the “technique of the laboratory” has been the “accepted mode of procedure” and the “source of intellectual security.”
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- Information
- The Anthem Companion to C. Wright Mills , pp. 179 - 190Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2016