"People are often quick to blame others for their misfortunes. However, C. Wright Mills argues that the only way to truly understand people’s behavior is to examine the social context in which the behavior occurs. In other words, Mills believes that we need a quality of mind that he calls the sociological imagination. By using sociological imagination, we learn how social, historical, cultural, economic, and political factors influence the choices that people make and the ways in which they live their lives. As you read this article, think about how the larger social context has shaped your own choices over the course of your life. Nowadays men often feel that their private lives are a series of traps. The sense that within their everyday worlds, they cannot overcome their troubles, and in this feeling, they are often quite correct: What ordinary men are directly aware of and what they try to do are bounded by the private orbits in which they live; their visions and their powers are limited to the close-up scenes of job, family, neighborhood; in other milieux, they move vicariously and remain spectators. And the more aware they become, however vaguely, of ambitions and of threats which transcend their immediate locales, the more trapped they seem to feel. Underlying this sense of being trapped are seemingly impersonal changes in the very structure of continent-wide societies. The facts of contemporary history are also facts about the success and the failure of individual men and women. When a society is industrialized, a “The Promise,” by C. Wright Mills, reprinted from The Sociological Ima sant becomes a worker; a feudal lord is liquidated or becomes a businessman. When classes rise or fall, a man is employed or unemployed; when the rate of investment goes up or down, a man takes new heart or goes broke. When wars happen, an insurance salesman becomes a rocket launcher; a store clerk, a radar man; a wife lives alone; a child grows up without a father. Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both. Yet men do not usually define the troubles they endure in terms of historical change and institutional contradiction. The well-being they enjoy, they do not usually impute to the big ups and downs of the societies in which they live. 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. They do not possess the quality of mind essential to grasp the interplay of man and society, of biography and history, of self and world. They cannot cope with their personal troubles in such ways as to control the structural transformations that usually lie behind them. Surely it is no wonder. In what period have so many men been so totally exposed at so fast a pace to such earthquakes of change? That Americans have not known such catastrophic changes as have the men and women of other societies is due to historical facts that are now quickly becoming ‘merely history.’ The history that now affects every man is world history. Within this scene and this period, in the course of a single generation, one sixth of mankind is transformed from all that is feudal and backward into all that is modern, advanced, and fearful. Political colonies are freed; new and less visible forms of imperialism installed. Revolutions occur; men feel the intimate grip of new kinds of authority. Totalitarian societie Everywhere in the underdeveloped world, ancient ways of life are broken up and vague expectations become urgent demands. Everywhere in the overdeveloped world, the means of authority and of violence become total in scope and bureaucratic in form. Humanity itself now lies before us, the super-nation at either pole concentrating its most co-ordinated and massive efforts upon the preparation of World War Three. The very shaping of history now outpaces the ability of men to orient themselves in accordance with cherished values. And which values? Even when they do not panic, men often sense that older ways of feeling and thinking have collapsed and the newer beginnings are ambiguous to the point of moral stasis. Is it any wonder that ordinary men feel they cannot cope with the larger worlds with which they are so suddenly confronted? That they cannot understand themeaning of their epoch for their own lives? That—in defense of selfhood—they become morally insensible, trying to remain altogether private men? Is it any wonder that they come to be possessed by asense of the trap? It is not only information that they need—in this Age of Fact, information often dominates their attention and overwhelms their capacities to assimilate it. It is not only the skills of reason that they need—although their struggles to acquire these often exhaust their limited moral energy. What they need, and what they feel they need, is a quality of mind that will help them to use information and to develop reason in order to achieve lucid summations of what is going on in the world and of what may be happening within themselves. It is this quality, I am going to contend, that journalists and scholars, artists and publics, scientists and editors are coming to expect of what may be called the sociological imagination.The sociological imagination enables its possessor to understand the larger historical scene in terms of its meaning for the inner life and the external career of a variety of individuals. It enables him to into account how individuals, in the welter of their daily experience, often become falsely conscious of their social positions. Within that welter, the framework of modern society is sought, and within that framework the psychologies of a variety of men and women are formulated. By such means the personal uneasiness of individuals is focused upon explicit troubles and the indifference of publics is transformed into involvement with public issues. The first fruit of this imagination—and the first lesson of the social science that embodies it—is the idea that the individual can understand his own experience and gauge his own fate only by locating himself within his period, that he can know his own chances in life only by becoming aware of those of all individuals in his circumstances.In many ways it is a terrible lesson; in many ways a magnificent one. We do not know the limits of man’s capacities for supreme effort or willing degradation, for agony or glee, for pleasurable brutality or the sweetness of reason. But in our time we have come to know that the limits of ‘human nature’ are frighteningly broad. We have come to know that every individual lives, from one generation to the next, in some society; that he lives out a biography, and that he lives it out within some historical sequence. By the fact of his living he contributes, however minutely, to the shaping of this society and to the course of its history, even as he is made by society and by its historical push and shove. The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society. That is its task and its promise. To recognize this task and this promise is the mark of the classic social analyst. It is characteristic of Herbert Spencer—turgid, polysyllabic, comprehensive; of E. A. Ross—graceful, muckraking, upright; of Auguste Comte and Emile Durkheim; of the intricate and subtle Karl Mannheim. It is the quality of all that is intellectually excellent in Karl Marx; it is the clue to Thorstein Veblen’s brilliant and ironic insight, to Joseph Schumpeter’s manysided constructions of reality; it is the basis of the psychological sweep of W. E. H. Lecky no less than of the profundity and clarity of Max Weber. And it is the signal of what is best in contemporary studies of man and society . No special study that does not come back to the problems of biography, of history and of their intersections within a society has completed its intellectual journey. Whatever the specific problems of the classic social analysts, however limited or however broad the features of social reality they have examined, those who have been imaginatively aware of the promise of their work have consistently asked three sorts of questions:(1) What is the structure of this particular society as a whole?What are its essential components, and how are they related to oneanother? How does it differ from other varieties of social order?Within it, what is the meaning of any particular feature for its continuanceand for its change?(2) Where does this society stand in human history? What arethe mechanics by which it is changing? What is its place within andits meaning for the development of humanity as a whole? How doesany particular feature we are examining affect, and how is it affectedby, the historical period in which it moves? And this period—whatare its essential features? How does it differ from other periods? Whatare its characteristic ways of history-making?(3) What varieties of men and women now prevail in this societyand in this period? And what varieties are coming to prevail? In whatways are they selected and formed, liberated and repressed, madesensitive and blunted? What kinds of ‘human nature’ are revealed inthe conduct and character we observe in this society in this period?And what is the meaning for ‘human nature’ of each and every featureof the society we are examining?"
“A existência, porque humana, não pode ser muda, silenciosa, nem tampouco pode nutrir-se de falsas palavras, mas de palavras verdadeiras, com que os homens transformam o mundo. Existir, humanamente, é pronunciar o mundo, é modificá-lo. O mundo pronunciado, por sua vez, se volta problematizado aos sujeitos pronunciantes, a exigir deles novo pronunciar.Não e no silêncio que os homens se fazem, mas na palavra, no trabalho, na ação-reflexão.Mas, se dizer a palavra verdadeira, que é trabalho, que é práxis, é transformar o mundo, dizer a palabra não é privilégio de alguns homens, mas direito de todos os homens. Precisamente por isto, ninguém pode dizer a palavra verdadeira sozinho, ou dizê-la para os outros, num ato de prescrição, com o qual rouba a palavra aos demais. O diálogo é este encontro dos homens, mediatizados pelo mundo, para pronunciá-lo, não se esgotando,portanto, na relação eu-tu.”
“La existencia, en tanto humana, no puede ser muda, silenciosa, ni tampoco nutrirse de falsas palabras sino de palabras verdaderas con las cuales los hombres transforman el mundo. Existir, humanamente, es “pronunciar” el mundo, es transformarlo. El mundo pronunciado, a su vez, retorna problematizado a los sujetos pronunciantes, exigiendo de ellos un nuevo pronunciamiento.Los hombres no se hacen en el silencio, sino en la palabra, en el trabajo, en la acción, en la reflexión.Mas si decir la palabra verdadera, que es trabajo, que es praxis, es transformar el mundo, decirla no es privilegio de algunos hombres, sino derecho de todos los hombres. Precisamente por esto, nadie puede decir la palabra verdadera solo, o decirla para los otros, en un acto de prescripción con el cual quita a los demás el derecho de decirla. Decir la palabra, referida al mundo que se ha de transformar, implica un encuentro de los hombres para esta transformación.”
“Human existence cannot be Silent, nor can it be nourished by false words, but only by true words, with which men and women transform the world. To exist, humanly, is to name the world, to change it. Once named, the world in its turn reappears to the nam-ers as a problem and requires of them a new naming. Human beings are not built in silence, but in word, in work, in action-reflection.But while to say the true word—which is work, which is praxis—is to transform the world, saying that word is not the privilege of some few persons, but the right of everyone. Consequently, no one can say a true word alone—nor can she say it for another, in a prescriptive act which robs others of their words.Dialogue is the encounter between men, mediated by the world, in order to name the world.”
