The Sociological Imagination
Chapter One: The Promise
C. Wright Mills (1959)
Nowadays people often feel that their private lives are a series
of traps. They sense that within their everyday worlds, they cannot overcome
their troubles, and in this feeling, they are often quite correct. What
ordinary people 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 peasant becomes a worker; a feudal lord is
liquidated or becomes a businessman. When classes rise or fall, a person is
employed or unemployed; when the rate of investment goes up or down, a person
takes new heart or goes broke.
When wars happen, an insurance salesperson
becomes a rocket launcher; a store clerk, a radar operator; a wife or husband
lives alone; a child grows up without a parent. Neither the life of an
individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding
both.
Yet
people 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 people do not usually know what
this connection means for the kinds of people 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 individuals 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 people 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 individual is world history. Within this scene and this
period, in the course of a single generation, one sixth of humankind 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; people feel the intimate grip of
new kinds of authority. Totalitarian societies rise, and are smashed to bits -
or succeed fabulously. After two centuries of ascendancy, capitalism is shown
up as only one way to make society into an industrial apparatus.
After two
centuries of hope, even formal democracy is restricted to a quite small portion
of mankind. 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 coordinated and
massive efforts upon the preparation of World War Three.
The
very shaping of history now outpaces the ability of people to orient themselves
in accordance with cherished values. And which values? Even when they do not
panic, people often sense that older ways of feeling and thinking have
collapsed and that newer beginnings are ambiguous to the point of moral stasis.
Is it any wonder that ordinary people feel they cannot cope with the larger
worlds with which they are so suddenly confronted? That they cannot understand
the meaning of their epoch for their own lives? That - in defense of selfhood -
they become morally insensible, trying to remain altogether private
individuals? Is it any wonder that they come to be possessed by a sense 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 take 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 her own
experience and gauge her own fate only by locating herself within her period,
that she can know her own chances in life only by becoming aware of those of
all individuals in her circumstances. In many ways it is a terrible lesson; in
many ways a magnificent one. We do not know the limits of humans 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 lives it out within some historical sequence. By
the fact of this 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
many-sided 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 people and society.
No
social 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 one another? How does it
differ from other varieties of social order? Within it, what is the meaning of
any particular feature for its continuance and for its change?
(2)
Where does this society stand in human history? What are the mechanics by which
it is changing? What is its place within and its meaning for the development of
humanity as a whole? How does any particular feature we are examining affect,
and how is it affected by, the historical period in which it moves? And this
period - what are its essential features? How does it differ from other
periods? What are its characteristic ways of history-making?
(3)
What varieties of men and women now prevail in this society and in this period?
And what varieties are coming to prevail? In what ways are they selected and
formed, liberated and repressed, made sensitive and blunted? What kinds of
`human nature' are revealed in the conduct and character we observe in this
society in this period? And what is the meaning for 'human nature' of each and
every feature of the society we are examining?
Whether
the point of interest is a great power state or a minor literary mood, a
family, a prison, a creed - these are the kinds of questions the best social
analysts have asked. They are the intellectual pivots of classic studies of
individuals in society - and they are the questions inevitably raised by any
mind possessing the sociological imagination. For that imagination is the
capacity to shift from one perspective to another - from the political to the
psychological; from examination of a single family to comparative assessment of
the national budgets of the world; from the theological school to the military
establishment; from considerations of an oil industry to studies of
contemporary poetry. It is the capacity to range from the most impersonal and
remote transformations to the most intimate features of the human self - and to
see the relations between the two. Back of its use there is always the urge to
know the social and historical meaning of the individual in the society and in
the period in which she has her quality and her being.
That,
in brief, is why it is by means of the sociological imagination that men and
women now hope to grasp what is going on in the world, and to understand what
is happening in themselves as minute points of the intersections of biography
and history within society. In large part, contemporary humanity's self-conscious
view of itself as at least an outsider, if not a permanent stranger, rests upon
an absorbed realization of social relativity and of the transformative power of history. The sociological imagination is the most fruitful form
of this self-consciousness. By its use people whose mentalities have swept only
a series of limited orbits often come to feel as if suddenly awakened in a
house with which they had only supposed themselves to be familiar. Correctly or
incorrectly, they often come to feel that they can now provide themselves with
adequate summations, cohesive assessments, comprehensive orientations. Older
decisions that once appeared sound now seem to them products of a mind
unaccountably dense. Their capacity for astonishment is made lively again. They
acquire a new way of thinking, they experience a transvaluation of values: in a
word, by their reflection and by their sensibility, they realize the cultural
meaning of the social sciences.
Perhaps
the most fruitful distinction with which the sociological imagination works is
between 'the personal troubles of milieu' and 'the public issues of social
structure.' This distinction is an essential tool of the sociological
imagination and a feature of all classic work in social science.
Troubles occur within the character of the individual and
within the range of his or her immediate relations with others; they have to do
with one's self and with those limited areas of social life of which one is
directly and personally aware. Accordingly, the statement and the resolution of
troubles properly lie within the individual as a biographical entity and within
the scope of one's immediate milieu - the social setting that is directly open
to her personal experience and to some extent her willful activity. A trouble
is a private matter: values cherished by an individual are felt by her to be
threatened.
Issues have to do with matters that transcend these local environments of
the individual and the range of her inner life. They have to do with the
organization of many such milieu into the institutions of an historical society
as a whole, with the ways in which various milieux overlap and interpenetrate
to form the larger structure of social and historical life. An issue is a
public matter: some value cherished by publics is felt to be threatened. Often
there is a debate about what that value really is and about what it is that
really threatens it. This debate is often without focus if only because it is
the very nature of an issue, unlike even widespread trouble, that it cannot
very well be defined in terms of the immediate and everyday environments of
ordinary people. An issue, in fact, often involves a crisis in institutional
arrangements, and often too it involves what Marxists call 'contradictions' or
'antagonisms.'
In
these terms, consider unemployment. When, in a city of 100,000, only one is
unemployed, that is his personal trouble, and for its relief we properly look
to the character of the individual, his skills and his immediate opportunities.
But when in a nation of 50 million employees, 15 million people are unemployed,
that is an issue, and we may not hope to find its solution within the range of
opportunities open to any one individual. The very structure of opportunities
has collapsed. Both the correct statement of the problem and the range of
possible solutions require us to consider the economic and political
institutions of the society, and not merely the personal situation and
character of a scatter of individuals.
Consider
war. The personal problem of war, when it occurs, may be how to survive it or
how to die in it with honor; how to make money out of it; how to climb into the
higher safety of the military apparatus; or how to contribute to the war's
termination. In short, according to one's values, to find a set of milieux and
within it to survive the war or make one's death in it meaningful. But the structural issues of war have to do with its
causes; with what types of people it throws up into command; with its effects
upon economic and political, family and religious institutions, with the
unorganized irresponsibility of a world of nation-states.
Consider
marriage. Inside a marriage a man and a woman may experience personal troubles,
but when the divorce rate during the first four years of marriage is 250 out of
every 1,000 attempts, this is an indication of a structural issue having to do
with the institutions of marriage and the family and other institutions that
bear upon them.
Or
consider the metropolis - the horrible, beautiful, ugly, magnificent sprawl of
the great city. For many members of the upperclass the personal solution to
'the problem of the city' is to have an apartment with private garage under it
in the heart of the city and forty miles out, a house by Henry Hill, garden by
Garrett Eckbo, on a hundred acres of private land. In these two controlled
environments - with a small staff at each end and a private helicopter
connection - most people could solve many of the problems of personal milieux
caused by the facts of the city. But all this, however splendid, does not solve
the public issues that the structural fact of the city poses. What should be
done with this wonderful monstrosity? Break it all up into scattered units,
combining residence and work? Refurbish it as it stands? Or, after evacuation,
dynamite it and build new cities according to new plans in new places? What
should those plans be? And who is to decide and to accomplish whatever choice
is made? These are structural issues; to confront them and to solve them
requires us to consider political and economic issues that affect innumerable
milieux.
In
so far as an economy is so arranged that slumps occur, the problem of
unemployment becomes incapable of personal solution. In so far as war is
inherent in the nation-state system and in the uneven industrialization of the
world, the ordinary individual in her restricted milieu will be powerless -
with or without psychiatric aid - to solve the troubles this system or lack of
system imposes upon him. In so far as the family as an institution turns women
into darling little slaves and men into their chief providers and unweaned
dependents, the problem of a satisfactory marriage remains incapable of purely
private solution. In so far as the overdeveloped megalopolis and the
overdeveloped automobile are built-in features of the overdeveloped society,
the issues of urban living will not be solved by personal ingenuity and private
wealth.
What we experience in various and specific milieux, I have noted,
is often caused by structural changes. Accordingly, to understand the changes
of many personal milieux we are required to look beyond them. And the number
and variety of such structural changes increase as the institutions within
which we live become more embracing and more intricately connected with one
another. To be aware of the idea of social structure and to use it with
sensibility is to be capable of tracing such linkages among a great variety of
milieux. To be able to do that is to possess the sociological imagination.
