The sociological imagination. Chapter one “ The Promise C wright Mills, 1959.

Notes

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 up by the private orbits
in which they live, their visions and their powers are limited to the closeup scenes of their jobs, family,
neigborhood,in other milieu they move vicariously and remain spectators. And the more aware they
become, however vaguely of ambitions and threats which transcend their immediate locales, the more
trapped theyseem to feel.

Underlying the 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
umemployed; when the rate of investment goes up or down, a person takes heart or goes broke. When
wars happen, an insurance salesperson become a rocket launcher, a store keeper, 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
societies in which they live.Seldom aware of the intricate connection between the pattern 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 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 transformation 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 catastropic change 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, wthin this scene and this period, in the
course of a single generation, onesixth of humankind is transformed from all that of a feudal and
backward into what 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 as only one way to make socieity into an industrial apparatus.After
two centuries of hope, even formal democracy is restricted to a quite small portion of mankind.Every
where in the underdeveloped world, ancient ways of life are broken up and vague expectations become
urgent demands. Everywhere in the underdeveloped world the means of authority and of violence
become total in scope and bureaucratic in form…
The sociological imagination enables its possessor to understand the large historical science in terms of
its meaning for the inner life and 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 m odern 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 individual s is focused upon explicit troubles and the indifferenc e of publics is
transformed into involvement with public issues…The sociological imagination enables us to grasp
history and biography and the relations between the two within society. This is its task and its promise..

That by sociological imagination men and women hope to grasp what is going in on the world, to
understanding what is happening in themselves at minute points of the intersection of biography and
history within society. ..they acquire a new way of thinking, 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 themost fruitful distinction with which the socioloical imagination works is between the
personal troubles of milieu and the public issues of social structure…

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 skill and his immediate
opportunites. 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 with the name of opportunities open to sny one
individual. .. we needto consider the
economic and political institutions of the society and not merely, the personal situation and character of
a scatter of individuals.

..consider marriage, inside a marriage a man and woman may experience personal troubles but when
the divorce rate during the four years of marriage I s 250 out of every 1000 attempts this is an indication
of a structural issue having to do with the insitutions of marriage and the family and other institutions
that bear on them.

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 and in the uneven
industrialization of the world, the ordinary individual in his restricted milieu will be powerless…to solvet
he troubles of this system of lack of system imposes on him.

..what we experienced in various and specific milieu, Is often caused by structural changes. ..we are
required to look beyond them. And the no. and variety of such structural changes increase as the
insitutions 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 milieu.To be able to do that is to possess the sociological
imagination.