The Sociological Imagination

The Sociological Imagination

By: C. Wright Mills  

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Average Customer Rating: 5.0 out of 5

Leading sociologist Todd Gitlin brings this fortieth anniversary edition up to date with a lucid afterword in which he considers the ways social analysis has progressed since Mills first published his study in 1959. A classic in the field, this book still provides rich food for our imagination.

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Customer Review: 5 out of 5
A gift to Meghalaya India - I bought this book to send to a teacher in Meghalaya, India who is taking a graduate degree in Sociology and it was a text in his own classes. He was thrilled to receive it because the standard of his work is raised according to the textbooks from his own reading list he is able to obtain.
I cannot review the book (as I didn't read it), but repeat his appreciation and his promise to use it to serve his community.

Customer Review: 5 out of 5
Classic and still relevant - Probably one of the most influential books in modern sociology, combining not only a wonderful characterisation of styles of sociology but also a commitment to interpreting the world and changing it.
His appendix "On Intellectual Craftmanship" is a chapter I have ALL my graduate students read every year, and would wish all social scientists did so!

Customer Review: 5 out of 5
Read, imagine, live - A classic of sociological thought, and one of the best (if not the best) accounts on the purpose and tasks of sociological mindset. Sociological imagination (or perspective, if you will) as intersection of biography and history - pure and simple, yet succinctly incisive and elegantly descriptive. Still a very relevant, influential and timely text for each and all.

Customer Review: 4 out of 5
Humanistic marxism: fatally flawed - "It is my aim in this book to define the meaning of the social sciences for the cultural tasks of our time. I want to specify the kinds of effort that lie behind the development of the sociological imagination; to indicate its implications for political as well as for cultural life."

The first chapter of this book is "The Promise" and in it Mills takes his stand with the great tradition of the Enlightenment and the idea of liberation by learning. For Mills, the promise is that cultivation of the sociological imagination may enable people to place personal worries and concerns in the larger social and historical context, and thus to think more effectively about them.

Chapters on Grand Theory and Abstracted Empiricism show how the understanding of social processes is impeded by immersion in certain types of theory and in narrow-minded "nomal science". Other chapters explore the many and varied ways that the critical and probing "sociological imagination" can be subverted or frustrated. His description of the Machieavellian tactics employed by academics to sideline rivals is especially revealing (for example, have a potentially dangerous book reviewed by a junior member of a hostile faction). His comments on the function of professional associations and conferences are equally deadly.

The fatal flaw of the book is Mill's Marxism and lack of understanding of economics, exemplified by his dismissive reference to people who could not see the value of the New Deal. The author's theoretical and ideological stance is not explicitly articulated but was clearly in the rational and humanistic Marxist tradition. He yearned for a viable alternative to liberalism and Marxism as he saw them in the 1950s but he clearly did not perceive classical liberalism as a candidate that was worthy of mention. It seems that classical, non-socialist liberals were so thin on the ground during his lifetime that he did not see any need to engage with them. That is a major weakness and it prevented Mills, and this book, from reaching the full extent of insight and understanding that his scholarship, his integrity and his industry should have permitted.

The Appendix on Intellectual Craftmanship is worth reading every few years to keep focussed for effective reading, thinking and writing. The remainder of this review consists of extracts from the appendix to convey some of its flavour.

"It is best to begin, I think, by reminding you, the beginning student, that the most admirable thinkers within the scholarly community you have chosen to join do not split their work from their lives.They seem to take both too seriously to allow such dissociation, and they want to use each for the enrichment of the other."

"You must set up a file, which is, I suppose, a sociologist's way of saying: keep a journal...In such a file as I am going to describe, there is joined personal experience and professional activities, studies under way and studies planned..."

"One of the very worst things that happens to social scientists is that they feel the need to write of their 'plans' on only one occasion: when they are going to ask for money for a specific piece of research or 'a project'. It is as a request for funds that most 'planning' is done, or at least written carefully about. However standard the practice, I think this very bad: it is bound in some degree to be salesmanship, and, given prevailing expectations, very likely to result in painstaking pretensions; the project is lilely to be presented', rounded out in some arbitrary manner long before it ought to be; it is often a contrived thing, aimed at getting the money for ulterior purposes, however valuable, as well as for the research presented."

"Any working social scientist who is well on his way ought at all times to have so many plans, that is to say ideas, that the question is always, which of them am I, ought I, to work on next. And he should keep a special file for his master agenda, which he writes and rewrites just for himself and perhaps for discussion with friends. From time to time he ought to review this very carefully and purposefully, and sometimes too, when he is relaxed."

"Any such procedure is one of the indispensable means by which your intellectual enterprise is kept oriented and under control...In [a vigorous and free intellectual community]...there would be interludes of discussion among individuals about future work. Three kinds of interludes - on problems, methods, theory - ought to come out of the work of social scientists and lead into it again: they should be shaped by work-in-progress and to some extend guide their work. It is for such interludes that a professional association finds its intellectual reason for being."

Customer Review: 5 out of 5
Robust Problems Define Excellence - TThis is a masterful work by an original thinker. Wright was concerned with the developments that he was seeing in the social sciences in his time. He was concerned that the social sciences was developing in ways that limited its value to humanity and therefore to itself. He saw the social science of his day as working against true freedom in society by allowing itself to be used to manipulate the population into unthinking acceptance of established authority.

He saw two major trends that removed the social sciences from addressing robust problems whose solution would make genuine differences to humanity. The first was a retreat into 'Theory' so abstract that it was unable to describe anything of significance. Wright uses as an example an article that describes a theory of human relationships that was so abstracted from reality that, as Wright shows, it could not capture the fact that sometimes people accept the norms of their society unwillingly. This theory was wrapped in such opaque jargon to unambiguously define the trivial that it last all relationship to genuine society.

Wright also identifies as a further development in the social sciences, an empiricism so constrained by technique that it can only address the most specific and mundane problem. If theory has become to remote and abstract to contact real society this empiricism is equivalent in being so immersed in the specifics of a society that it cannot capture more than the trivial.

Wright's book is a plea to social scientists to abandon these two enterprises and to return to a social science which is concerned with problems whose solutions will change society,. He calls the ability to find and understand such problems the sociological imagination. He sees practitioners of this form of sociology as inherently political. They may not be in political office but they make their findings known to be acted upon in the political milieu.

Wright sees this as a way to genuine freedom in that the governed will know the structure of the society that is governing them and can then freely choose to live within it or to make changes. Wright is concerned that the social sciences of his time were not used to promote this genuine understanding of society by the population but to manipulate them into a passive acceptance of norms that may not be in their interest. He is afraid of a beneficent tyranny with a population of what he calls happy robots.

This book is a denunciation of passive acquiescence and a plea for informed acceptance as the basis of society. Wright's fears are as valid today as when he wrote them over 40 years ago.

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