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.”