Mills’ Concept Of ‘Sociological Imagination’

The sociological imagination would enable those who exercise it to understand the contemporary historical panorama concerning its significance and relevance, referring both to the professional careers and the private lives of many heterogeneous people, allowing them to evaluate how individuals, through their daily and customary actions are frequently trapped by a false consciousness about their respective social positions.

According to Mills, a substantive differentiation of the sociological imagination resides in the permanent separation between the personal concerns of the environment and the public problems of the social structure; Such a bifurcation constitutes a central element of the theoretical-analytical practice and, at the same time, serves as an essential component of any conceptual construction considered classical in the field of social sciences. Concerns about the character of a person arise within the sphere formed by his close relationships with other individuals. According to Mills, the common man experiences a feeling of being trapped. He is overwhelmed by discomfort that appears in the form of difficult problems: price rises, divorces and family crises, lacerating inequality, etc. Your possibilities of action to change the circumstances are limited to your private life. Mills’ fundamental thesis is that the private life of people, their opportunities and problems, can only be understood if we put it with history and the ‘structural’ phenomena of society. We must avoid the risk, as one student wisely pointed out to me last week, of using the notions of ‘society’ or ‘structural’ acts as a kind of black box where the causes of our problems reside, but that saves us the effort to specify them concretely and establish how it is that what happens to us, on a day-to-day basis, effectively has to do with what happens on other levels, or in the decisions of people who are very foreign to people’s daily lives but that govern key institutions of society.

Regarding the other factor treated in a discriminatory way by the sociological imagination, complementary to the personal concerns derived from the surrounding environment, it refers to the presence of problems related to issues that escape the individual’s psychic being, as well as exceeding their localized and immediate radius of action. They referred to the specific organizational aspects of numerous areas located within the institutional framework of a particular historically determined society and considered a whole, expressed in the various ways through which different media are involved and reciprocally involved, configuring the broadest social and historical life. The existence of a problem, in this sense, concerns an eminently public issue. This widespread problem frequently suffers from a lack of adequate approaches, considering that it is incubated in the very nature of public affairs connected to the social structure, in contrast to the development of personal concerns, including the most widespread and shared among them. ; that is to say that the “problems” cannot be defined correctly from the context delineated by “the immediate and daily environments of ordinary men.”

The values ​​threatened during the postwar period were, in many cases, not identified as values, nor was it generally noted that they were explicitly threatened, while a ‘situation of discomfort and indifference constitutes the distinctive sign of our time.’ The specific topics of most significant interest to social analysts consisted of mass leisure and comic magazines, neglecting crucial issues of the moment such as the phenomenon of poverty or the exploitation of child labor, existing in most countries. A large number of public problems, as well as a considerable portion of private concerns, were usually focused in terms of mental pathologies, ‘in a pathetic attempt to avoid the great problems of modern society. To perceive that conceptual content that any author intends to transmit, one should begin by finding out the ‘place’ of origin of the same, that is, who is, what is his ideology in the political and economic fields, as well as his defined or underlying ideology referred to the appreciation of the various social systems. In a way, Mills is a relatively iconoclastic follower of Marx, Durkheim, and Weber, mixing elements of their respective conceptions, and likewise appears as one of the most prominent North American sociologists, as a journal in the classical tradition.

In several ways, this author considers that the intellectual practice of the sociologist should entail the necessary articulation between singular sociohistorical connotations and individual trajectories or biographies. This conjunctural context determines the characteristics of interpersonal and intergroup relations carried out within the same shared society. The systematic exercise of the ‘sociological imagination’ points to this task, constituting its specific metier turned into ‘promise,’ the explicit recognition of which is the stamp of the group of sociologists esteemed as classics. In this regard, those analyzes of the complex social problems detached from the historical vision, from the biographical developments and – fundamentally – from the convergence of both aspects (operated within a given society) have not been able to complete an integrated intellectual work.

People nowadays don’t just need mere information. In this data age, information sometimes dominates your attention & exceeds your ability to understand and assimilate it. Similarly, people don’t just need intellectual skills, even though they struggle to achieve them, sometimes exhausts a person’s pure energy. What people feel they need and what they need is a mental quality, which helps them utilize this information & develop a reason to get lucid recaps of what is happening in the world & what is perhaps happening within them. At any given time, of course, ‘social science’ consists of what highly recognized social scientists are doing, but not every one of them is, in any way, doing the same thing: in reality, they don’t even do things of the same kind. What social scientists have achieved in the past is also a valuable part of the social sciences, but each student of these subjects chooses a certain tradition of his discipline.

The concept of sociological imagination allows its possessor to comprehend the broader historical setting with its meaning for the inner life as well as for the outer trajectory of the diversity of individuals. It allows him to consider how individuals, in the tumult of their daily life, are sometimes falsely aware of their social standings. In that tumult, the modern society’s plot is sought, & within that plot, the psychologies of a diversity of both males and females are formulated. By such means, the personal unease of individuals is laser-focused on specific concerns. The first lesson of social science as well as the first fruit of imagination – which embodies it – is the idea that one particular individual can only comprehend his own particular experience & assess his very own destiny. It has been made quite clear that each person lives his life, from one particular generation to another, in a society, writes his biography, and becomes part of history. By living, a person makes valuable contributions to the society in which he or she lives in, albeit in a minimal measure, but he or she does shape that society; not only the society, one can even go as far as to say that the history of that society is somewhat shaped by him or her.

Mills argues that thinkers who claim to represent exact science frequently turn it into ‘scientism,’ evaluating that characteristic experimentation corresponds to the analysis of social practices and that only through the application of its rigorous methodology is it possible to resolve human problems as a whole. Notwithstanding such an appreciation, ‘many cultural workers have come to think of science as a false and pretentious Messiah, or at least a markedly ambiguous element of modern civilization.’ That which in this author’s time was considered sociological research tended to be oriented, according to his perspective, around three general directions, each of which was prone to deviation from the original axis from distorted approaches about it. The tendencies mentioned corresponding respectively, to the inclination towards a theory of history, to a certain conceptual systematization about the “nature of man and of society” and to the empirical treatment of contemporary social problems.

The first sociological current cited denotes a strong generalizing ambition, seeking to encompass through a historical macro theory ‘the totality of man’s social life,’ which entails a comprehensive undertaking. It is represented by authors located in various ideological positions but who, nevertheless, share the intention of addressing a comprehensive scientific vision, simultaneously systematized and historical. That is, it deals with and uses themes from the past while doing so with the object to roughly differentiate stages, eras, or stages of evolution from history and the regularities of social life.

In the context of sociology understood as classical, expressions of this formally stereotypical epistemological procedure stand out, from Auguste Comte to Max Weber, passing through Karl Marx and Herbert Spencer, among others. In more recent times, such historical theories of humanity fell into specific deformations, sometimes becoming a narrow transhistorical mold into which the materials of human history are forced into and from which prophetic visions emerge (generally bleak), as exemplified for example by the theoretical constructions elaborated by Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee.