The Sociological Imagination

“Yet men 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 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 [….] They cannot cope with their personal troubles in such ways as to control the structural transformations that usually lie behind them.”

Mills expands on the themes of powerlessness and despair, seeing this as the common human condition within modern society. For Mills, the reason individuals feel like their lives and fate are outside of their own hands stems, partially, from the lack of awareness of how social and historical processes continuously condition and determine the private and individual experience of contemporary life. And it is precisely the absence of this connection between history and biography that Mills will come to address in his concept of 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.” 

Mills defines one of his most famous concepts: the sociological imagination. As he puts it, the sociological imagination is a way of thinking that seeks to connect the larger, structural forces of society with the daily experience of individuals. Individuals themselves come to understand why and how they feel the way they feel about their current and future prospects in life. Thus, the sociological imagination is a framework by which to study human societies, doing so in a way that avoids reducing social phenomena down to the merely personal (psychological, psychoanalytical, biological, etc.) or exaggerating the inherently malleable institutions of society into something absolute, trans-historical, and thus impossible to transform.

“When people cherish some set of values and do not feel any threat to them, they experience well-being. When they cherish values but do feel them to be threatened, they experience a crisis [...] But suppose people are neither aware of any cherished values nor experience any threat? That is the experience of indifference [...] Suppose, finally, they are unaware of cherished values, but still are very much aware of a threat? That is the experience of uneasiness, of anxiety, which, if it is total enough, becomes a deadly unspecified malaise.”

Mills outlines the typology of human emotion with respect to the degree to which society confirms, challenges, or opposes, their own set of values. Thus, we see Mills define well-being as an individual whose values align with society, crisis as an individual whose values feel threatened, indifference as an individual who does not have a firmly held set of beliefs and values, and uneasiness/anxiety as someone who has not yet clarified their values to themselves yet feels that their life as a whole remains under threat.

Through these examples, we get a sense of how Mills understands the framework of the sociological imagination. It seems he sees it as a way of study and understanding how lives of individuals are conditioned and affected by larger historical, political, economic, and social factors. So much so that, the very emotion of well-being, which is sometimes assumed to describe a state of happiness or personal contentment, depends, to a large degree, on whether or not the values of an individual are accepted and not threatened by the society in which they live. In this way we get a more nuanced and complex sense of something as seemingly straightforward as the idea of well-being. 

“[W]hat we call an institution is probably best defined as a more or less stable set of roles [...] But in connection with ‘institutions’ the definition [...] is not quite complete. To what is translated, we must add that the roles making up an institution are not usually just one big ‘complementarity’ of ‘shared expectations.’ Have you ever been in an army, a factory—or for that matter a family? Well, those are institutions. Within them, the expectations of some men seem just a little more urgent than those of anyone else. That is because, as we say, they have more power. Or to put it more sociologically, although not yet altogether so: an institution is a set of roles graded in authority.” 

Mills defines a social institution and explains how it differs from a mere network of relationships wherein people perform various though differing tasks (e.g. friendship groups can involve various persons all of which are considered part of a group but who may play different roles within the group as a whole, such that one person may be a better listener or better practical planner). Institutions, says Mills, are a grouping together of different positions or roles that individuals may occupy. Some individuals will have more power than others relative to the role or function they perform. This asymmetrical distribution of power or authority is what Mills calls ‘graded in authority’ when he provides the reader with his sociological definition.

“Grand theory is drunk on syntax, blind to semantics. Its practitioners do not truly understand that [...] the proper result of good definition is to transform argument over terms into disagreements about fact, and thus open arguments to further inquiry.” 

Mills summarizes his criticisms of the sociological school known as “grand theory,” of which Talcott Parsons is the most well-known representative. As Mills details in Chapter 2, the virtue of grand theory in social science is the development of the most general requirements for any study of human society. However, says Mills, this is also grand theory’s limitation, since it fails to descend from the most general sociological categories to the concrete, lived experiences of individuals in a particular society and in a particular moment in history. Thus, when Mills claims that grand theory is ‘drunk on syntax’ while being ‘blind to semantics,’ what he is referring to is the grand theoretician’s fetish for the logical relations between general categories. He calls this syntax, since syntax refers to the logical relations between symbols, categories of analysis, or concepts, regardless of their meaning. Thus, grand theory is ‘blind to semantics,’ insofar as its general categories for social science fail to grasp, and are thus emptied of, the very meaning and experience of an individual’s life in a particular period of human history. 

“We might well imagine a ‘pure type’ of society, a perfectly disciplined social structure, in which the dominated men [...] cannot quit their prescribed roles, but nevertheless share none of the dominator’s values, and thus in no way believe in the legitimacy of the order. It would be like a ship manned by galley slaves, in which the disciplined movement of the oars reduces the rowers to cogs in a machine, and the violence of the whipmaster is only rarely needed. The galley slaves need not even be aware of the ship’s direction, although any turn of the bow evokes the wrath of the master, the only man aboard who is able to see ahead. But perhaps I begin to describe rather than to imagine.”

Mills uses a metaphor here to serve two functions. First, Mills uses the image of the ship manned and operated mainly by its slaves to criticize the grand theory school of sociology. For Mills, this image of the ship manned by slaves who cannot free themselves from their roles refers to the way in which Parsons and the grand theory school can only account for human society insofar as there is a perfect correspondence between social order and the individual’s socialization into society. Grand theory can only account for societies wherein no disruption to civic life prevails and thus cannot account for societies wherein antagonism, disagreement, and upheavals occur (for Mills, almost all societies are said to exhibit the latter traits rather than the former). Second, Mills uses the slave ship imagery to suggest that one of the defining features of contemporary society is this feeling of an individual being unable to free themselves from the roles that they have found themselves occupying. It is for this reason that Mills ends this passage by saying that, at this juncture, he begins to describe more than imagine.

“But when there are values so firmly and so consistently held by genuinely conflicting interests that the conflict cannot be resolved by logical analysis and factual investigation, then the role of reason in that human affair seems at an end [...] in the end we may be reduced to mere assertion and counter-assertion; then we can only plead or persuade. And at the very end, if the end is reached, moral problems become problems of power, and in the last resort, if the last resort is reached, the final form of power is coercion.”

Mills outlines the various ways in which power comes to inform the resolution of differences within society. For Mills, it is important to grasp this concept in order to demonstrate the limitations and shortcomings of a politics that simply relies on, and has an unwavering belief in, the idea that reason and rational argumentation can and will overcome every obstacle. For Mills, reason and rational argumentation is effective up until the point that “moral problems become problems of power.” In other words, reason and deliberation are effective only in situations where each party’s moral principles remain unchallenged. It is in situations where differences can only be resolved insofar as the principles of one party are undermined or betrayed that moral disagreements are transformed into a power struggle. Hence, says Mills, the final form of power is simply coercion.

“Since work in the abstracted empirical manner is expensive, only large institutions can readily afford it. Among these are corporations, army, state, and also their adjuncts, especially advertising, promotion, and public relations [...] As a result, the style has become embodied in definite institutional centers: since the twenties in advertising and marketing agencies; since the thirties in corporations and syndicated polling agencies; since the forties, in academic life, at several research bureaus; and during World War Two, in research branches of the federal government. The institutional pattern is now spreading, but these remain its strongholds.”

Mills provides a general overview of the conditions of intellectual labor that the social scientist finds themselves in and explains how these conditions have contributed to the rise of the “bureaucratic ethos” and “abstracted empirical” trends within sociology. The kind of environment that the social scientist finds themselves working in, says Mills, is one funded by institutions motivated by clear, particular, and political interests. Thus, says Mills, the work produced by social scientists is something that is made possible precisely because the specific research being undertaken also satisfies the interests of a larger institutional body (regardless of whether the social scientist is aware of this or not). And to make matters worse, this trend has only seen an increase since the end of the Second World War.

“For ‘social structure,’ as the conception is most commonly used, refers just to that—to the combination of institutions classified according to the functions each performs.”

Mills defines one of the most commonly used terms in sociology: social structure. Social structure refers to the particular organization and relations of power maintained between the institutions of a given society—the former being what is ‘structural’ insofar as the relations of power between the institutions of a society give that society a particular and definite structure (i.e. feudalism is a different organization of society than capitalism). For Mills, it is important that we do not confuse the social structure of one society for another. To do so would be to fall prey to the very trappings of the general theory school of social science.

“In our period, social structures are usually organized under a political state. In terms of power, and in many other interesting terms as well, the most inclusive unit of social structure is the nation-state. The nation-state is now the dominating form in world history and [...] a major fact in the life of every man [...] all the institutions and specific milieux in which most men live their public and private lives are now organized into one or the other of the nation-states [...] The point is that the nation-state is the frame within which they most often feel the need to formulate the problems of smaller and of larger units [...] In choosing the national social structure as our generic working unit, we are adopting a suitable level of generality: one that enables us to avoid abandoning our problems and yet to include the structural forces obviously involved in many details and troubles of human conduct today. Moreover, the choice of national social structures enables us most readily to take up the major issues of public concern.” 

Mills explains why he believes the nation-state to be the appropriate level of generality for social scientific inquiry. For Mills, the nation-state is the most general unit for social science insofar as (a) human social life is largely determined and conditioned by the institutions that are organized at the national level and (b) allows the social scientist to move between the geopolitics and power relations at the international level, along with the internal conflicts and personal issues at the individual/private level. For Mills, this is something grand theory is not able to achieve because its concepts are too general and abstract. Thus, the framework of the sociological imagination begins with the general unit of the nation-state since that is the hinge or fulcrum by which the social scientist can integrate history and biography into a single study.

“That a given question—the relations of forms of nationalism with types of militarism, e.g.—must often be given a different answer when it is asked of different societies and periods means that the question itself often needs to be re-formulated. We need the variety provided by history in order even to ask sociological questions property, much less to answer them [...] Comparisons are required in order to understand what may be the essential conditions whatever we are trying to understand, whether forms of slavery or specific meanings of crime, types of family or peasant communities or collective farms. We must observe whatever we are interested in under a variety of circumstances. Otherwise we are limited to flat description.”

Mills comments on the methodology of comparative historical analysis as being part and parcel of the sociological imagination. Making historical comparisons between different societies is crucial for Mills, since it is by comparative analysis that one comes to understand what is specific to the social group one is studying, therefore avoiding any conflation between two qualitatively different forms of human society throughout history. To fail to do this, says Mills, results in ‘flat description’—i.e. it results in the social scientist producing an analysis of human society which says nothing about the specific society under investigation. It can only repeat the invariant features of human societies in general and across time.

“What Marx called the ‘principle of historical specificity’ refers, first, to a guideline: any given society is to be understood in terms of the specific period in which it exists. However ‘period’ may be defined, the institutions, the ideologies, the types of men and women prevailing in any given period constitute something of a unique pattern. This does not mean that such an historical type cannot be compared with others, and certainly not that the pattern can be grasped only intuitively. But it does mean [...] that within this historical type various mechanisms of change come to some specific kind of intersection. These mechanisms, which Karl Mannheim [...] called ‘principia media,’ are the very mechanisms that the social scientist, concerned with social structure, wishes to grasp.” 

Mills draws on the work of Karl Marx, particularly his concept of “the principle of historical specificity,” to clarify why he takes history to be a necessary part of the work done by social scientists. For Mills, as it was for Marx, the reason why an understanding of history is so important is because to understand history implies understanding the transformations and differences between human societies at different periods of time. On this basis one can detail the ways in which feudal society is different from capitalist society—and not simply in general or in terms of its formal social structure, but in terms of the kinds of experiences, worries, and lived reality individuals had during that time period. It is in this way that history informs Mills’ sociological imagination.

“[W]hen we try to orient ourselves […] we find that too many of our old expectations and images are, after all, tied down historically; that too many of our standard categories of thought and of feeling as often disorient us as help to explain what is happening around us; that too many of our explanations are derived from the great historical transition from the Medieval to the Modern Age; and that when they are generalized for use today, they become unwieldy, irrelevant, not convincing. I also mean that out major orientations—liberalism and socialism—have virtually collapsed as adequate explanations of the world and of ourselves.”

Mills describes the feeling of disorientation that has come to pervade both the intellectual and the private lives of individuals. For Mills, this is indicative of what will be required of the social scientist and society as whole in the coming year. This includes the task of revising old ways of thinking and creating new ways of wresting back a sense of stability and orientation in a moment in history where everything that has been taken for granted is now coming undone. 

“In both [liberalism and socialism], increased rationality is held to be the prime condition of increased freedom. The liberating notion of progress by reason, the faith in science as an unmixed good, the demand for popular education and the faith in its political meaning for democracy—all these ideals of The Enlightenment have rested upon the happy assumption of the inherent relation of reason and freedom.”

Mills outlines the general principles that have influenced individual thought and research processes since the period of history known as the Enlightenment. For Mills, just as he was witnessing a dissolution and generalized disorientation in peoples’ long held world views, there was a related disenchantment with the promises made by the Enlightenment: namely, that the more rational a society is, the freer it is.

“The increasing rationalization of society, the contradiction between such rationality and reason, the collapse of the assumed coincidence of reason and freedom—these developments lie back of the rise into view of the man who is ‘with’ rationality but without reason, who is increasingly self-rationalized and also increasingly uneasy. It is in terms of this type of man that the contemporary problem of freedom is best stated. Yet such trends and suspicions are often not formulated as problems, and they are certainly not widely acknowledged as issues or felt as a set of troubles. Indeed, it is the fact of its unrecognized character, its lack of formulation, that is the most important feature of the contemporary problem of freedom and reason.”

Mills continues on his theme of disenchantment and dissolution of Enlightenment ideals. For Mills, this combination of dissolution and disenchantment of long-established values produces a situation wherein individuals increasingly attempt to integrate and socialize themselves to the demands of social life. They do this without any of the expected benefits of well-being. It is for this reason that Mills believes that present and future social science research must recenter itself on this very problem, which he terms the problem of freedom.

“Karl Mannheim has made the point in a clear way by speaking of “self-rationalization,” which refers to the way in which an individual, caught in the limited segments of great, rational organizations, comes systematically to regulate his impulses and his aspirations, his manner of life and his ways of thought, in rather strict accordance with ‘the rules and regulations of the organization.’ The rational organization is thus an alienating organization.” 

Mills borrows the phrase “self-rationalization” from the sociologist Karl Mannheim in order to elucidate his previous point regarding the problem of freedom in sociology. For Mills, following Mannheim, to self-rationalize means that an individual increases their effort to act and live in a way that satisfies the criteria of efficiency and productivity of the organization to which they belong. However, Mannheim’s insight shows the existence of an inverse relation between the increased self-rationalization and the degree to which individuals are free. For Mannheim and Mills, increased self-rationalization translates into, or produces, increasing amounts of alienation, not freedom.

“The advent of the alienated man and all the themes which lie behind his advent now affect the whole of our serious intellectual life and cause our immediate intellectual malaise. It is a major theme of the human condition in the contemporary epoch and of all studies worthy of the name. I know of no idea, no theme, no problem, that is so deep in the classic tradition.” 

Mills puts forward the thesis that the new figure of the human condition is the ‘alienated man.’ As seen in the previous passage, this new figure defining the human condition arises from the inverse proportion that exists between increased self-rationalization and the quality of life on the part of the individual. Mills’ proposal is significant because it suggests that the social scientific study of human social life must now reorient itself toward the problem of freedom, of self-rationalization, and do so in a manner that no longer assumes an inherent and progressive logic between reason and freedom (i.e. no longer assume Enlightenment ideals of progress).

“Back of all this [...] lies the simple and decisive fact that the alienated man is the antithesis of the Western image of the free man. The society in which this man, this cheerful robot, flourishes is the antithesis of the free society [...] The advent of this man points to freedom as trouble, as issue, and [...] as problem for social scientists. Put as a trouble of the individual [...] it is the trouble called ‘alienation.’ As an issue for publics [...] it is no less than the issue of democratic society, as fact and as aspiration.” 

Mills outlines the new task of the social scientist in the face of alienated human existence. For Mills, if alienation is the new human condition, this should lead social scientists to view the society in which alienation flourishes as an unfree society. Alienation is itself a condition of unfreedom. Thus, says Mills, not only must social science show how society remains unfree; social science must also do the work of translating individual troubles (feelings of powerlessness) into problems that the whole of society must confront. If our society wants to retain its claims to democracy and freedom, says Mills, then our society must change so that alienation is no longer a fact of human existence. Only then can society be said to be truly free.

“Increasingly, research is used, and social scientists are used, for bureaucratic and ideological purposes. This being so, as individuals and as professionals, students of man and society face such questions as: whether they are aware of the uses and values of their work, whether these may be subject to their own control, whether they want to seek to control them. How they answer these question, or fail to answer them, and how they use or fail to use the answers in their work and in their professional lives determine their answer to the final question: whether in their work as social scientists they are (a) morally autonomous, (b) subject to the morality of other men, or (c) morally adrift [...] Social scientists must now really confront these quite fateful questions.”

Mills outlines the line of questioning by which social scientists can reflect on themselves and others in relation to the institutions that support their work. For Mills, social scientists are obliged to acknowledge that their work is always susceptible to be used and manipulated for ends other than those of democracy and freedom. Moreover, not only is this a question of how aware a social scientist may be, but it is also a question of action; of how and where social scientists undertake their work and the effort they make to prevent its reappropriation by alienating institutions.

“Three overriding political ideals seem to me inherent in the traditions of social science [...] The first of these is simply the value of truth, of fact [...] In such a world as ours, to practice social science is, first of all, to practice the politics of truth. But the politics of truth is not an adequate statement of the values that guide our enterprise. The truth of our findings, the accuracy of our investigations [...] may or may not be relevant to human affairs. Whether they are, and how they are, is in itself the second value, which in brief, is the value of the role of reason in human affairs. Along with that goes a third value—human freedom, in all the ambiguity of its meaning [...] That is why it is one of our intellectual tasks, as social scientists, to clarify the ideal of freedom and the ideal of reason.”

Mills further outlines the task moving forward for social scientists. For Mills, the labor of social science is that of producing truth statements (statements of facts, of what the reality of a social situation is beyond dispute); and these findings of social science must be made relevant to the rest of human society and must be shown to be relevant to the pursuit of freedom. It is this process that Mills identifies as the important task ahead.

“The third way in which the social scientist may attempt to realize the value of reason and its role in human affairs is also well known [...] It is to remain independent, to do one’s own work, to select one’s own problems, but to direct this work at kings as well as to ‘publics.’ [...] In taking up such a role [...] we are trying to act upon the value of reason; in assuming that we may not be altogether ineffective, we are assuming a theory of history-making: we are assuming that ‘man’ is free and that by his rational endeavors he can influence the course of history.”

Mills directly addresses what was previously called “the role of reason” on the part of social scientific work. For Mills, one of the clearest ways in which social scientists make use of reason is to produce, publish, and present findings to the leaders of society in a public manner. This kind of social scientist, then, is not simply an academic who shuts themselves away from the rest of society. Rather, this figure is closer to that of the ‘public intellectual’ who maintains a sense of civic obligation and professional transparency regarding their pursuit for truth and the pursuit of freedom for all.

“Fate is a feature of a historically specific kind of social structure. In a society in which the ultimate weapon is the rifle; in which the typical economic unit is the family-farm and the small shop; in which the national-state does not yet exist or is merely a distant framework; in which communication is by word-of-mouth, handbill, pulpit—in such a society, history is indeed fate. But consider now, the major clue to our condition [...] In our time, international as well as national means of history-making are being centralized. Is it not thus clear that the scope and the chance for conscious human agency in history-making is just now uniquely available? Elites of power in charge of these means do now make history [...] but compared to other men and other epochs, these circumstances themselves certainly do not appear to be overwhelming.”

Mills puts forward the idea that compared to previous moments in history, modern society is perhaps in the best position to determine its own future existence. For this reason, Mills begins this passage by claiming fate is a feature of previous social forms. Today, with the advent of the nation-state and an international political economy, mass collectives and groups decide the future of their own existence. Human beings have a greater degree of self-determination than pre-nation-state societies.

“In the United States today, intellectuals, artists, ministers, scholars, and scientists are fighting a cold war in which they echo and elaborate the confusions of officialdoms [...] They do not try to put responsible content into the politics of the United States; they help to empty politics and to keep it empty.”

Mills gives his overall view of the state of intellectual, cultural, and political life. For Mills, the American landscape regarding academic, governmental, cultural, and artist sectors is a bleak one. Each sector, in its own way, remains complicit with what he calls the “emptying out of politics”—i.e. each sector fails to reorient their work toward the problem of alienation, the absence of freedom as the human condition, and the fact that alienated humanity is indexed to an unfree society. It is only until each sector begins to address itself to these issues that they can be said to be ‘putting responsible content into politics.