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What does Mills mean by the Sociological Imagination?What are some sources that might influence things like the music we ‘like’ and listen to?What does Berger mean by being able “to see the strange in the familiar?” Give an example of something in everyday life.How does social location inform our understanding of the world?
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The Sociological Imagination
Chapter One: The Promise
C. Wright Mills (1959)
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 by
the private orbits in which they live; their visions and their powers are limited to the close-up
scenes of job, family, neighborhood; in other milieux, they move vicariously and remain
spectators. And the more aware they become, however vaguely, of ambitions and of threats
which transcend their immediate locales, the more trapped they seem to feel.
Underlying this 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 unemployed; when the rate of investment goes up or down, a person takes new
heart or goes broke. When wars happen, an insurance salesperson becomes a rocket launcher; a
store clerk, 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 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 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 might 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
transformations 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 catastrophic changes
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. Within
this scene and this period, in the course of a single generation, one sixth of humankind is
transformed from all that is feudal and backward into all that 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
up as only one way to make society into an industrial apparatus. After two centuries of hope,
even formal democracy is restricted to a quite small portion of mankind. Everywhere in the
underdeveloped world, ancient ways of life are broken up and vague expectations become urgent
demands. Everywhere in the overdeveloped world, the means of authority and of violence
become total in scope and bureaucratic in form. Humanity itself now lies before us, the super-
nation at either pole concentrating its most coordinated and massive efforts upon the preparation
of World War Three.
The very shaping of history now outpaces the ability of people to orient themselves in
accordance with cherished values. And which values? Even when they do not panic, people often
sense that older ways of feeling and thinking have collapsed and that newer beginnings are
ambiguous to the point of moral stasis. Is it any wonder that ordinary people feel they cannot
cope with the larger worlds with which they are so suddenly confronted? That they cannot
understand the meaning of their epoch for their own lives? That – in defense of selfhood – they
become morally insensible, trying to remain altogether private individuals? Is it any wonder that
they come to be possessed by a sense of the trap?
It is not only information that they need – in this Age of Fact, information often dominates their
attention and overwhelms their capacities to assimilate it. It is not only the skills of reason that
they need – although their struggles to acquire these often exhaust their limited moral energy.
What they need, and what they feel they need, is a quality of mind that will help them to use
information and to develop reason in order to achieve lucid summations of what is going on in
the world and of what may be happening within themselves. It is this quality, I am going to
contend, that journalists and scholars, artists and publics, scientists and editors are coming to
expect of what may be called 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.
The first fruit of this imagination – and the first lesson of the social science that embodies it – is
the idea that the individual can understand her own experience and gauge her own fate only by
locating herself within her period, that she can know her own chances in life only by becoming
aware of those of all individuals in her circumstances. In many ways it is a terrible lesson; in
many ways a magnificent one. We do not know the limits of humans capacities for supreme
effort or willing degradation, for agony or glee, for pleasurable brutality or the sweetness of
reason. But in our time we have come to know that the limits of ‘human nature’ are frighteningly
broad. We have come to know that every individual lives, from one generation to the next, in
some society; that he lives out a biography, and lives it out within some historical sequence. By
the fact of this living, he contributes, however minutely, to the shaping of this society and to the
course of its history, even as he is made by society and by its historical push and shove.
The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between
the two within society. That is its task and its promise. To recognize this task and this promise is
the mark of the classic social analyst. It is characteristic of Herbert Spencer – turgid, polysyllabic,
comprehensive; of E. A. Ross – graceful, muckraking, upright; of Auguste Comte and Emile
Durkheim; of the intricate and subtle Karl Mannheim. It is the quality of all that is intellectually
excellent in Karl Marx; it is the clue to Thorstein Veblen’s brilliant and ironic insight, to Joseph
Schumpeter’s many-sided constructions of reality; it is the basis of the psychological sweep of
W. E. H. Lecky no less than of the profundity and clarity of Max Weber. And it is the signal of
what is best in contemporary studies of people and society.
No social study that does not come back to the problems of biography, of history and of their
intersections within a society has completed its intellectual journey. Whatever the specific
problems of the classic social analysts, however limited or however broad the features of social
reality they have examined, those who have been imaginatively aware of the promise of their
work have consistently asked three sorts of questions:
(1) What is the structure of this particular society as a whole? What are its essential components,
and how are they related to one another? How does it differ from other varieties of social order?
Within it, what is the meaning of any particular feature for its continuance and for its change?
(2) Where does this society stand in human history? What are the mechanics by which it is
changing? What is its place within and its meaning for the development of humanity as a whole?
How does any particular feature we are examining affect, and how is it affected by, the historical
period in which it moves? And this period – what are its essential features? How does it differ
from other periods? What are its characteristic ways of history-making?
(3) What varieties of men and women now prevail in this society and in this period? And what
varieties are coming to prevail? In what ways are they selected and formed, liberated and
repressed, made sensitive and blunted? What kinds of `human nature’ are revealed in the conduct
and character we observe in this society in this period? And what is the meaning for ‘human
nature’ of each and every feature of the society we are examining?
Whether the point of interest is a great power state or a minor literary mood, a family, a prison, a
creed – these are the kinds of questions the best social analysts have asked. They are the
intellectual pivots of classic studies of individuals in society – and they are the questions
inevitably raised by any mind possessing the sociological imagination. For that imagination is
the capacity to shift from one perspective to another – from the political to the psychological;
from examination of a single family to comparative assessment of the national budgets of the
world; from the theological school to the military establishment; from considerations of an oil
industry to studies of contemporary poetry. It is the capacity to range from the most impersonal
and remote transformations to the most intimate features of the human self – and to see the
relations between the two. Back of its use there is always the urge to know the social and
historical meaning of the individual in the society and in the period in which she has her quality
and her being.
That, in brief, is why it is by means of the sociological imagination that men and women now
hope to grasp what is going on in the world, and to understand what is happening in themselves
as minute points of the intersections of biography and history within society. In large part,
contemporary humanity’s self-conscious view of itself as at least an outsider, if not a permanent
stranger, rests upon an absorbed realization of social relativity and of the transformative power
of history. The sociological imagination is the most fruitful form of this self-consciousness. By
its use people whose mentalities have swept only a series of limited orbits often come to feel as if
suddenly awakened in a house with which they had only supposed themselves to be familiar.
Correctly or incorrectly, they often come to feel that they can now provide themselves with
adequate summations, cohesive assessments, comprehensive orientations. Older decisions that
once appeared sound now seem to them products of a mind unaccountably dense. Their capacity
for astonishment is made lively again. They acquire a new way of thinking, they 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 the most fruitful distinction with which the sociological imagination works is between
‘the personal troubles of milieu’ and ‘the public issues of social structure.’ This distinction is an
essential tool of the sociological imagination and a feature of all classic work in social science.
Troubles occur within the character of the individual and within the range of his or her
immediate relations with others; they have to do with one’s self and with those limited areas of
social life of which one is directly and personally aware. Accordingly, the statement and the
resolution of troubles properly lie within the individual as a biographical entity and within the
scope of one’s immediate milieu – the social setting that is directly open to her personal
experience and to some extent her willful activity. A trouble is a private matter: values cherished
by an individual are felt by her to be threatened.
Issues have to do with matters that transcend these local environments of the individual and the
range of her inner life. They have to do with the organization of many such milieu into the
institutions of an historical society as a whole, with the ways in which various milieux overlap
and interpenetrate to form the larger structure of social and historical life. An issue is a public
matter: some value cherished by publics is felt to be threatened. Often there is a debate about
what that value really is and about what it is that really threatens it. This debate is often without
focus if only because it is the very nature of an issue, unlike even widespread trouble, that it
cannot very well be defined in terms of the immediate and everyday environments of ordinary
people. An issue, in fact, often involves a crisis in institutional arrangements, and often too it
involves what Marxists call ‘contradictions’ or ‘antagonisms.’
In these terms, 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 skills and his immediate opportunities. 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 within
the range of opportunities open to any one individual. The very structure of opportunities has
collapsed. Both the correct statement of the problem and the range of possible solutions require
us to consider the economic and political institutions of the society, and not merely the personal
situation and character of a scatter of individuals.
Consider war. The personal problem of war, when it occurs, may be how to survive it or how to
die in it with honor; how to make money out of it; how to climb into the higher safety of the
military apparatus; or how to contribute to the war’s termination. In short, according to one’s
values, to find a set of milieux and within it to survive the war or make one’s death in it
meaningful. But the structural issues of war have to do with its causes; with what types of people
it throws up into command; with its effects upon economic and political, family and religious
institutions, with the unorganized irresponsibility of a world of nation-states.
Consider marriage. Inside a marriage a man and a woman may experience personal troubles, but
when the divorce rate during the first four years of marriage is 250 out of every 1,000 attempts,
this is an indication of a structural issue having to do with the institutions of marriage and the
family and other institutions that bear upon them.
Or consider the metropolis – the horrible, beautiful, ugly, magnificent sprawl of the great city.
For many members of the upperclass the personal solution to ‘the problem of the city’ is to have
an apartment with private garage under it in the heart of the city and forty miles out, a house by
Henry Hill, garden by Garrett Eckbo, on a hundred acres of private land. In these two controlled
environments – with a small staff at each end and a private helicopter connection – most people
could solve many of the problems of personal milieux caused by the facts of the city. But all this,
however splendid, does not solve the public issues that the structural fact of the city poses. What
should be done with this wonderful monstrosity? Break it all up into scattered units, combining
residence and work? Refurbish it as it stands? Or, after evacuation, dynamite it and build new
cities according to new plans in new places? What should those plans be? And who is to decide
and to accomplish whatever choice is made? These are structural issues; to confront them and to
solve them requires us to consider political and economic issues that affect innumerable milieux.
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 system
and in the uneven industrialization of the world, the ordinary individual in her restricted milieu
will be powerless – with or without psychiatric aid – to solve the troubles this system or lack of
system imposes upon him. In so far as the family as an institution turns women into darling little
slaves and men into their chief providers and unweaned dependents, the problem of a satisfactory
marriage remains incapable of purely private solution. In so far as the overdeveloped
megalopolis and the overdeveloped automobile are built-in features of the overdeveloped
society, the issues of urban living will not be solved by personal ingenuity and private wealth.
What we experience in various and specific milieux, I have noted, is often caused by structural
changes. Accordingly, to understand the changes of many personal milieux we are required to
look beyond them. And the number and variety of such structural changes increase as the
institutions 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 milieux. To be able to do that is to
possess the sociological imagination.
Invitation to Sociology
Peter Berger (1963)
We would say then that the sociologist (that is, the one we would really like to invite to our
game) is a person intensively, endlessly, shamelessly interested in the doings of men. His natural habitat
is all the human gathering places of the world, wherever men* come together. The sociologist may be
interested in many other things. But his consuming interest remains in the world of men, their
institutions, their history, their passions. He will naturally be interested in the events that engage men’s
ultimate beliefs, their moments of tragedy and grandeur and ecstasy. But he will also be fascinated by
the commonplace, the everyday. He will know reverence, but this reverence will not prevent him from
wanting to see and to understand. He may sometimes feel revulsion or contempt. But this also will not
deter him from wanting to have his questions answered. The sociologist, in his quest for understanding,
moves through the world of men without respect for the usual lines of demarcation. Nobility and
degradation, power and obscurity, intelligence and folly—these are equally interesting to him, however
unequal they may be in his personal values or tastes. Thus his questions may lead him to all possible
levels of society, the best and the least known places, the most respected and the most despised. And, if
he is a good sociologist, he will find himself in all these places because his own questions have so taken
possession of him that he has little choice but to seek for answers.
We could say that the sociologist, but for the grace of his academic title, is the man who must
listen to gossip despite himself, who is tempted to look through keyholes, to read other people’s mail, to
open closed cabinets. What interests us is the curiosity that grips any sociologist in front of a closed door
behind which there are human voices. If he is a good sociologist, he will want to open that door, to
understand these voices. Behind each closed door he will anticipate some new facet of human life not
yet perceived and understood.
The sociologist will occupy himself with matters that others regard as too sacred or as too
distasteful for dispassionate investigation. He will find rewarding the company of priests or of
prostitutes, depending not on his personal preferences but on the questions he happens to be asking at
the moment. He will also concern himself with matters that others may find much too boring. He will be
interested in the human interaction that goes with warfare or with great intellectual discoveries, but
also in the relations between people employed in a restaurant or between a group of little girls playing
with their dolls. His main focus of attention is not the ultimate significance of what men do, but the
action in itself, as another example of the infinite richness of human conduct.
In these journeys through the world of men the sociologist will inevitably encounter other
professional Peeping Toms. Sometimes these will resent his presence, feeling that he is poaching on
their preserves. In some places the sociologist will meet up with the economist, in others with the
political scientist, in yet others with the psychologist or the ethnologist. Yet chances are that the
*To be understood as people or persons.
questions that have brought him to these same places are different from the ones that propelled his
fellow trespassers. The sociologist’s questions always remain essentially the same: “What are people
doing with each other here?” “What are their relationships to each other?” “How are these relationships
organized in institutions?” “What are the collective ideas that move men and institutions?” In trying to
answer these questions in specific instances, the sociologist will, of course, have to deal with economic
or political matters, but he will do so in a way rather different from that of the economist or the political
scientist. The scene that he contemplates is the same human scene that these other scientists concern
themselves with. But the sociologist’s angle of vision is different.
Much of the time the sociologist moves in sectors of experience that are familiar to him and to
most people in his society. He investigates communities, institutions and activities that one can read
about every day in the newspapers. Yet there is another excitement of discovery beckoning in his
investigations. It is not the excitement of coming upon the totally unfamiliar, but rather the excitement
of finding the familiar becoming transformed in its meaning. The fascination of sociology lies in the fact
that its perspective makes us see in a new light the very world in which we have lived all our lives. This
also constitutes a transformation of consciousness. Moreover, this transformation is more relevant
existentially than that of many other intellectual disciplines, because it is more difficult to segregate in
some special compartment of the mind. The astronomer does not live in the remote galaxies, and the
nuclear physicist can, outside his laboratory, eat and laugh and marry and vote without thinking about
the insides of the atom. The geologist looks at rocks only at appropriate times, and the linguist speaks
English with his wife. The sociologist lives in society, on the job and off it. His own life, inevitably, is part
of his subject matter. Men being what they are, sociologists too manage to segregate their professional
insights from their everyday affairs. But it is a rather difficult feat to perform in good faith.
The sociologist moves in the common world of men, close to what most of them would call real.
The categories he employs in his analyses are only refinements of the categories by which other men
live—power, class, status, race, ethnicity. As a result, there is a deceptive simplicity and obviousness
about some sociological investigations. One reads them, nods at the familiar scene, remarks that one
has heard all this before and don’t people have better things to do than to waste their time on truisms—
until one is suddenly brought up against an insight that radically questions everything one had
previously assumed about this familiar scene. This is the point at which one begins to sense the
excitement of sociology.
Let us take a specific example. Imagine a sociology class in a Southern college where almost all
the students are white Southerners. Imagine a lecture on the subject of the racial system of the South.
The lecturer is talking here of matters that have been familiar to his students from the time of their
infancy. Indeed, it may be that they are much more familiar with the minutiae of this system than he is.
They are quite bored as a result. It seems to them that he is only using more pretentious words to
describe what they already know. Thus he may use the term “caste,” one commonly used now by
American sociologists to describe the Southern racial system. But in explaining the term he shifts to
traditional Hindu society, to make it clearer. He then goes on to analyze the magical beliefs inherent in
caste tabus, the social dynamics of commensalism and connubium, the economic interests concealed
within the system, the way in which religious beliefs relate to the tabus, the effects of the caste system
upon the industrial development of the society and vice versa—all in India. But suddenly India is not
very far away at all. The lecture then goes back to its Southern theme. The familiar now seems not quite
so familiar anymore. Questions are raised that are new, perhaps raised angrily, but raised all the same.
And at least some of the students have begun to understand that there are functions involved in this
business of race that they have not read about in the newspapers (at least not those in their
hometowns) and that their parents have not told them—partly, at least, because neither the
newspapers nor the parents knew about them.
It can be said that the first wisdom of sociology is this—things are not what they seem. This too
is a deceptively simple statement. It ceases to be simple after a while. Social reality turns out to have
many layers of meaning. The discovery of each new layer changes the perception of the whole.
Anthropologists use the term “culture shock” to describe the impact of a totally new culture
upon a newcomer. In an extreme instance such shock will be experienced by the Western explorer who
is told, halfway through dinner, that he is eating the nice old lady he had been chatting with the
previous day—a shock with predictable physiological if not moral consequences. Most explorers no
longer encounter cannibalism in their travels today. However, the first encounters with polygamy or
with puberty rites or even with the way some nations drive their automobiles can be quite a shock to an
American visitor. With the shock may go not only disapproval or disgust but a sense of excitement that
things can reallybe that different from what they are at home. To some extent, at least, this is the
excitement of any first travel abroad. The experience of sociological discovery could be described as
“culture shock” minus geographical displacement. In other words, the sociologist travels at home—with
shocking results. He is unlikely to find that he is eating a nice old lady for dinner. But the discovery, for
instance, that his own church has considerable money invested in the missile industry or that a few
blocks from his home there are people who engage in cultic orgies may not be drastically different in
emotional impact. Yet we would not want to imply that sociological discoveries are always or even
usually outrageous to moral sentiment. Not at all. What they have in common with exploration in
distant lands, however, is the sudden illumination of new and unsuspected facets of human existence in
society. This is the excitement and . . . the humanistic justification of sociology.
People who like to avoid shocking discoveries, who prefer to believe that society is just what
they were taught in Sunday School, who like the safety of the rules and the maxims of what Alfred
Schuetz has called the “world taken-for-granted,” should stay away from sociology. People who feel no
temptation before closed doors, who have no curiosity about human beings, who are content to admire
scenery without wondering about the people who live in those houses on the other side of that river,
should probably also stay away from sociology. They will find it unpleasant or, at any rate, unrewarding.
People who are interested in human beings only if they can change, convert or reform them should also
be warned, for they will find sociology much less useful than they hoped. And people whose interest is
mainly in their own conceptual constructions will do just as well to turn to the study of little white mice.
Sociology will be satisfying, in the long run, only to those who can think of nothing more entrancing than
to watch men and to understand things human.
It may now be clear that we have, albeit deliberately, understated the case in the title of this
chapter. To be sure, sociology is an individual pastime in the sense that it interests some men and bores
others. Some like to observe human beings, others to experiment with mice. The world is big enough to
hold all kinds and there is no logical priority for one interest as against another. But the word “pastime”
is weak in describing what we mean. Sociology is more like a passion. The sociological perspective is
more like a demon that possesses one, that drives one compellingly, again and again, to the questions
that are its own. An introduction to sociology is, therefore, an invitation to a very special kind of passion.
THINKING ABOUT THE READING
Peter Berger claims that sociologists are tempted to listen to gossip, peek through keyholes, and look at
other people’s mail. This can be interpreted to mean that the sociologist has an insatiable curiosity
about other people. What are some other behaviors and situations that might capture the attention of
the sociologist? How does the sociologist differ from the psychologist or the economist or the historian?
Are these fields of study likely to be in competition with sociology or to complement it?
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