Quotes from book
The Sociological Imagination

Name: The Sociological Imagination
Author: C. Wright Mills

The Sociological Imagination is a 1959 book by American sociologist C. Wright Mills published by Oxford University Press. In it, he develops the idea of sociological imagination, the means by which the relation between self and society can be understood.Mills felt that the central task for sociology and sociologists was to find the connections between the particular social environments of individuals and the wider social and historical forces in which they are enmeshed. The approach challenges a structural functionalist approach to sociology, as it opens new positions for the individual to inhabit with regard to the larger social structure. Individual function that reproduces larger social structure is only one of many possible roles and is not necessarily the most important. Mills also wrote of the danger of malaise , which he saw as inextricably embedded in the creation and maintenance of modern societies. This led him to question whether individuals exist in modern societies in the sense that "individual" is commonly understood .

“[O]ne could translate the 555 pages of The Social System into about 150 pages of straightforward English. The result would not be very impressive.”

C. Wright Mills book The Sociological Imagination

Source: The Sociological Imagination (1959), p. 31, commenting on the verbosity of the chief work of competing sociologist Talcott Parsons.

“Above all, do not give up your moral and political autonomy by accepting in somebody else's terms the illiberal practicality of the bureaucratic ethos or the liberal practicality of the moral scatter. Know that many personal troubles cannot be solved merely as troubles, but must be understood in terms of public issues — and in terms of the problems of history making.”

C. Wright Mills book The Sociological Imagination

Appendix: "On Intellectual Craftsmanship"
The Sociological Imagination (1959)

“Any contemporary political re-statement of liberal and socialist goals must include as central the idea of a society in which all men would become men of substantive reason, whose independent reasoning would have structural consequences for their societies, its history and thus for their own life fates.”

C. Wright Mills book The Sociological Imagination

Source: The Sociological Imagination (1959), p. 174.

“One great lesson that we can learn from its systematic absence in the work of the grand theorists is that every self-conscious thinker must at all times be aware of — and hence be able to control — the levels of abstraction on which he is working. The capacity to shuttle between levels of abstraction, with ease and with clarity, is a signal mark of the imaginative and systematic thinker.”

C. Wright Mills book The Sociological Imagination

The Sociological Imagination (1959)