社会学的想象力

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.