1、C. Wright Mills: The Sociological ImaginationInnholdsfortegnelse til Word-dokumentetInnholdsfortegnelse til Word-dokumentet.1Merknad om Layout .1Baksidetekst.1Contents .31. The Promise .32. Grand Theory .33. Abstracted Empiricism.34. Types of Practicality .35. The Bureaucratic Ethos.36. Philosophies
2、 of Science.37. The Human Variety.38. Uses of History.39. On Reason and Freedom .310. On Politics.3APPENDIX: On intellectual Craftsmanship.3Acknowledgments.3Index.31. The PromiseNOWADAYS men often feel that their private lives are a series of traps. They sense that within their everyday worlds, they
3、 cannot overcome their troubles, and in this feeling, they are often quite correct: What ordinary men 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
4、 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 st
5、ructure 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 man is
6、 employed or unemployed; when the rate of investment goes up or down, a man takes new heart or goes broke. When wars happen, an insurance salesman becomes a rocket launcher; a store clerk, a radar man; a wife lives alone; a child grows up without a father. Neither the life of an individual nor the h
7、istory of a society can be understood without understanding both.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. S
8、eldom 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 do not possess t
9、he quality of mind essential to grasp the interplay of man 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 man
10、y men 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 man is world
11、 history. Within this scene and this period, in the course of a single generation, one sixth of mankind is transformed from all that is feudal and back-ward into all that is modern, advanced, and fearful. Political colonies are freed; new and less visible forms of imperialism in-stalled. Revolutions
12、 occur; men feel the intimate grip of new kinds of authority. Totalitarian societies rise, and are smashed to bitsor 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 de
13、mocracy 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
14、form. Humanity itself now lies before us, the super-nation at either pole concentrating its most co-ordinated and massive efforts upon the preparation of World War Three.The very shaping of history now outpaces the ability of men to orient themselves in accordance with cherished values. And which va
15、lues? Even when they do not panic, men 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 men feel they cannot cope with the larger worlds with which they are so suddenly confronted?
16、That they cannot understand the meaning of their epoch for their own lives? Thatin defense of selfhood-they become morally insensible, trying to remain altogether private men? Is it any wonder that they come to be possessed by a sense of the trap?It is not only information that they needin this Age
17、of Fact, information often dominates their attention and overwhelms their capacities to assimilate it. It is not only the skills of reason that they needalthough their struggles to acquire these often exhaust their limited moral energy.What they need, and what they feel they need, is a quality of mi
18、nd 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
19、are coming to expect of what may be called the sociological imagination.1The 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 ho
20、w 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 uneasin
21、ess of individuals is focused upon explicit troubles and the indifference of publics is transformed into involvement with public issues.The first fruit of this imaginationand the first lesson of the social science that embodies itis the idea that the individual can understand his own experience and
22、gauge his own fate only by locating himself within his period, that he can know his own chances in life only by becoming aware of those of all individuals in his circumstances. In many ways it is a terrible lesson; in many ways a magnificent one. We do not know the limits of mans capacities for supr
23、eme 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
24、; that he lives out a biography, and that he lives it out within some historical sequence. By the fact of his living he contributes, how-ever 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
25、 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 Spencerturgid, polysyllabic, comprehensive; of
26、 E. A. Rossgraceful, 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 Veblens brilliant and ironic insight, to Joseph Schumpeters many-sided constru
27、ctions 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 man and society.No social study that does not come back to the problems of biography, of history an
28、d 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 ha
29、ve 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 featur
30、e 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 affec
31、ted by, the historical period in which it moves? And this periodwhat 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
32、to prevail? In what ways are they selected and formed, liberated and re-pressed, made sensitive and blunted? What kinds of human na-ture 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 soci
33、ety we are examining?Whether the point of interest is a great power state or a minor literary mood, a family, a prison, a creedthese are the kinds of questions the best social analysts have asked. They are the intellectual pivots of classic studies of man in societyand they are the questions inevita
34、bly raised by any mind possessing the sociological imagination. For that imagination is the capacity to shift from one perspective to anotherfrom the political to the psycho-logical; from examination of a single family to comparative assess-ment of the national budgets of the world; from the theolog
35、ical 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 selfand to see the relations between the two. Back of its us
36、e there is always the urge to know the social and historical meaning of the individual in the society and in the period in which he has his quality and his being.That, in brief, is why it is by means of the sociological imagination that men now hope to grasp what is going on in the world, and to und
37、erstand what is happening in themselves as minute points of the intersections of biography and history within society. In large part, contemporary mans self-conscious view of himself as at least an outsider, if not a permanent stranger, rests upon an absorbed realization of social relativity and of
38、the trans-formative power of history. The sociological imagination is the most fruitful form of this self-consciousness. By its use men whose(8)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
39、 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 astoni
40、shment 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.2Perhaps the most fruitful distinction with which the sociological imaginatio
41、n 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 im
42、mediate relations with others; they have to do with his self and with those limited areas of social life of which he 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 his imm
43、ediate milieuthe social setting that is directly open to his personal experience and to some extent his willful activity. A trouble is a private matter: values cherished by an individual are felt by him to be threatened.Issues have to do with matters that transcend these local environments of the individual and the range of his inner life. They have to do with the organization of many such milieux into the institutions of an historical society as a
