The Sociological Imagination

Introduction

C. Wright Mills, a sociologist at Columbia University known for The Power Elite (1956), wrote this book as a polemic against two dominant trends in American social science: Parsons’s “grand theory”, which he mocked by rendering long passages in a few plain sentences, and “abstracted empiricism”, survey research of the kind associated with Paul Lazarsfeld. The sociological imagination, he argues, is the ability to grasp the link between biography and history: one person out of work has a private trouble, but when millions are unemployed it is a public issue. An appendix, “On Intellectual Craftsmanship”, gives practical advice on keeping a file and organising research. Mills died in 1962, aged 45.

Connections

Criticizes

• The Social System1951 · Talcott Parsons