Introduction

What follows are extracts from C. Wright Mills' The Sociological Imagination arranged roughly by topics.

On "human nature":

"It is true, as psychoanalysts continually point out, that people do often have 'the increasing sense of being moved by obscure forces within themselves which they are unable to define.' But it is not true, as Ernest Jones asserted, that 'man's chief enemy and danger is his own unruly nature and the dark forces pent up within himself.' On the contrary: 'Man's chief danger' today lies in the unruly forces of contemporary society itself, with its alienating methods of production, its enveloping techniques of political domination, its international anarchy--in a word, its pervasive transformations of the very 'nature' of man and the conditions and aims of his life" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 13).

"Historical transformations carry meanings not only for individual ways of life, but for the very character--the limits and possibilities of the human being. As the history-making unit, the dynamic nation-state is also the unit within which the variety of men and women are selected and formed, liberated and repressed--it is the man-making unit. That is one reason why struggles between nations and between blocs of nations are also struggles over the types of human beings that will eventually prevail in the Middle East, in India, in China, in the United State; that is why culture and politics are now so intimately related; and that is why there is such need and such demand for the sociological imagination" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 158).

"For we cannot adequately understand 'man' as an isolated biological creature, as a bundle of reflexes or a set of instincts, as an 'intelligible field' or a system in and of itself. Whatever else he may be, man is a social and an historical actor who must be understood, if at all, in close and intricate interplay with social and historical structures" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 158).

"Within the broad limits of the physiology of the sense organs, our very perception of the physical world, the colors we discriminate, the smells we become aware of, the noises we hear, are socially patterned and socially circumscribed. The motivations of men, and even the varying extents to which various types of men are typically aware of them, are to be understood in terms of the vocabularies of motive that prevail in a society and of social changes and confusions among such vocabularies" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 162).

On social life:

"Nowadays men 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 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 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" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 3).

"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, 1959, p.3).

On social change:

"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" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, pp.10-11).

"We can examine trends in an effort to answer the question 'where are we going?'--and that is what social scientists are often trying to do. In doing so, we are trying to study history rather than to retreat into it, to pay attention to contemporary trends without being 'merely journalistic,' to gauge the future of these trends without being merely prophetic. All this is hard to do. We must remember that we are dealing with historical materials; that they do change very rapidly; that there are countertrends. And that we have always to balance the immediacy of the knife-edge present with the generality needed to bring out the meaning of specific trends for the period as a whole. But above all, the social scientist is trying to see the several major trends together--structurally, rather than as happening in a scatter of milieux, adding up to nothing new, in fact not adding up at all. This is the aim that lends to the study of trends its relevance to the understanding of a period, and which demands full and adroit use of the materials of history" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, pp. 153-154).

On the Making of History:

"Whatever else it is [the United States], surely this is evident: it is a society in which functionally rational bureaucracies are increasingly used in human affairs and in history-making decisions. Not all periods are alike in the degree to which historical changes within them are independent of the willful control, go on behind all men's backs. Ours seems to be a period in which key decisions or their lack by bureaucratically instituted elites are increasingly sources of historical change. Moreover, it is a period and a society in which the enlargement and the centralization of the means of control, of power, now include quite widely the use of social science for whatever ends those in control of these means may assign to it" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, pp. 115-116).

"From the individual's standpoint, much that happens seems the result of manipulation, of management, of blind drift; authority is often not explicit; those with power often feel no need to make it explicit and justify it. That is one reason why ordinary men, when they are in trouble or when they sense that they are up against issues, cannot get clear targets for thought and action; they cannot determine what it is that imperils the values they vaguely discern as theirs" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, pp. 169-170).

"Men are free to make history, but some men are much freer than others. Such freedom requires access to the means of decisions and of power by which history may now be made. It is not always so made; in the following, I am speaking only of the contemporary period in which the means of history-making power have become so enlarged and so centralized. It is with reference to this period that I am contending that if men do not make history, they tend increasingly to become the utensils of history-makers and also the mere objects of history-making" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 181).

"But consider now, the major clue to our condition: Is it not, in a word, the enormous enlargement and the decisive centralization of all the means of power and decision, which is to say--all the means of history-making? In modern industrial society, the facilities of economic production are developed and centralized--as peasants and artisans are replaced by private corporations and government industries. In the modern nation-state, the means of violence and of political administration undergo similar development--as kings control nobles, and self-equipped knights are replaced by standing armies and now by fearful military machines" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, pp. 182-183).

On legitimation:

"Now, what Parsons and other grand theorists call 'value-orientations' and 'normative structure' has mainly to do with master symbols of legitimation. This is, indeed, a useful and important subject. The relations of such symbols to the structure of institutions are among the most important problems of social science. Such symbols, however, do not form some autonomous realm within a society; their social relevance lies in their use to justify or to oppose the arrangement of power and the positions within this arrangement of the powerful. Their psychological relevance lies in the fact that they become the basis for adherence to the structure of power or for opposing it" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 37).

'Governments' do not necessarily, as Emerson would have it, 'have their origin in the moral identity of men.' To believe that government does is to confuse its legitimations with its causes. Just as often, or even more often, such moral identities as men of some society may have rest on the fact that institutional rulers successfully monopolize, and even impose, their master symbols (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 37).

"We cannot assume today that men must in the last resort be governed by their own consent. Among the means of power that now prevail is the power to manage and to manipulate the consent of men. That we do not know the limits of such power--and that we hope it does have limits--does not remove the fact that such power today is successfully employed without the sanction of the reason or the conscience of the obedient" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, pp.40-41).

"Intellectual 'conviction' and moral 'belief' are not necessary, in either the rulers or the ruled, for a structure of power to persist and even flourish. So far as the role of ideologies is concerned, the frequent absence of engaging legitimation and the prevalence of mass apathy are surely two of the central facts about the Western societies today" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 41).

On Rationalization:

"The forces that shape these milieux do not originate within them, nor are they controllable by those sunk in them. Moreover, these milieux are themselves increasingly rationalized. Families as well as factories, leisure as well as work, neighborhoods as well as states--they to become parts of a functionally rational totality--or they are subject to uncontrolled and irrational forces" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 169).

"Given these effects of the ascendant trend of rationalization, the individual 'does the best he can.' He gears his aspirations and his work to the situation he is in, and from which he can find no way out. In due course, he does not seek a way out: he adapts. That part of his life which is left over from work, he uses to play, to consume, 'to have fun.' Yet this sphere of consumption is also being rationalized. Alienated from production, from work, he is also alienated from consumption, from genuine leisure. This adaptation of the individual and its effects upon his milieux and self results not only in the loss of his chance, and in due course, of his capacity and will to reason; it also affects his chances and his capacity to act as a free man. Indeed, neither the value of freedom nor of reason, it would seem, are known to him" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 170).

"The rational organization is thus an alienating organization: the guiding principles of conduct and reflection, and in due course of emotion as well, are not seated in the individual conscience of the Reformation man, or in the independent reason of the Cartesian man. The guiding principles, in fact, are alien to and in contradiction with all that has been historically understood as individuality. It is not too much to say that in the extreme development the chance to reason of most men is destroyed, as rationality increases and its locus, its control, is moved from the individual to the big-scale organization. There is then rationality without reason. Such rationality is not commensurate with freedom but the destroyer of it" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 170).

"It will no longer do merely to assume, as a metaphysic of human nature, that down deep in man-as-man there is an urge for freedom and a will to reason. Now we must ask: What in man's nature, what in the human condition today, what in each of the varieties of social structure makes for the ascendancy of the cheerful robot? And what stands against it?" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 171).

On Reason and the "Irrationality Factor":

"Science, it turns out, is not a technological Second Coming. That its techniques and its rationality are given a central place in a society does not mean that men live reasonably and without myth, fraud, and superstition. Universal education may lead to technological idiocy and nationalist provinciality--rather than to the informed and independent intelligence. The mass distribution of historic culture may not lift the level of cultural sensibility, but rather, merely banalize it--and compete mightily with the chance for creative innovation. A high level of bureaucratic rationality and of technology does not mean a high level of either individual or social intelligence. From the first you cannot infer the second" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, 168).

For social, technological, or bureaucratic rationality is not merely a grand summation of the individual will and capacity to reason. The very chance to acquire that will and that capacity seems in fact often to be decreased by it" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, pp. 168-169).

"Rationally organized social arrangements are not necessarily a means of increased freedom--for the individual or for the society. In fact, often they are a means of tyranny and manipulation, a means of expropriating the very chance to reason, the very capacity to act as a free man" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 169).

"The increasing rationalization of society, the contradiction between such rationality and reason, the collapse of the assumed coincidence of reason and freedom--these developments lie back of the rise into view of the man who is 'with' rationality but without reason, who is increasingly self-rationalized and also increasingly uneasy. It is in terms of this type of man that the contemporary problem of freedom is best stated" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 169).

"In our time, must we not face the possibility that the human mind as a social fact might be deteriorating in quality and cultural level, and yet not many would notice it because of the overwhelming accumulation of technological gadgets? Is not that one meaning of rationality without reason? Of human alienation? Of the absence of any free role for reason in human affairs? The accumulation of gadgets hides these meanings: Those who use these devices do not understand them; those who invent them do not understand much else. That is why we may not, without great ambiguity, use technological abundance as the index of human quality and cultural progress" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 175).

On Social Sciences:

Moreover, it is a period and a society in which the enlargement and the centralization of the means of control, of power, now include quite widely the use of social science for whatever ends those in control of these means may assign to it" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, pp. 115-116).

"To come to an orderly understanding of men and societies requires a set of viewpoints that are simple enough to make understanding possible, yet comprehensive enough to permit us to include in our views the range and depth of the human variety. The struggle for such viewpoints if the first and continuing struggle of social science" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 133).

"As each social science advances, its interaction with the others has been intensified. . .They may of course specialize in one institutional order, but in so far as they grasp what is essential to it, they will also come to understand its place within the total social structure, and hence its relations with other institutional domains. For in considerable part, it is becoming clear, its every reality consists of these relations" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 139).

"To state and to solve any one of the significant problems of our period requires a selection of materials, conceptions, and methods from more than any one of these several disciplines. A social scientist need not 'master the field' in order to be familiar enough with its materials and perspectives to use them in clarifying the problems that concern him. It is in terms of such topical 'problems,' rather than in accordance with academic boundaries, that specialization ought to occur" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 142).

"Every social science--or better, every well-considered social study--requires an historical scope of conception and a full use of historical materials" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 145).

"All sociology worthy of the name is 'historical sociology.' It is, in Paul Sweezy's excellent phrase, an attempt to write 'the present as history.'" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 146).

"I believe that what may be called classic social analysis is a definable and usable set of traditions; that its essential feature is the concern with historical social structures; and that its problems are of direct relevance to urgent public issues and insistent human troubles. I also believe that there are now great obstacles in the way of this tradition's continuing--both within the social sciences and in their academic and political settings--but that nevertheless the qualities of mind that constitute it are becoming a common denominator of our general cultural life and that, however vaguely and in however a confusing variety of disguises, they are coming to be felt as a need" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 21).

"It is out of the classic work, moreover, that most of the ideas being used on the sub-historical and on the trans-historical levels of work have in fact arisen. What really fruitful idea, what conception of man and society and of their relations, has resulted from abstracted empiricism or grand theory? So far as ideas are concerned, both of these schools are parasites living off the classic social science tradition" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 125).

"Classic social science, in brief, neither 'builds up' from microscopic study nor 'deduces down' from conceptual elaboration. Its practitioners try to build and to deduce at the same time, in the same process of study, and to do so by means of adequate formulation and re-formulation of problems and their adequate solutions" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 128).

"The classic focus, in short, is on substantive problems. The character of these problems limits and suggests the methods and the conceptions that are used and how they are used. Controversy over different views of 'methodology' and 'theory' is properly carried on in close and continuous relation with substantive problems" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 128).

"No problem can be adequately formulated unless the values involved and the apparent threat to them are stated. These values and their imperilment constitute the terms of the problem itself. The values that have been the thread of classic social analysis, I believe, are freedom and reason; the forces that imperil them today seem at times to be co-extensive with the major trends of contemporary society, if not to constitute the characterizing features of the contemporary period. The leading problems of the social studies today have this in common: They concern conditions and tendencies that seem to imperil these two values and the consequences of that imperilment for the nature of man and the making of history" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, pp. 129-130).

"Social research is advanced by ideas; it is only disciplined by fact" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 71).

"Studies are also used--by social scientists and by other people--in ideological ways. In fact the ideological relevance of social science is inherent in its very existence as social fact. Every society holds images of its own nature--in particular, images and slogans that justify its system of power and the ways of the powerful. The images and ideas produced by social scientists may or may not be consistent with these prevailing images, but they always carry implications for them. In so far as these implications become known, they usually come to be argued over--and used:
     By justifying the arrangement of power and the ascendancy of the powerful, images and ideas transform power into authority.
     By criticizing or debunking prevailing arrangements and rulers, they strip them of authority.
     By distracting attention from issues of power and authority they distract attention from the structural realities of the society itself" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 80).

"Values are involved in the selection of the problems we study; values are also involved in certain of the key conceptions we use in our formulation of these problems, and values affect the course of their solution. So far as conceptions are concerned, the aim ought to be to use as many 'value-neutral' terms as possible and to become aware of and to make explicit the value implications that remain. So far as problems are concerned, the aim ought to be, again, to be clear about the values in terms of which they are selected, and then to avoid as best one can evaluative bias in their solution, no matter where that solution takes one and no matter what its moral or political implications may be" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 78).

"In a book the writer is often trying to persuade others of the result of his thinking; in a classroom the teacher ought to be trying to show others how one man thinks--and at the same time reveal what a fine feeling he gets when he does it well. The teacher ought then, it seems to me, to make very explicit the assumptions, the facts, the methods, the judgments. He ought not to hold back anything, but ought to take it very slowly and at all times repeatedly make clear the full range of moral alternatives before he gives his own choice" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 79).

"That democracy in the United States is so largely formal does not mean that we can dodge the conclusion that if reason is to play any free part in a democratic making of history, one of its chief carriers must surely be the social sciences" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 191).

"The educational and political role of social science in a democracy is to help cultivate and sustain publics and individuals that are able to develop, to live with, and to act upon adequate definitions of personal and social realities" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 192).

"Nowadays social research is often of direct service to army generals and social workers, corporation managers and prison wardens. Such bureaucratic use has been increasing; no doubt it will continue to increase" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 80).

"The morale projected by the 'human relations' experts is the morale of men who are alienated but who have conformed to managed or conventional expectations of 'morale.' Assuming that the existing framework of industry is unalterable and that the aims of the managers are the aims of everyone, the experts of 'human relations' do not examine the authoritarian structure of modern industry and the role of the worker in it. They define the problem of morale in very limited terms, and by their techniques seek to reveal to their managerial clients how they can improve employee morale within the existing framework of power. Their endeavor is manipulation. They would allow the employee to 'blow off steam' without changing the structure within which he is to live out his working life. . . .In a word, the human relations experts have extended the general tendency for modern society to be rationalized in an intelligent way and in the service of a managerial elite" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, pp. 94-95).

"Their [social scientist's] positions change--from the academic to the bureaucratic; their publics change--from movements of reformers to circles of decision-makers; and their problems change--from those of their own choice to those of their new clients. The scholars themselves tend to become less intellectually insurgent and more administratively practical. Generally accepting the status quo, they tend to formulate problems out of the troubles and issues that administrators believe they face. They study, as we have seen, workers who are restless and without morale, and managers who 'do not understand' the art of managing human relations. They also diligently serve the commercial and corporate ends of the communications and advertising industries" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 96).

"I want to make it clear in order to reveal the meaning of the bureaucratic ethos. Its use has mainly been in and for non-democratic areas of society--a military establishment, a corporation, an advertising agency, an administrative division of government. It is in and for such bureaucratic organizations that many social scientists have been invited to work, and the problems with which they there concern themselves are the kinds of problems that concern the more efficient members of such administrative machines" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, pp. 114-115).

"Theory serves, in a variety of ways, as ideological justification of authority. Research for bureaucratic ends serves to make authority more effective and more efficient by providing information of use to authoritative planners" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 117).

"In the intellectual condition of the social sciences today, there is so much to do by way of initial 'structuring' (let the word stand for the kind of work I am describing) that much 'empirical research' is bound to be thin and uninteresting. Much of it, in fact, is a formal exercise for beginning students, and sometimes a useful pursuit for those who are not able to handle the more difficult substantive problems of social science. There is no more virtue in empirical inquiry as such than in reading as such. The purpose of empirical inquiry is to settle disagreements and doubts about facts, and thus to make arguments more fruitful by basing all sides more substantively. Facts discipline reason; but reason is the advance guard in any field of learning" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 205).

On Sociological Imagination:

"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 the is intellectually excellent in Karl Marx; it is the clue to Thorstein Veblen's brilliant and ironic insight . . . no less than of the profundity and clarity of Max Weber" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 6).

"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" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, pp. 6-7).

"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" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 9).

"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 his 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" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 10).

"To study these problems, to realize the human variety, requires that our work be continuously and closely related to the level of historical reality--and to the meanings of this reality for individual men and women. Our aim is to define this reality and to discern these meanings . . . It requires that we seek a fully comparative understanding of the social structures that have appeared and do now exist in world history. It requires that smaller-scale milieux be selected and studied in terms of larger-scale historical structures. It requires that we avoid the arbitrary specialization of academic departments, that we specialize our work variously according to topic, and above all according to problem, and that in doing so we draw upon the perspectives and ideas, the materials and the methods of any and all suitable studies of man as an historical actor" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 134).

"The role of reason I have been outlining neither means nor requires that one hit the pavement, take the next plane to the scene of the current crisis, run for Congress, buy a newspaper plant, go among the poor, set up a soap box. Such actions are often admirable, and I can readily imagine occasions when I should personally find it impossible not to want to do them myself. But for the social scientist to take them to be his normal activities is merely to abdicate his role, and to display by his action a disbelief in the promise of social science and in the role of reason in human affairs. This role requires only that the social scientist get on with the work of social science and that he avoid furthering the bureaucratization of reason and of discourse" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 192).

"If there are any ways out of the crises of our period by means of intellect, is it not up to the social scientist to state them? What we represent--although this is not always apparent--is man become aware of mankind. It is on the level of human awareness that virtually all solutions to the great problems must now lie" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 193).

"If we take the simple democratic view that what men are interested in is all that concerns us, then we are accepting the values that have been inculcated, often accidentally and often deliberately by vested interests. These values are often the only ones men have had any chance to develop. They are unconsciously acquired habits rather than choices.

"If we take the dogmatic view that what is to men's interests, whether they are interested in it or not, is all that need concern us morally, then we run the risk of violating democratic values. We may become manipulators or coercers, or both, rather than persuaders within a society in which men are trying to reason together and in which the value of reason is held in high esteem.

"What I am suggesting is that by addressing ourselves to issues and to troubles, and formulating them as problems of social science, we stand the best chance, I believe the only chance, to make reason democratically relevant to human affairs in a free society, and so realize the classic values that underlie the promise of our studies" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 194).

"Imagination is often successfully invited by putting together hitherto isolated items, by finding unsuspected connections" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 201).

"The sociological imagination, I remind you, in considerable part consists of the capacity to shift from one perspective to another, and in the process to build up an adequate view of a total society and of its components. It is this imagination, of course, that sets off the social scientist from the mere technician. Adequate technicians can be trained in a few years. The sociological imagination can also be cultivated; certainly it seldom occurs without a great deal of often routine work. Yet there is an unexpected quality about it, perhaps because its essence is the combination of ideas that no one expected were combinable--say, a mess of ideas from German philosophy and British economics. There is a playfulness of mind back of such combining as well as a truly fierce drive to make sense of the world, which the technician as such usually lacks" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 211).

"Since one can be trained only in what is already known, training sometimes incapacitates one from learning new ways; it makes one rebel against what is bound to be at first loose and even sloppy. But you must cling to such vague images and notions, if they are yours, and you must work them out. For it is in such forms that original ideas, if any, almost always first appear" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 212).

"There are definite ways, I believe, of stimulating the sociological imagination:

(1) On the most concrete level, the re-arranging of the file, as I have already said, is one way to invite imagination" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 212).

"(2) An attitutde of playfulness toward the phrases and words with which various issues are defined often loosens up the imagination. Look up synonyms for each of your key terms in dictionaries and in technical books, in order to know the full range of their connotations" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 212).

"(3) Many of the general notions you come upon, as you think about them, will be cast into types. A new classification is the usual beginning of fruitful developments (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 213).

"(4) Often you get the best insights by considering extremes--by thinking of the opposite of that with which you are directly concerned. If you think about despair, then also think about elation; if you study the miser, then also the spendthrift. The hardest thing in the world is to study one object; when you try to contrast objects, you get a better grip on the materials and you can then sort out the dimensions in terms of which the comparisons are made" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, pp. 213-14).

"The idea is to use a variety of viewpoints: you will, for instance, ask yourself how would a political scientist whom you have recently read approach this, and how would that experimental psychologist, or this historian? You try to think in terms of a variety of viewpoints and in this way to let your mind become a moving prism catching light from as many angles as possible. In this connection, the writing of dialogues is often very useful" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 214).

"(5) The fact that, for the sake of simplicity, in cross-classification, you first work in terms of yes-or-no, encourages you to think of extreme opposites. That is generally good, for qualitative analysis cannot of course provide you with frequencies of magnitudes. Its techniques and its end is to give you the range of types" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 214).

"(6) Whatever the problem with which you are concerned, you will find it helpful to try to get a comparative grip on the materials. The search for comparable cases, either in one civilization and historical period or in several, gives you leads. You would never think of describing an institution in twentieth-century America without trying to bear in mind similar institutions in other types of structures and periods. That is so even if you do not make explicit comparisons" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 215).

"In time you will come almost automatically to orient your reflections historically. One reason for doing so is that often what you are examining is limited in number: to get a comparative grip on it, you have to place it inside an historical frame. To put it another way, the contrasting-type approach often requires the examination of historical materials. This sometimes results in points useful for a trend analysis, or it leads to a typology of phases" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 215).

"Some knowledge of world history is indispensable to the sociologist; without such knowledge, no matter what else he knows, he is simply crippled" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 215).

"(7) There is finally, a point which has more to do with the craft of putting a book together than with the release of the imagination. Yet those two are often one: how you go about arranging materials for presentation always affects the content of your work (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 216).

"A topic is a subject, like 'the careers of corporation executives' or 'the increased power of military officials' or 'the decline of society matrons.' Usually most of what you have to say about a topic can readily be put into one chapter or a section of a chapter. But the order in which all your topics are arranged often brings you into the realm of themes.

"A theme is an idea, usually of some signal trend, some master conception, or a key distinction, like rationality and reason, for example. In working out the construction of a book, when you come to realize the two or three, or, as the case may be, the six or seven themes, then you will know that you are on top of the job. You will recognize these themes because they keep insisting upon being dragged into all sorts of topics and perhaps you will feel that they are mere repetitions. And sometimes that is all they are! Certainly very often they will be found in the more clotted and confused, the more badly written, sections of your manuscript.

"What you must do is sort them out and state them in a general way as clearly and briefly as you can. Then, quite systematically, you must cross-classify them with the full range of your topics. This means that you will ask of each topic: Just how is it affected by each of these themes? And again: Just what is the meaning, if any, for each of these themes on each of the topics?" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 216).

"Sometimes, by the way, you may find that a book does not really have any themes. It is just a string of topics, surrounded , of course, by methodological introductions to methodology, and theoretical introductions to theory. These are indeed quite indispensable to the writing of books by men without ideas. And so is lack of intelligibility" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 217).

On Intellectual Craftsmanship:

"To the individual social scientist who feels himself a part of the classic tradition, social science is the practice of a craft. A man at work on problems of substance, he is among those who are quickly made impatient and weary by elaborate discussions of method-and-theory-in-general; so much of it interrupts his proper studies" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 195).

"It is best to begin, I think, by reminding you, the beginning student, that the most admirable thinkers within the scholarly community you have chose to join do not split their work from their lives. They seem to take both too seriously to allow such dissociation, and they want to use each for the enrichment of the other" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 195).

"Scholarship is a choice of how to live as well as a choice of career; whether he knows it or not, the intellectual workman forms his own self as he works toward the perfection of his craft; to realize his own potentialities, and any opportunities that come his way, he constructs a character which has as its core the qualities of a good workman" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 196).

"What this means is that you must learn to use your life experience in your intellectual work: continually to examine and interpret it. In this sense craftsmanship is the center of yourself and you are personally involved in every intellectual product upon which you may work" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 196).

"To say that you can 'have experience,' means, for one thing, that your past plays into and affects your present, and that it defines your capacity for future experience. As a social scientist, you have to control this rather elaborate interplay, to capture what you experience and sort it out; only in this way can you hope to use it to guide and test your reflection, and in the process shape yourself as an intellectual craftsman" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 196).

"But how can you do this? One answer is: you must keep a file, which is, I suppose, a sociologist's way of saying: keep a journal. Many creative writers keep journals; the sociologist's need for systematic reflection demands it" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 196).

"By keeping an adequate file and thus developing self-reflective habits, you learn how to keep your inner world awake. Whenever you feel strongly about events or ideas you must try not to let them pass from your mind, but instead to formulate them for your files and in so doing draw out their implications, show yourself how foolish these feelings or ideas are, or how they might be articulated into productive shape. The file also helps you build on the habit of writing. You cannot 'keep your hand in' if you do not write something at least every week. In developing the file, you can experiment as a writer and thus, as they say, develop your powers of expression. To maintain a file is to engage in the controlled experience" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 197).

"All this involves the taking of notes. You will have to acquire the habit of taking a large volume of notes from any worth-while book you read--although, I have to say, you may get better work out of yourself when you read really bad books. The first step in translating experience, either of other men's writing, or of your own life, into the intellectual sphere, is to give it form. Merely to name an item of experience often invites you to explain it; the mere taking of a note from a book is often a prod to reflections. At the same time, of course, the taking of a note is a great aid in comprehending what you are reading" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 199).

"I do not know the full social conditions of the best intellectual workmanship, but certainly surrounding oneself by a circle of people who will listen and talk--and at times they have to be imaginary characters--is one of them. At any rate I try to surround myself with all the relevant environment--social and intellectual--that I think might lead me into thinking well along the lines of my work" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 201).

"You do not really have to study a topic you are working on; for as I have said, once you are into it, it is everywhere. You are sensible to its themes; you see and hear them everywhere in your experience, especially, it always seems to me, in apparently unrelated areas. Even the mass media, especially bad movies and cheap novels and picture magazines and night radio, are disclosed in fresh importance to you" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 211).

"I know you will agree that you should present your work in as clear and simple language as your subject and your thought about it permit. But as you may have noticed, a turgid and polysyllabic prose does seem to prevail in the social sciences. I suppose those who use it believe they are imitating 'physical science,' and are not aware that much of that prose is not altogether necessary. It has in fact been said with authority that there is 'a serious crisis in literacy'--a crisis in which social scientists are very much involved" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 217).

"Such lack of ready intelligibility, I believe, usually has little or nothing to do withthe complexity of subject matter, and nothing at all with profundity of thought. It has to do almost entirely with certain confusions of the academic writer about his own status (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 218).

"In many academic circles today anyone who tries to write in a widely intelligible way is liable to be condemned as a 'mere literary man' or, worse still, ' mere journalist.' Perhaps you have already learned that these phrases, as commonly used, only indicate the spurious inference: superficial because readable" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 218).

"The academic man in America is trying to carry on a serious intellectual life in a social context that often seems quite set against it. His prestige must make up for many of the dominant values he has sacrificed by choosing an academic career. His claims for prestige readily become tied to his self-image as a 'scientist.' To be called a 'mere journalist' makes him feel undignified and shallow. It is this situation, I think, that is often at the bottom of the elaborate vocabulary and involved manner of speaking and writing. It is less difficult to learn this manner than not. It has become a convention--those who do not use it are subject to moral disapproval. It may be that it is the result of an academic closing of the ranks on the part of the mediocre, who understandably wish to exclude those who win the attention of intelligent people, academic and otherwise" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 218).

"To write is to raise a claim for the attention of the reader. That is part of any style. To write is also to claim for oneself at least status enough to be read. The young academic man is very much involved in both claims, and because he feels his lack of public position, he often puts the claim for his own status before his claim for the attention of the reader to what he is saying (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 218).

" In fact, in America, even the most accomplished men of knowledge do not have much status among wide circles and publics. In this respect, the case of sociology has been an extreme one: in large part sociological habits of style stem from the time when sociologists had little status even with other academic men. Desire for status is one reason why academic men slip so readily into unintelligibility. And that, in turn, is one reason why they do not have the status they desire. A truly vicious circle--but one of which any scholar can easily break" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, pp. 218-19).

"To overcome the academic prose you have first to overcome the academic pose. It is much less important to study grammar and Anglo-Saxon roots than to clarify your own answers to these three questions: (1) How difficult and complex after all is my subject? (2) When I write, what status am I claiming for myself? (3) For whom am I trying to write?" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 219).

"My first point, then, is that most 'socspeak' is unrelated to any complexity of subject matter or thought. It is used--I think almost entirely--to establish academic claims for one's self; to write in this way is to say to the reader (often I am sure without knowing it): 'I know something that is so difficult you can understand it only if you first learn my difficult language. In the meantime, you are merely a journalist, a layman, or some other sort of underdeveloped type'" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 220).

"To answer the second question, we must distinguish two ways of presenting the work of social science according to the idea that the writer has of himself, and the voice with which he speaks. One way results from the idea that he is a man who may shout, whisper, or chuckle--but who is always there. It is also clear what sort of man he is: whether confident or neurotic, direct or involuted, he is a center of experience and reasoning; now he has found out something, and he is telling us about it, and how he found it out. This is the voice behind the best expositions available in the English language" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 220).

"The other way of presenting work does not use any voice of any man. Such writing is not a 'voice' at all. It is an autonomous sound. It is a prose manufactured by a machine. That it is full of jargon is not as noteworthy as that it is strongly mannered: it is not only impersonal; it is pretentiously impersonal. Government bulletins are sometimes written n this way. Business letters also. And a great deal of social science. Any writing--perhaps apart from that of certain truly great stylists--that is not imaginable as human speech is bad writing" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, pp. 221-22).

"(3) But finally there is the question of those who are to hear the voice--thinking about that also leads to characteristics of style. It is very important for any writer to have in mind just what kinds of people he is trying to speak to--and also what he really thinks of them. These are not easy questions: to answer them well requires decisions about oneself as well as knowledge of reading publics. To write is to raise a claim to be read, but by whom?" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 221).

"One answer has been suggested by my colleague, Lionel Trilling, who has given me permission to pass it on. You are to assume that you have been asked to give a lecture on some subject you know well, before an audience of teachers and students from all departments of a leading university, as well as an assortment of interested people from a near-by city. Assume that such an audience is before you and that they have a right to know; assume that you want to let them know. Now write" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 221).

"There is one last point, which has to do with the interplay of writing and thinking. If you write solely with reference to what Hans Reichenbach has called the 'context of discovery' you will be understood by very few people; moreover you will tend to be quite subjective instatement. To make whatever you think more objective, you must work in the context of presentations. At first, you 'present' your thoughts to yourself, which is often called 'thinking clearly.' Then when you feel that you have it straight, you present it to others--and often find that you have not made it clear. Now you are in the 'context of presentation.' Sometimes you will notice that as you try to present your thinking, you will modify it--not only in its form of statement but often in its content as well. You will get new ideas as you work in the context of presentation. In short, it will become a new context of discovery, different from the original one, on a higher level I think, because more socially objective. Here again, you cannot divorce how you think from how you write. You have to move back and forth between these two contxts, and whenever you move it is well to know where you might be going" (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 222).

Bibliography:

Mills, C. Wright. 1959 [1976] The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press.