The sociological imagination and the promise of sociology

Wright Mills: The Promise

In his book, the Sociological Imagination, in the opening chapter, C. Wright Mills (1959) introduces the reader to his discussion on the sociological impact that the leap from the Victorian age to industrialization has made on the average man and woman in first world countries. Called "The Promise," the first chapter sets the tone for the remainder of the book wherein Mills will go on to judge the profession of sociological study in a negative tone, suggesting that the profession has succumbed in some way to its own narcissism (p. 5). It has, Mills suggests in the first chapter, left post World War II men and women somewhat uncertain of themselves as they gauge their own value by comparing themselves to the success or lack thereof achieved by others (p. 3). Mills says that the ordinary man, and points out, too, that most men are quite ordinary as feudal lords have either "liquidated" or become a businessman, while the peasant worker becomes the industrialized worker (p. 3).

Sociological Imagination

Mills says that the sociological imagination allows us to blend the elements of history and biography together so that we can see the similarities and the relevance of one to the other (p. 6). To demonstrate his case in point, Mills cites some of the most interesting and articulate writers who accomplished the blend in a way that best exemplifies his point; Veblen, Spencer, Ross, and even Karl Marx (p. 6). Each of these writers was, in his own way, able to blend the historical with the biographical to yield the philosophical reflection on the contemporary society's direction the compulsion that drives men and women to pursue paths of materialistic self-absorption (p. 6).

Mill is suggesting that contemporary men and women have lost sight of the struggle that brought them to the post World War II age of consumerism and conspicuous consumption. In other words, contemporary men and women have lost sight of the philosophical for the commercial, and have replaced the sociological enlightenments of socialism and democracy. That contemporary men and women consume without thought as to their how their abundance or consumption of abundance came to them. Mills says:

"No social study that does not come back to the problems of biography, of history and of their intersections within a society has completed its intellectual journey (p. 6)."

Conclusion