Wright Mills Is That Neither the Life

¶ … Wright Mills is that neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both. However, individuals rarely define their personal troubles in terms of historical change. The idea is that individuals live out their individual lives, their biographies, which they live out within some historical sequence. The concept of the sociological imagination provides that an individual can only understand his experiences by placing his individual life within the context of his lifetime.

A good example of the interrelationship between history and biography is an individual man in his late 20s, with a family to support, who does not have a job. The joblessness is part of that individual's biography. However, the biography is incomplete without understanding the historical context of the man's lifetime. The role of a man fitting that example differs tremendously depending on the historical context. For example, in the 1930s a huge amount of people were unemployed. The historical context is that the country was experiencing the Great Depression.

Therefore, the individual's unemployment, as part of his biography, was an accepted and acceptable condition. The fact of his unemployment did not place a black mark on his biography. That is how history impacts the individual's biography. The relationship is reciprocal, because the fact of that one individual's unemployment, while not historically significant on its own, was one of the elements that helped create the Great Depression. In contrast, in the economic boom of the 1980's, an individual with the same life circumstances would be considered lazy and irresponsible.

The role of the sociological imagination is that it is the link whereby individuals relate their biographies to the larger histories. Therefore, it would be the step where the individual worker during the time of the Great Depression looked outside of his individual circumstances to realize that he was part of a significant historical event.

The example of the Great Depression would not really require an individual to use his sociological imagination to really understand the interrelationship between biography and history, because there was an awareness of the Great Depression, which permeated individual lives. In fact, usually the interplay between biography and history will be more subtle. For example, violence against women is currently an epidemic in our country; however there is no broad awareness of the problem.

Each slap or kick, while it may play a huge role in an individual's biography, contributes to the history of a society that not only condones, but encourages, violence against women. To say that one woman was raped today means little, in a historical context. To say that one woman was raped every six seconds today reflects a society that has little regard for the personal integrity of its women.

In turn, that society creates an atmosphere in individual biographies that make it more likely that additional women will be assaulted; men are taught that violence against women is permissible, and women are taught to accept violence as part of being a woman. 2. Auguste Comte is generally regarded as the first sociologist. In fact, he coined the term sociology. Furthermore, he believed that sociology was the science that would connect all other areas of scientific inquiry.

However, the idea of a special science for the study of human relations was not unique to Comte; it was a widely held 19th century belief. What was unique was Comte's vision of sociology. Comte was the founder of Positivism, which is best described as a mixture between a philosophy and an approach to the science of sociology. Positivism dictates that scientific inquiry does not look for the ultimate cause of observable behavior, but studies the relations between those things that can be observed.

In addition to founding Positivism, Comte sought to apply skills previously used in the hard sciences, such as observation and experimentation, to the field of sociology. Comte believed that there was one law that was universal to the sciences: the law of three phases. By this, Comte meant that society had gone through three phases: Theological, Metaphysical, and Scientific. The Theological phase referred to the period before the Enlightenment, in which individual position in society was a function of religion.

The Metaphysical phase was that period after the French Revolution, in which individual rights were considered paramount to the concerns of society as a whole. Finally, the Scientific phase, the period after the revolution, was Comte's time period. It was during that time that Comte believed that individuals could find solutions to societal problems. Furthermore, Comte believed that mankind could progress through the science of sociology and that sociology could be used to solve persistent societal problems.

The irony is that by advocating sociology as a method to solve the world's problems, Comte was actually moving away from the idea of the scientific observer. Comte envisioned a second universal law, which he referred to as the encyclopedic law. The encyclopedic law enabled Comte to classify all of the sciences. Comte's contributions to sociology and scholarship include the creation of the term "altruism," which he used to refer to an individual's moral obligation to society.

Both of these ideas reflected the social and intellectual context of 19th century France. The Revolution had failed and people were seeking meaning beyond the individual; hence the idea that people were morally obligated to act in ways that would help others, but that might actually be contrary to the actor's self-interest. Furthermore, the 19th Century was fervently scientific, and had turned away from the focus on religion and the.