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

Mills does not mince words as he puts the burden for contemporary men and women failing to connect their history and their biography on the shoulders of the sociologists who have, like Narcissi fallen for their own rhetoric such that it has bloomed into empty words (pp. 1-7). Without the sociologist's connection, there is no meter by which to measure progress in the present. The present becomes void of historical significance, and the priority of individualism takes precedence...

Mills says that the questions that need to be asked by the mind possessing sociological imagination are not being asked, and to the extent that they are being asked, they are being answered without the historical perspective that helps society understand how they have socially evolved as a community over the individual (p. 7).
"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 understand what is happening in themselves minute points of the intersections of biography and history within society (p. 7)."

Even though Mills wrote these observations in 1959, his assessment of the post World War II nuclear family environment does, in many ways, reflect the sociological imagination today.

Bibliography

Mills, C. Wright. The Sociological Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University…