The Sociological Imagination

Mills outlines the reasons why history and comparative analysis are indispensable tools for sociological research moving forward. Without historical context, “the social scientist cannot adequately state the kinds of problems that ought now to be the orienting points of his studies” (143). In other words, without a sense of the historical transformations that differentiate one society from another, sociologists will fail to grasp the specific underlying problems that should inform their chosen society of study.

Returning to questions regarding the utility of sociological studies for voting patterns, Mills offers this point:

I do not suppose, for example, that anyone would argue with the statement that the fact of political indifference is one of the major facts of the contemporary political scene in Western societies. Yet in those studies of “the political psychology of voters” which are non-comparative and non-historical, we do not find even a classification of “voters”—or of “political men”—that really takes into account such indifference, and much less its meaning (148).

Thus, it is only by employing a comparative analysis of different social forms that social scientists can correctly grasp the true nature of each. Comparative analysis prevents scientists from confusing one form for another or incorrectly assuming the trans-historical form human societies have always taken. Or in Mills’ formulation:

What Marx called the “principle of historical specificity” refers, first, to a guide-line: any given society is to be understood in terms of the specific period in which it exists. However “period” may be defined, the institutions, the ideologies, the types of men and women prevailing in any given period constitute something of a unique pattern. This does not mean that such an historical type cannot be compared with others, and certainly not that the pattern can be grasped only intuitively. But it does mean [...] that within this historical type various mechanisms of change come to some specific kind of intersection. These mechanisms, which Karl Mannheim [...] called “principia media,” are the very mechanisms that the social scientist, concerned with social structure, wishes to grasp (149).

Next, Mills summarizes and appraises the dominant ideals of social science. He places particular emphasis on the social science’s belief in the relation between Reason and Freedom. According to Mills, the relationship of Reason and Freedom is a marker of social science’s indebtedness to the Enlightenment. The movement, which took place in the 18th century following the French Revolution of 1789, sought to understand the rudiments for a just society, concluding that a just society is a reasonable society, and thus a free one:

These two ideologies came out of The Enlightenment, and they have had in common many assumptions and values. In both, increased rationality is held to be the prime condition of increased freedom. The liberating motion of progress by reason, the faith in science as an unmixed good, the demand for popular education and the faith in its political meaning for democracy—all these ideals of The Enlightenment have rested upon the happy assumption of the inherent relation of reason and freedom (166).

However, says Mills, social scientists in both the present and future find themselves at a crossroads or moment of crisis regarding the Enlightenment ideal:

We are at an ending of what is called The Modern Age. Just as Antiquity was followed by several centuries of Oriental ascendancy, which Westerners provincially call The Dark Ages, so now The Modern Age is being succeeded by a post-modern period. Perhaps we may call it: The Fourth Epoch (165-166).

For social scientists in particular, this post-modern or “Fourth Epoch,” means that:

[…] when we try to orient ourselves [….] we find that too many of our old expectations and images are, after all, tied down historically; that too many of our standard categories of thought and of feeling as often disorient us as help to explain what is happening around us; that too many of our explanations are derived from the great historical transition from the Medieval to the Modern Age; and that when they are generalized for use today, they become unwieldy, irrelevant, not convincing. I also mean that out major orientations—liberalism and socialism—have virtually collapsed as adequate explanations of the world and of ourselves (166).

To make matters worse, Mills claims we constantly witness evidence that causes us to lose faith in the idea that Reason necessarily leads to Freedom:

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. For social, technological, or bureaucratic rationality is not merely a grand summation of the individual will and capacity to reason (168-169).

For Mills, this dissolution of the bond between Reason and Freedom is also evident at the level of the individual and takes the form of alienated existence:

The advent of the alienated man and all the themes which lie behind his advent now affect the whole of our serious intellectual life and cause our immediate intellectual malaise. It is a major theme of the human condition in the contemporary epoch and of all studies worthy of the name. I know of no idea, no theme, no problem, that is so deep in the classic tradition. (172).

Thus, concludes Mills, social scientists can no longer presume the link between Reason and Freedom. They must now treat the question of freedom as a question that goes to the very heart of sociological endeavors.

In this chapter, Mills returns to the politics implicit in the work of individual social scientists. Writing during the midst of the Cold War, in light of what he takes to be detrimental turns in sociological research through the “bureaucratic ethos” and liberal practicalism, Mills offers an alternative image of the task of the social scientist. This alternative would ameliorate the ills that have hindered genuine, social scientific work:

It is, I think, the political task of the social scientist who accepts the ideals of freedom and reason, to address his work to each of the other three types of men I have classified in terms of power and knowledge. To those with power and with awareness of it, he imputes varying measures of responsibility for such structural consequences as he finds by his work to be decisively influenced by their decisions and their lack of decisions. To those whose actions have such consequences, but who do not seem to be aware of them, he directs whatever he has found out about those consequences. He attempts to educate and then, again, he imputes responsibility. To those who are regularly without such power and whose awareness is confined to their everyday milieux, he reveals by his work the meaning of structural trends and decisions for these milieux, the ways in which personal troubles are connected with public issues; in the course of these efforts, he states what he has found out concerning the actions of the more powerful. These are his major educational tasks, and they are his major public tasks when he speaks to any larger audience (185-186).

Mills the goes on to describe what an effective social scientist, who acknowledges the moral and social responsibility of his or her work, might look like. He directs his proclamation to his contemporaries and future social scientists, writing:

Alongside skill and value, we ought to put sensibility, which includes them both, and more besides: it includes a sort of therapy in the ancient sense of clarifying one’s knowledge of self. It includes the cultivation of all those skills of controversy with oneself that we call thinking, and which, when engaged in with others, we call debate. An educator must begin with what interests the individual most deeply, even if it seems altogether trivial and cheap. He must proceed in such a way and with such materials as to enable the student to gain increasingly rational insight into these concerns, and into others he will acquire in the process of his education. And the educator must try to develop men and women who can and who will by themselves continue what he has begun: the end product of any liberating education is simply the self-educating, self-cultivating man and woman; in short, the free and rational individual. A society in which such individuals are ascendant is, by one major meaning of the word, democratic (186-187).