The Sociological Imagination | Study Guide

The eponymous term, sociological imagination, originates in C. Wright Mills's 1959 book, which criticizes trends in the social sciences of his day. Specifically, practitioners of social study aspired to create a pseudoscientific paradigm in which they attempted to conduct value-free investigations of people and society. In other words, they were overly concerned with developing theoretical explanations for human behavior that were not informed by empirical study of the populations these theories aimed to explain. Mills challenges such attempts to understand humanity and its social structures in a valueless vacuum, ignoring both history and context. He stands within the radical tradition of American sociology—carrying the torch passed by German sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920) and American economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929) and inspiring the New Left of the 1960s. Mills was arguably the most important American sociologist of the last half the 20th century. In The Sociological Imagination, he calls on social scientists to locate their understanding of the social structure at the intersection of personal biography and world history and urges them to advocate for freedom and reason. His prescient critique of postmodern democracy and explanation of the ways in which large bureaucratic institutions have curtailed it are highly relevant today. Mills predicted some of the ways in which monopoly capitalism would come to undermine the Enlightenment ideals of the earlier American era. The text remains important as a handbook for how to approach social science as well as a trove of insights on the American social structure.