Explore "The Sociological Imagination" by C. Wright Mills on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Whether he knows it or not, the line-up of a man's problems-how he states them and what priority he assigns to each-rests upon methods, theories, and values.
Yet, it must be admitted, some men working in social science do not have any ready answer to the signal question of the lineup of their problems. They do not feel the need of any, for they do not, in fact, determine the problems upon which they work. Some allow the immediate troubles of which ordinary men in their everyday milieux are aware to set the problems upon which they work; others accept as their points of orientation the issues defined officially or unofficially by authorities and interests. About this, our colleagues of Eastern Europe and Russia will know much more than we, for most of us have never lived under a political organization which officially controls the intellectual and cultural sphere. But by no means is the phenomenon absent in the West, certainly not in America. The political, but more especially the commercial, orientation of problems for social scientists may come about by their willing, even eager, self-co-ordination.