The Sociological Imagination by C. Wright Mills

The idea of social structure, along with the contention that it is the generic unit of social science, is historically most closely associated with sociology, and sociologists have been its classical exponents. The traditional subject matter of both sociology and anthropology has been the total society; or, as it is called by anthropologists, ‘the culture. ' What is specifically ‘sociological' in the study of any particular feature of a total society is the continual effort to relate that feature to others, in order to gain a conception of the whole. The sociological imagination, I have noted, is in considerable part a result of training in this kind of effort. But nowadays such a view and such practice is by no means confined to sociologists and anthropologists. What was once a promise in these disciplines has become at least a faltering practice, as well as an intention, in the social sciences generally.

Cultural anthropology, in its classic tradition and in its current developments, does not seem to me in any fundamental way distinguishable from sociological study. Once upon a time, when there were few or no surveys of contemporary societies, anthropologists had to collect materials about pre-literate peoples in out-of-the-way places. Other social sciences-notably history, demography and political science-have from their beginnings depended upon documentary materials accumulated in literate societies. And this fact tended to separate the disciplines. But now ‘empirical surveys' of various sorts are used in all the social sciences, in fact the technique has been most fully developed by psychologists and sociologists in connection with historical societies. In recent years, too, anthropologists have of course studied advanced communities and even nation-states, often at a considerable distance; in turn, sociologists and economists have studied ‘the undeveloped peoples. ' There is neither a distinction in method nor a boundary of subject matter that truly distinguishes anthropology from economics and sociology today.