Explore "The Sociological Imagination" by C. Wright Mills on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
As each social science advances, its interaction with the others has been intensified. The subject matter of economics is again becoming what it was in the beginning-the ‘political economy,' which is increasingly viewed within a total social structure. An economist such as John Galbraith is as much a political scientist as Robert Dahl or David Truman; in fact his work on the current structure of American capitalism is as much a sociological theory of a political economy as Schumpeter's view of capitalism and democracy or Earl Latham's of group politics. Harold D. Lasswell or David Riesman or Gabriel Almond is as much a sociologist as a psychologist and a political scientist. They are in and out of the social sciences, and so are they all; in so far as a man comes to master any of these ‘fields' he is forced into the bailiwicks of the others, which is to say, into the sphere of all those belonging to the classic tradition. They may of course specialize in one institutional order, but in so far as they grasp what is essential to it, they will also come to understand its place within the total social structure, and hence its relations with other institutional domains. For in considerable part, it is becoming clear, its every reality consists of these relations.
Of course, it should not be supposed that, faced with the great variety of social life, social scientists have rationally divided up the work at hand. In the first place, each of the disciplines involved has grown up on its own and in response to quite specific demands and conditions; none has been developed as part of some over-all plan. In the second place, there are of course many disagreements concerning the relations of these several disciplines and there are disagreements also about the appropriate degree of specialization. But the overriding fact today is that these disagreements can now be seen more as facts of the academic life than as intellectual difficulties, and even academically, I believe, they often tend nowadays to resolve themselves, to be outgrown.