Explore "The Sociological Imagination" by C. Wright Mills on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
More important than the extent to which historians are social scientists, or how they should behave, is the still more controversial point that the social sciences are themselves historical disciplines. To fulfill their tasks, or even to state them well, social scientists must use the materials of history. Unless one assumes some trans-historical theory of the nature of history, or that man in society is a non-historical entity, no social science can be assumed to transcend history. All sociology worthy of the name is ‘historical sociology. ' It is, in Paul Sweezy's excellent phrase, an attempt to write ‘the present as history. ' There are several reasons for this intimate relation of history and sociology:
(1) In our very statement of what-is-to-be-explained, we need the fuller range that can be provided only by knowledge of the historical varieties of human society. That a given question-the relations of forms of nationalism with types of militarism, e.g.