The Sociological Imagination by C. Wright Mills

The problems of social and historical psychology are in many ways the most intriguing that we can study today. It is in this area that the major intellectual traditions of our times, in fact of Western civilization, now come to a most exciting confluence. It is in this area that ‘the nature of human nature'-the generic image of man, inherited from the Enlightenment-has in our time been brought into question by the rise of totalitarian governments, by ethnographic relativism, by discovery of the great potential of irrationality in man, and by the very rapidity with which men and women can apparently be historically transformed.

We have come to see that the biographies of men and women, the kinds of individuals they variously become, cannot be understood without reference to the historical structures in which the milieux of their everyday life are organized. Historical transformations carry meanings not only for individual ways of life, but for the very character-the limits and possibilities of the human being. As the history-making unit, the dynamic nation-state is also the unit within which the variety of men and women are selected and formed, liberated and repressed-it is the man-making unit. That is one reason why struggles between nations and between blocs of nations are also struggles over the types of human beings that will eventually prevail in the Middle East, in India, in China, in the United States; that is why culture and politics are now so intimately related; and that is why there is such need and such demand for the sociological imagination. For we cannot adequately understand ‘man' as an isolated biological creature, as a bundle of reflexes or a set of instincts, as an ‘intelligible field' or a system in and of itself. Whatever else he may be, man is a social and an historical actor who must be understood, if at all, in close and intricate interplay with social and historical structures.