Explore "The Sociological Imagination" by C. Wright Mills on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
On the basis of developments in psychoanalysis, as well as in social psychology as a whole, it is now possible to state briefly the psychological concerns of the social sciences. I list here, in the barest of summary, only those propositions which I take as the most fruitful hunches, or, at the least, as legitimate assumptions on the part of the working social scientist.6
The life of an individual cannot be adequately understood without references to the institutions within which his biography is enacted. For this biography records the acquiring, dropping, modifying, and in a very intimate way, the moving from one role to another. One is a child in a certain kind of family, one is a playmate in a certain kind of child's group, a student, a workman, a foreman, a general, a mother. Much of human life consists of playing such roles within specific institutions. To understand the biography of an individual, we must understand the significance and meaning of the roles he has played and does play; to understand these roles we must understand the institutions of which they are a part.