Explore "The Sociological Imagination" by C. Wright Mills on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Men are free to make history, but some men are much freer than others. Such freedom requires access to the means of decisions and of power by which history may now be made. It is not always so made; in the following, I am speaking only of the contemporary period in which the means of history-making power have become so enlarged and so centralized. It is with reference to this period that I am contending that if men do not make history, they tend increasingly to become the utensils of history-makers and also the mere objects of history-making.
How large a role any explicit decisions do play in the making of history is itself an historical problem. It depends very much upon the means of power that are available at any given time in any given society. In some societies, the innumerable actions of innumerable men modify their milieux, and so gradually modify the structure itself. These modifications are the course of history; history is drift, although in total ‘men make it. ' Thus, innumerable entrepreneurs and innumerable consumers, by ten thousand decisions per minute, may shape and re-shape the free-market economy. Perhaps this was the chief kind of limitation Marx had in mind when he wrote, in The 18th Brumaire: ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves. .'