Explore "The Sociological Imagination" by C. Wright Mills on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
I do not expect (nor does my present argument as a whole require) that this view be accepted by all social scientists. What I want most to say here is that, having accepted the values of reason and freedom, it is a prime task of any social scientist to determine the limits of freedom and the limits of the role of reason in history.
In assuming the third role, the social scientist does not see himself as some autonomous being standing ‘outside society. ' In common with most other people, he does feel that he stands outside the major history-making decisions of this period; at the same time he knows that he is among those who take many of the consequences of these decisions. That is one major reason why to the extent that he is aware of what he is doing, he becomes an explicitly political man. No one is ‘outside society'; the question is where each stands within it.