The Sociological Imagination by C. Wright Mills

What are the chances of success? Given the political structure within which we must now act, I do not believe it is very likely that social scientists will become effective carriers of reason. For men of knowledge to enact this strategic role, certain conditions must be present. Men make their own history, Marx said, but they do not make it under conditions of their own choice. Well then, what are the conditions we require to play this role effectively? What are required are parties and movements and publics having two characteristics: (1) within them ideas and alternatives of social life are truly debated, and (2) they have a chance really to influence decisions of structural consequence. Only if such organizations existed, could we become realistic and hopeful about the role of reason in human affairs which I have been trying to outline. Such a situation, by the way, I should consider one major requirement for any fully democratic society.

In such a polity social scientists in their political roles would probably ‘speak for' and ‘against' a variety of movements and strata and interests, rather than merely address an often vague, and-I fear-dwindling, public. Their ideas, in short, would compete, and this competition (as a process as well as in its result at any given time) would be politically relevant. If we take the idea of democracy seriously, if we take the democratic role of reason in human affairs seriously, our engagement in such a competition will in no way distress us. Surely we cannot suppose that all definitions of social reality, much less all statements of political ways and means, much less all suggestions of goals, would result in some undebatable, unified doctrine.2