The Sociological Imagination by C. Wright Mills

It is my aim in this book to define the meaning of the social sciences for the cultural tasks of our time. I want to specify the kinds of effort that lie behind the development of the sociological imagination; to indicate its implications for political as well as for cultural life; and perhaps to suggest something of what is required to possess it. In these ways, I want to make clear the nature and the uses of the social sciences today, and to give a limited account of their contemporary condition in the United States.2

At any given moment, of course, ‘social science' consists of what duly recognized social scientists are doing-but all of them are by no means doing the same thing, in fact not even the same sort of thing. Social science is also what social scientists of the past have done-but different students choose to construct and to recall different traditions in their discipline. When I speak of ‘the promise of social science,' I hope it is clear that I mean the promise as I see it.