The Sociological Imagination by C. Wright Mills

Embarrassingly enough for an avowed sociologist, all the unfortunate tendencies (except possibly one) that I shall consider in the following chapters fall into what is generally thought to be ‘the field of sociology,' although the cultural and political abdication implicit in them no doubt characterize much of the daily work in other social sciences. Whatever may be true in such disciplines as political science and economics, history and anthropology, it is evident that in the United States today what is known as sociology has become the center of reflection about social science. It has become the center for interest in methods; and in it one also finds the most extreme interest in ‘general theory. ' A truly remarkable variety of intellectual work has entered into the development of the sociological tradition. To interpret this variety as A Tradition is in itself audacious. Yet perhaps it will be generally agreed that what is now recognized as sociological work has tended to move in one or more of three general directions, each of which is subject to distortion, to being run into the ground.

Tendency I: Toward a theory of history. For example, in the hands of Comte, as in those of Marx, Spencer, and Weber, sociology is an encyclopedic endeavor, concerned with the whole of man's social life. It is at once historical and systematic-historical, because it deals with and uses the materials of the past; systematic, because it does so in order to discern ‘the stages' of the course of history and the regularities of social life.