The Sociological Imagination

C. Wright Mills outlines what he calls the “sociological imagination” and its analytical promise for sociological study. According to Mills, the sociological imagination intends to ameliorate the theoretical blind spot that plagues most individuals in their daily lives. This blind spot is the inability of individual persons to connect their unique lived experiences to the larger structures of power (economic, political, cultural) that determine the future possibilities of their existences. Absent this connection between the historical and the biographical, says Mills, individuals feel trapped and demoralized:

Nowadays men often feel that their private lives are a series of traps. They sense that within their everyday worlds, they cannot overcome their troubles, and in this feeling, they are often quite correct: What ordinary men are directly aware of and what they try to do are bounded by the private orbits in which they live; their visions and their powers are limited to the close-up scenes of job, family, neighborhood; in other milieux, they move vicariously and remain spectators. And the more aware they become...of ambitions and of threats which transcend their immediate locales, the more trapped they seem to feel (3).

According to Mills, while the “sociological imagination” is a framework for understanding how “to grasp history and biography and the relation between the two within society” (4), it aims to show how an individual can only “know his own changes in life only by becoming aware of those of all individuals in his circumstances” (3).