C. Wright Mills - The Sociological Imagination (1959)

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Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both.

C. Wright Mills
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.

C. Wright Mills
The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society. That is its task and its promise. To recognize this task and this promise is the mark of the classic social analyst.

C. Wright Mills
In our time, what is at issue is the very nature of man, the image we have of his limits and possibilities as a man. History is not yet done with its exploration of the limits and meanings of human nature.

C. Wright Mills
Above all, do not give up your moral and political autonomy by accepting in somebody else's terms the illiberal practicality of the bureaucratic ethos or the liberal practicality of the moral scatter. Know that many personal troubles cannot be solved merely as troubles, but must be understood in terms of public issues — and in terms of the problems of history making.

C. Wright Mills
Let every man be his own methodologist, let every man be his own theorist

C. Wright Mills
One could translate the 555 pages of The Social System into about 150 pages of straightforward English. The result would not be very impressive.

C. Wright Mills
Any contemporary political re-statement of liberal and socialist goals must include as central the idea of a society in which all men would become men of substantive reason, whose independent reasoning would have structural consequences for their societies, its history and thus for their own life fates.

C. Wright Mills
To say that you can 'have experience,' means, for one thing, that your past plays into and affects your present, and that it defines your capacity for future experience. As a social scientist, you have to control this rather elaborate interplay, to capture what you experience and sort it out; only in this way can you hope to use it to guide and test your reflection, and in the process shape yourself as an intellectual craftsman

C. Wright Mills
One great lesson that we can learn from its systematic absence in the work of the grand theorists is that every self-conscious thinker must at all times be aware of — and hence be able to control — the levels of abstraction on which he is working. The capacity to shuttle between levels of abstraction, with ease and with clarity, is a signal mark of the imaginative and systematic thinker.

C. Wright Mills
It is the political task of the social scientist — as of any liberal educator — continually to translate personal troubles into public issues, and public issues into the terms of their human meaning for a variety of individuals. It is his task to display in his work — and, as an educator, in his life as well — this kind of sociological imagination. And it is his purpose to cultivate such habits of mind among the men and women who are publicly exposed to him. To secure these ends is to secure reason and individuality, and to make these the predominant values of a democratic society.

C. Wright Mills
For we cannot adequately understand 'man' as an isolated biological creature, as a bundle of reflexes or a set of instincts, as an 'intelligible field' or a system in and of itself. Whatever else he may be, man is a social and an historical actor who must be understood, if at all, in close and intricate interplay with social and historical structures

C. Wright Mills
The very shaping of history now outpaces the ability of men to orient themselves in accordance with cherished values.

C. Wright Mills
To overcome the academic prose you have first to overcome the academic pose,

C. Wright Mills