C.W. Mills The Sociological Imagination Concept

The Sociological Imagination
Chapter One: The Promise
C. Wright Mills (1959)
Nowadays people 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 people are directly aware of and what they try to do are bounded by
the private orbits inwhich 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, however vaguely, of ambitions and of threats
which transcend their immediate locales, the more trapped they seem to feel.
Underlying this sense of being trapped are seemingly impersonalchanges in the very structure of
continent-wide societies. The facts of contemporary history are also facts about the success and
the failure of individual men and women. When a society is industrialized, a peasant becomes a
worker; a feudal lord is liquidated or becomes a businessman. When classes rise or fall, a person
is employed or unemployed; when the rate of investment goes up or down, aperson takes new
heart or goes broke. When wars happen, an insurance salesperson becomes a rocket launcher; a
store clerk, a radar operator; a wife or husband lives alone; a child grows up without a parent.
Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without
understanding both.
Yet people do not usually define the troubles they endure in terms of historicalchange and
institutional contradiction. The well-being they enjoy, they do not usually impute to the big ups
and downs of the societies in which they live. Seldom aware of the intricate connection between
the patterns of their own lives and the course of world history, ordinary people do not usually
know what this connection means for the kinds of people they are becoming and for the kinds ofhistory-making in which they might take part. They do not possess the quality of mind essential
to grasp the interplay of individuals and society, of biography and history, of self and world.
They cannot cope with their personal troubles in such ways as to control the structural
transformations that usually lie behind them.
Surely it is no wonder. In what period have so many people been sototally exposed at so fast a
pace to such earthquakes of change? That Americans have not known such catastrophic changes
as have the men and women of other societies is due to historical facts that are now quickly
becoming 'merely history.' The history that now affects every individual is world history. Within
this scene and this period, in the course of a single generation, one sixth of humankindis
transformed from all that is feudal and backward into all that is modern, advanced, and fearful.
Political colonies are freed; new and less visible forms of imperialism installed. Revolutions
occur; people feel the intimate grip of new kinds of authority. Totalitarian societies rise, and are
smashed to bits - or succeed fabulously. After two centuries of ascendancy, capitalism is shown
upas only one way to make society into an industrial apparatus. After two centuries of hope,
even formal democracy is restricted to a quite small portion of mankind. Everywhere in the
underdeveloped world, ancient ways of life are broken up and vague expectations become urgent
demands. Everywhere in the overdeveloped world, the means of authority and of violence
become total in scope andbureaucratic in form. Humanity itself now lies before us, the super-

nation at either pole concentrating its most coordinated and massive efforts upon the preparation
of World War Three.
The very shaping of history now outpaces the ability of people to orient themselves in
accordance with cherished values. And which values? Even when they do not panic, people often
sense that older ways of...