The promise of the sociological imagination by c. wright mills

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Summary

Mills begins The Sociological Imagination by describing the situation of man in the 1950s.

C wright mills the task and promise of sociology

He characterizes this situation as one of both confinement and powerlessness. On the one hand, men are confined by the routine of their lives: you go to your job and are a worker, and then you come home and are a family-man. There are limited roles that men play, and a day in the life of a man is a cycle through them.

On the other hand, men are also powerless in the face of larger and global political conditions they cannot control. In the 1950s, shadowed by anxieties over nuclear warfare and tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union in the Cold War, there is increasingly a feeling that the big problems facing men today are not ones the average man can affect.

You go to work and you go home, but at no time do you seem to have a role to play in global politics.

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