Social Science - Sociology Critical Reflection Assignment 2

Excerpts from The Sociological Imagination; Chapter One: The Promise by 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 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, 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 impersonal changes 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, a person 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 historical change 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 of history-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.

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Perhaps the most fruitful distinction with which the sociological imagination works is between 'the personal

troubles of milieu' and 'the public issues of social structure.' This distinction is an essential tool of the

sociological imagination and a feature of all classic work in social science.

Troubles occur within the character of the individual and within the range of his or her immediate relations with

others; they have to do with one's self and with those limited areas of social life of which one is directly and

personally aware. Accordingly, the statement and the resolution of troubles properly lie within the individual as

a biographical entity and within the scope of one's immediate milieu - the social setting that is directly open to

her personal experience and to some extent her willful activity. A trouble is a private matter: values cherished by

an individual are felt by her to be threatened.

Issues have to do with matters that transcend these local environments of the individual and the range of her

inner life. They have to do with the organization of many such milieu into the institutions of an historical society

as a whole, with the ways in which various milieux overlap and interpenetrate to form the larger structure of

social and historical life. An issue is a public matter: some value cherished by publics is felt to be threatened.

Often there is a debate about what that value really is and about what it is that really threatens it. This debate is

often without focus if only because it is the very nature of an issue, unlike even widespread trouble, that it

cannot very well be defined in terms of the immediate and everyday environments of ordinary people. An issue,

in fact, often involves a crisis in institutional arrangements, and often too it involves what Marxists call

'contradictions' or 'antagonisms.'

In these terms, consider unemployment. When, in a city of 100,000, only one is unemployed, that is his personal

trouble, and for its relief we properly look to the character of the individual, his skills and his immediate

opportunities. But when in a nation of 50 million employees, 15 million people are unemployed, that is an issue,

and we may not hope to find its solution within the range of opportunities open to any one individual. The very

structure of opportunities has collapsed. Both the correct statement of the problem and the range of possible

solutions require us to consider the economic and political institutions of the society, and not merely the

personal situation and character of a scatter of individuals.

Consider war. The personal problem of war, when it occurs, may be how to survive it or how to die in it with

honor; how to make money out of it; how to climb into the higher safety of the military apparatus; or how to

contribute to the war's termination. In short, according to one's values, to find a set of milieux and within it to

survive the war or make one's death in it meaningful. But the structural issues of war have to do with its causes;

with what types of people it throws up into command; with its effects upon economic and political, family and

religious institutions, with the unorganized irresponsibility of a world of nation-states.

Consider marriage. Inside a marriage a man and a woman may experience personal troubles, but when the

divorce rate during the first four years of marriage is 250 out of every 1,000 attempts, this is an indication of a

structural issue having to do with the institutions of marriage and the family and other institutions that bear upon

them.

Or consider the metropolis - the horrible, beautiful, ugly, magnificent sprawl of the great city. For many

members of the upperclass the personal solution to 'the problem of the city' is to have an apartment with private

garage under it in the heart of the city and forty miles out, a house by Henry Hill, garden by Garrett Eckbo, on a

hundred acres of private land. In these two controlled environments - with a small staff at each end and a private

helicopter connection - most people could solve many of the problems of personal milieux caused by the facts of

the city. But all this, however splendid, does not solve the public issues that the structural fact of the city poses.

What should be done with this wonderful monstrosity? Break it all up into scattered units, combining residence

and work? Refurbish it as it stands? Or, after evacuation, dynamite it and build new cities according to new

plans in new places? What should those plans be? And who is to decide and to accomplish whatever choice is

made? These are structural issues; to confront them and to solve them requires us to consider political and

economic issues that affect innumerable milieux.

In so far as an economy is so arranged that slumps occur, the problem of unemployment becomes incapable of

personal solution. In so far as war is inherent in the nation-state system and in the uneven industrialization of the

world, the ordinary individual in her restricted milieu will be powerless - with or without psychiatric aid - to

solve the troubles this system or lack of system imposes upon him. In so far as the family as an institution turns

women into darling little slaves and men into their chief providers and unweaned dependents, the problem of a

satisfactory marriage remains incapable of purely private solution. In so far as the overdeveloped megalopolis

and the overdeveloped automobile are built-in features of the overdeveloped society, the issues of urban living

will not be solved by personal ingenuity and private wealth.

What we experience in various and specific milieux, I have noted, is often caused by structural changes.

Accordingly, to understand the changes of many personal milieux we are required to look beyond them. And the

number and variety of such structural changes increase as the institutions within which we live become more

embracing and more intricately connected with one another. To be aware of the idea of social structure and to

use it with sensibility is to be capable of tracing such linkages among a great variety of milieux. To be able to do

that is to possess the sociological imagination.