理论是一棵树

社会学的想象力

The Sociological Imagination

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, however vaguely, of ambitions and of threats which transcend their immediate locales, the more trapped they seem to feel.

We start from personal troubles.

The formulation of problems

The formulation of problems, then, should include explicit attention to a range of public issues and of personal troubles; and they should open up for inquiry the causal connections between milieux and social structure.

That variety, and hence the very formulation of problems, becomes available only when our view is broadened to include comparative and historical social structures.

The 'basic problem', by the way, and its answer, usually require attention both to uneasiness arising from the 'depth' of biography, and to indifference arising from the very structure of a historical society.

The sociological imagination, I remind you, in considerable part consists of the capacity to shift from one perspective to another, and in the process to build up an adequate view of a total society and of its components.

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What are the major issues for publics and the key troubles of private individuals in our time? To formulate issues and troubles, we must ask what values are cherished yet threatened, and what values are cherished and supported, by the characterizing trends of our period. In the case both of threat and of support we must ask what salient contradictions of structure may be involved.