Mills’ “The Sociological Imagination”

The sociological imagination is an essential understanding for humanity to have. The idea has surely existed for centuries or even millennia before C.W. Mills (1959) put a name to it, but by identifying and describing it we are better able to explain it to others and achieve an understanding of its effects for ourselves. Having a solid grasp of the sociological imagination is a useful tool for realizing one’s place in the world and can be applied to both large and small issues when it comes to classifying them as important or unimportant, worth worrying about or better left ignored.

Mills’ explanation of why people feel trapped is two-fold. For one, they encounter repeated difficulties in life that are simply a part of life that they cannot overcome or escape. It is necessary to engage these difficulties in order to maintain the things that are valued like a home and family and job. Beyond that are the larger wheels of the world that individual people feel little or no control over such as the issues with aging. Being aware of these wheels makes people feel even more trapped because they can see how their situations are made better or worse as these wheels turn and there is nothing to do but endure those changing tides.

The social imagination is the ability of people to realize their place in the large scale of the world and of time and to realize why that placement has a perceived trapping effect. It also allows people to acknowledge that everyone who has ever lived or ever will endure that same feeling. While that shared identity might not be comforting, full engagement of the sociological imagination allows a person to realize just how important individuals and groups have been to the course of history and that everyday life is important because it shapes the society we live in and the future we grow into. What we feel is a trap is, in fact, an essential part of life.

When Mills (1959) says “The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society,” he is describing this effect of realizing the place of people in the seemingly impersonal machine that is humanity at large. No society exists without the fully realized lives of the individuals in it and the effects of those lives on the experiences of the whole. A person might live their whole life and only once act on society, but without that effect, without a fully played out biography of that individual, history would be written differently and there is no way to know when or how that moment will be realized until it has happened.

What Mills (1959) describes “personal troubles” and “public issues,” he is talking about the inseparable nature of humanity’s problems. Any difficulty that an individual or small unit of individuals, such as a family, have to cope with is reflected in society as a whole, either as a cause or an effect. While a divorce is a personal matter, it has an effect on the fabric of society and the couples' developing children by impacting everyone who knows the divorced couple. It also reflects the perception of marriage held by society in the way it happens and the reasons for it. Employment is a similar situation in that ease or difficulty of finding a job always affects the individuals who are seeking work, but the kind of work they try to find and the reasons it is easy or difficult are reflections of happenings in the public sphere.

As a whole, the sociological imagination is essential for people to realize and fully inherit their place in society. While a person may be technically happier without realizing how much or little they matter to the world, this is not a realization that humanity can afford to ignore. Every individual should realize the impact they have on people around them and should understand the impact that others have on them. While ignorance might be comfortable, it creates a society of isolated people who have no sense of how bettering society will better themselves.

A personal experience that is very applicable to the social imagination in this era is the use of leisure time. Computer and video games have become prevalent in the developed world and the use of them has fallen under scrutiny almost since they came on the scene. The question of are they harmful to the psyche, do they make people dumber, and are they simply a waste of time makes it almost a stigma for anyone to play them, even as they become more common and accepted in popular culture. Struggling with these questions personally has been made easier by realizing how common they are and how similar they are to other popular trends that have fallen under fire in the past like recreational sport which has gone through phases of being only acceptable for the poor or for the noble, alternately, and music which has been considered a detriment to society on numerous occasions in recent history. Somehow humanity has survived these other trends and it will survive video games as well.

While it is sometimes frightening to apply the sociological imagination and realize how small or insignificant a person is in the grand scheme of things, it should also be heartening to realize that nearly everyone who has ever lived has been in a similar position and has still been integral to society on some scale, whether in terms of a family unit, a neighborhood, a nation, or even the entire world. There is no way to tell when a person’s choices will affect society in some tremendous way and in the meantime, the use of history and biographies will allow us to make sensible and informed choices in our own life.

Reference

Mills, C. W. (1959). The sociological imagination. Lewis & Clark. Retrieved from http://legacy.lclark.edu/~goldman/socimagination.html