For the ninth edition, I would like to thank the following reviewers: Brian Barry, Rochester Institute of Technology; Patricia Gibbs Stayte, Foothill College; Tessa leRoux, Lasell College; Beth F. Merenstein, Central Connecticut State University; and Henry Zonio, University of Kentucky.
Finally, at SAGE, I would like to recognize the creative and patient efforts of several individuals, including my sociology editor, Jeff Lasser. I also want to acknowledge the detailed work of the permissions editor, Tyler Huxtable; the proofreader, Wendy Jo Dymond; and the production editor, Rebecca Lee. Thank you all for whipping my manuscript into shape!
About the Editor
Susan J. Fergusonis a professor of sociology at Grinnell College, where she has taught for 28 years. Ferguson regularly teaches Introduction to Sociology, and her critically acclaimed anthology, Mapping the Social Landscape: Readings in Sociology (SAGE Publications, 2020) is used in introductory classes around the country. Ferguson also teaches courses on the family, medical sociology, the sociology of the body, and a new seminar on social inequality and identity. Ferguson has published in all of these areas, including the research collection, Breast Cancer: Society Shapes an Epidemic (with co-editor Anne Kasper, Palgrave, 2000); Shifting the Center: Understanding Contemporary Families (SAGE, 2018); and most recently, Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Social Class: Dimensions of Inequality and Identity (SAGE, 2019). In addition, Ferguson is the General Editor for “Contemporary Family Perspectives,” which is a series of research monographs and short texts on the family (SAGE Publications).Ferguson, who grew up in a working-class family in Colorado, still considers the Rocky Mountains to be her spiritual home. A first-generation college student, Ferguson was able to attend college with the help of scholarships, work study, and financial loans. She majored in political science and Spanish and also completed certificates of study in women’s studies and Latin American studies. After working for a couple of years for a large biotechnology research grant sponsored by the United States Agency for International Development, Ferguson entered graduate school and completed her master’s degree in sociology at Colorado State University and her Ph.D. in sociology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Her areas of study are gender, family, women’s health, and pedagogy, but her primary enthusiasm is for teaching.
Reading 1 The Promise
C. Wright Mills
The initial three selections examine the sociological perspective. The first of these is written by C. Wright Mills (1916–1962), a former professor of sociology at Columbia University. During his brief academic career, Mills became one of the best-known and most controversial sociologists. He was critical of the U.S. government and other social institutions where power was unfairly concentrated. He also believed that academics should be socially responsible and speak out against social injustice. The excerpt that follows is from Mills’s acclaimed book The Sociological Imagination. Since its original publication in 1959, this text has been required reading for most introductory sociology students around the world. Mills’s sociological imagination perspective not only compels the best sociological analyses but also enables the sociologist and the individual to distinguish between “personal troubles” and “public issues.” By separating these phenomena, we can better comprehend the sources of and solutions to social problems.
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.
Note: This article was written in 1959 before scholars were sensitive to gender inclusivity in language. The references to masculine pronouns and men are, therefore, generic to both males and females and should be read as such. Please note that I have left the author’s original language in this selection and other readings.
Source: C. Wright Mills, “The Promise” from The Sociological Imagination. Copyright © 1959, 2000 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Reproduced with permission of the Licensor through PLSclear.
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 man is employed or unemployed; when the rate of investment goes up or down, a man takes new heart or goes broke. When wars happen, an insurance salesman becomes a rocket launcher; a store clerk, a radar man; a wife lives alone; a child grows up without a father. Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both.
Yet men 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 men do not usually know what this connection means for the kinds of men 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 man 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 men been so totally 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 man is world history. Within this scene and this period, in the course of a single generation, one-sixth of mankind is 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; men 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 up as 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 and bureaucratic 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 men to orient themselves in accordance with cherished values. And which values? Even when they do not panic, men often sense that older ways of feeling and thinking have collapsed and that newer beginnings are ambiguous to the point of moral stasis. Is it any wonder that ordinary men feel they cannot cope with the larger worlds with which they are so suddenly confronted? That they cannot understand the meaning of their epoch for their own lives? That—in defense of selfhood—they become morally insensible, trying to remain altogether private men? Is it any wonder that they come to be possessed by a sense of the trap?
It is not only information that they need—in this Age of Fact, information often dominates their attention and overwhelms their capacities to assimilate it. It is not only the skills of reason that they need—although