Sociologists are often asked who a sociologist is and what he or she really does . This question could be answered in an illustrative and allegorical manner by saying that the sociologist has a superpower: "the sociological imagination ." As American sociologist Charles Wright Mills stated in his most important work:
" The sociological imagination allows its possessor to see and evaluate the broader context of historical events in its impact on the inner life and external behavior of a whole range of human categories. It enables one to understand why, in the chaos of everyday experience, individuals form a false idea of their social position. It offers one the ability to unravel, in this chaos, the broad lines, the fabric of modern society, and to follow within it the psychological plot of a whole range of men and women. In this way, one traces the personal distress of individuals back to objective disturbances in society and transforms public indifference into interest in public problems ."
See and predict
Charles Wright Mills , who died at just 46, was one of the most critical voices of his country's democracy. "The United States today is democratic essentially in form and in the rhetoric of expectation. In substance and practice, it is very often undemocratic , and this is evident in certain areas. The economies of large corporations are managed neither in the form of citizens' assemblies nor through a complex of powers accountable to those who directly suffer the consequences of their activities. The same can increasingly be said of the military machine and the political state."
He was not optimistic about the chances that sociologists could “save the world” but he believed that, since it might be possible to do so, they had a duty to try anyway. But above all, he was able to foresee some problems that were unimaginable at the time, in an era that placed unreserved trust in technology, whose only redeeming qualities were perceived. In his most famous work, The Sociological Imagination , he wrote: “ Must we not, in our age, prepare ourselves for the possibility that the human mind, as a social fact, deteriorates qualitatively and descends to a lower cultural level, without many noticing, overwhelmed as we are by the mass of small technological inventions? Isn't this perhaps one of the meanings of the phrase " rationality without reason "? Of the term human alienation? (…) The accumulation of technological expedients hides this meaning: those who use them do not understand them; those who invent them do not understand much more. This is why we cannot, except with many doubts and reservations, take technological abundance as an indicator of human quality and cultural progress .”
The sociological imagination in everyday life
Wright Mills offered many arguments in support of pursuing a sociological imagination that sought to create a conversation with women and men, demonstrating how "personal troubles" are inextricably linked to "public issues." The sociological imagination makes the personal political, like fiction and journalism, enabling the development of a "quality of mind" that can make individuals aware of what they are part of, thus creating change where necessary.
Rino Carfora
