Unveiling Hidden Structures: How to Activate Your Sociological Imagination

The sociological imagination was coined by C. Wright Mills in 1959.

Like the James Dean of sociology, Mills was a motorcycle and boxing enthusiast, unafraid to challenge the status quo.

So grab your helmet, hold on tight, and let’s hit the road to discover the visionary (super)power that is the sociological imagination.

Background

The 1950s were a very different time. Fresh off the victories of World War II, reveling in the biggest economic boom in history, confidence in American institutions was high.

But C. Wright Mills, a professor of sociology at Columbia University, was concerned. Because it was also a decade dominated by a whoppingly exclusive boys’ club: a small cadre of White men circulating among top positions in politics, business, and the military.

The Good Ol’ Boys of the 1950s

“For years, I have thought what was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa,” declared former president of General Motors Charles E. Wilson at his confirmation hearing for the Secretary of Defense position in 1953.

He had been nominated by former general and new U.S. president Dwight D. Eisenhower, who would use his farewell address in 1961 to warn against “the military-industrial complex:” the increasingly entwined interests of the military establishment and the industry of profit-hungry corporations serving it.

Mills believed the concentration of political, economic, and military power in the hands of men like Eisenhower and Wilson was a threat to democracy. In his 1956 book, The Power Elite, Mills wove together narratives of politicians, business magnates, and military leaders, exposing their shared interests and collusion in maintaining the existing power structure. Through meticulous research and insightful analysis, he shone a light on this complex web of connections and postwar power dynamics, hoping to empower readers to demand more inclusive leadership.

The Power Elite established Mills as a top sociologist with the audacity to challenge the prevailing wisdom of his time. For his next book, Mills decided to turn his attention to his own field of sociology. (See: Demystifying Sociology: What it is and why you should know)

Toward a New Sociology

Mills believed strongly that social scientists like himself had a responsibility to use their expertise and knowledge to serve the general public:

• They should not just vomit out a bunch of disconnected data, neglecting the more important story of how or why those findings came to be (an approach Mills derided as “abstracted empiricism”).
• Rather, social scientists should study the issues that matter most to people, communicate their findings clearly to the wider public, and do work relevant to people’s daily struggles.
• They should be a force for good: actively participating in public discourse, challenging prevailing power structures, and inspiring social change.

Unfortunately, in the 1950s, sociology was in the grip of a now-discredited theoretical school called functionalism.

In the starry-eyed world of functionalism, everything is the way it is for a good reason. Like the parts of your body cheerfully working together to promote your overall health and well-being, the various parts of society work together to form a harmonious whole. Even things that look like social ills would, upon further examination, reveal themselves to be necessary evils for a greater good when viewed through the rosy lens of functionalist theory.

The Folly of Functionalism

Lest anyone accuse me of being too harsh on functionalism, consider this example: One functionalist, Kingsley Davis, wrote an article for The American Sociological Review entitled “The Sociology of Prostitution.” In it, he insisted prostitution must serve a positive function in society. After all, it creates jobs for women, lets men get freaky on the side, and provides an outlet for horny dudes who would otherwise express their sexual frustrations in more harmful ways. If the so-called “oldest profession” is so bad, he argued, why has it persisted for thousands of years, despite many attempts to suppress it?

Functionalism was also infamous for its incredibly abstract theories. Harvard professor Talcott Parsons’s functionalist theory, which dominated the 1950s, was called AGIL: short for adaptation, goal attainment, integration, and latency. These are, supposedly, the four “core functions” of a society.

Mills thought this way of thinking was ridiculous:

• “Functionalism abstracts from history and from conflict,” he asserted. “It naturalizes the status quo and seeks to explain away the existence of conflict as a temporary defect.”
• In short, functionalism assumes, against all evidence, that we live in a just society. It assumes things are working out for the best, even when people get killed or maimed or subjugated. It assumes that social order and consensus are the natural state of society. (Like I said, the 1950s were a very different time!)

So, in his follow-up to The Power Elite, Mills took on the power elite of sociology. His mission was to pioneer a new sociological approach:

• One that was more holistic, taking into account the dynamism and complexity of social life.
• One that emphasized the inequalities, conflicts, and contradictions that are everywhere in our society, without assuming they all exist for our own good.
• Above all, Mills wanted to leave behind the oversimplified and idealized models of functionalism and return sociology’s focus to real people with real problems: empowering them to understand where those seemingly unique, personal problems had come from, and what they can do about them.

The result? The Sociological Imagination.

The more we understand what is happening in the world, the more frustrated we often become, for our knowledge leads to feelings of powerlessness. We feel that we are living in a world in which the citizen has become a mere spectator or a forced actor, and that our personal experience is politically useless and our political will a minor illusion.

C. Wright Mills: Letters and Autobiographical Writings

The sociological imagination, a concept introduced by C. Wright Mills, emphasizes the need to look beyond personal experiences to the social forces shaping society. It encourages a broader perspective on individual struggles that considers their social, cultural, and historical influences.

We all have problems, Mills notes. Many of those struggles have been imposed on us against our will. Many of us feel trapped in them, unable to escape. Yet we tend to think of them as “personal,” disconnected from the world around us.

But this is simply not true.

Everything, at all levels of society—from the individual circumstances of all 8 billion humans living on this giant spinning rock, to the countless interactions, networks, groups, cultures, institutions, and other collectives we continually create—is connected.

The separation of individual and society is an illusion, Mills argues. “Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both,” he declares. Furthermore, he proclaims, “many personal troubles are more likely to originate [today] in the institutions of the society than in the personal character of the individual.”

An example: obesity

Do individual choices play a role in whether someone is obese? Yes, for some. For others, not at all.

But did you know, in Mills’s time, the obesity rate in the United States was only about 13 percent…whereas today, it is over 40 percent?

Scholars have identified many reasons why the obesity rate has tripled. They include:

• The higher prices of healthy foods
• Aggressive marketing of unhealthy products
• The policies (or lack thereof) that permit corporations to profit from shoveling vast quantities of cheap junk into American midsections.

We often forget to consider these broader political, economic, and social factors. We tend to fall into the trap of only considering the immediate, the local, the personal. “[Our] visions and [our] powers are limited to the close-up scenes of job, family, neighborhood,” Mills observes. But it would be negligent to try to understand the full story of how someone came to be obese in this day and age without considering the fact that the obesity rate has freaking tripled (!) over the past 60 years. Clearly, there is something more at work here than individual willpower.

The same is true of many other personal struggles, Mills argues. Scratch the surface, and you will find dozens of political, economic, social, cultural, and historical factors that have contributed to its formation.

Just as individual people have their own life stories, societies have histories. It’s the combination of history and biography that gives the sociological imagination its awesome power.

More examples

Every single domain of people’s lives and experiences can be analyzed through the lens of the sociological imagination, even the most personal and intimate. Here are several more examples:

1) Academic success isn’t solely determined by individual talent and work ethic. Who goes to college, who gets into the best colleges, and who must take on astronomical debt just for the chance to earn a diploma are all influenced by dozens of factors having nothing to do with aptitude or merit.  

2) Many people have deeply personal reasons for choosing their career. But the ultimate outcome of that career may be shaped less by personal characteristics, and more by major economic, social, and technological forces that will be unleashed in decades to come.

6) Few problems make people feel more alone than struggling with mental illness or addiction. But like obesity, these rates have soared in recent decades:

• A 2020 survey by the American College Health Association, for example, found that over 60 percent of college students surveyed had experienced overwhelming anxiety within the past 12 months.
• Rates of depression were scarcely better, with more than 45 percent reporting that they had felt so depressed at some point during the previous 12 months that it had been difficult to function.
• About one-third of college students (31%) report symptoms consistent with alcohol abuse

Upon further examination, we can identify many broader social factors contributing to this explosion of mental health rates:

• The normalization of enormous academic, financial, and social stressors in college life
• Greater availability of therapeutic and pharmaceutical treatments
• Aggressive marketing by pharmaceutical companies
• Decreased stigma seeking help
• New findings about how the brain works

Death and Legacy

Like James Dean, Mills died young. He succumbed to heart disease at the age of 45 in 1962.

Though he did not live to see it, within ten years of his death, functionalism had become a defunct theory.

Its rosy outlook simply could not adequately explain the social strife and turmoil of the 1960s. And so sociologists sought alternate ways to understand society.

Using the sociological imagination, it was easy to see how the consensus of the 1950s was a charade: the result of an economic fluke and a deeply racist and sexist power structure that excluded large swathes of the population. It was also easy to see why these marginalized groups were not content to passively accept their oppression as a “necessary evil” in some functionalist fantasy.

For some reason, sociology textbooks keep presenting functionalism as if it is still one of the major theoretical schools. It is not. It has not been for 60 years. Please, publishing behemoths! Stop doing this.

Much of the sociology that is done today traces its theories and methods to this period after Mills’s death in the 1960s and 1970s, when the rejection of functionalism led to an explosion of new findings and insights that reinvigorated the discipline. These foundational texts illuminated people’s everyday struggles, interrogated inequalities, and understood people as active agents instead of pawns in a grand theory. Every one of them is inspired by Mills’s stirring articulation of how a social scientist should view the intersection of individual struggles and broader social contexts.

That is why the sociological imagination is pretty much required by law to be featured in Chapter 1 of every introductory sociology textbook in America. Given that Mills pretty much singlehandedly rescued sociology from its embarrassing mid-century missteps and was the first to articulate the analytical viewpoint embraced by all practicing sociologists today, it’s a well-deserved honor.

Why do conservatives hate sociology?

I don’t think I’m being unfair in characterizing the conservative attitude toward sociology as hatred. There are many scientific disciplines conservatives are not fond of. But few are as despised as sociology.

The sociological imagination, in my opinion, is a major reason why.

• Conservatives tend to blame individuals for their lot in life. Mills explicitly warns against this tendency to overemphasize individual factors and underemphasize the broader structural factors.
• The worldview of conservatism, with its deference to tradition and belief in a largely just world with a few necessary evils sprinkled in, resembles that of functionalism.
• By contrast, there is no deference to tradition in sociology. Every tradition has a history, and we cannot assume that history has been just. Nor should we assume there is any authority whatsoever in “the way things have always been done.”

These are not small differences. They are fundamental to the way both parties see the world. I don’t think there’s any argument that functionalism was a fundamentally conservative viewpoint. Millsian sociology (which is all sociology today) is fundamentally liberal. That’s why there are so few conservative sociologists. Even if one starts out conservative, one has to be trained not to simply take for granted that which conservatives insist must be taken for granted.

So I can understand why, from the perspective of a conservative, sociology may look like a liberal pseudoscience. But here’s the thing. Mills didn’t make the sociological imagination like that because he was liberal. He made it like that because it’s more scientific. It produces better findings and more useful conclusions.

So if you really think you can do a better job studying society than we can, prove it. Show your work. Send in your theories to our journals. We really do just want to do the best science. Do you?

What can the sociological imagination do for you?

I’ve been studying sociology since 2007, and I’m still inspired every day by the work and the promise of the sociological imagination. Whether you’re completely new to sociology or a long-time Mills disciple like me, you can always benefit by reminding yourself of what a powerful tool for personal and social transformation the sociological imagination is. It helps you do all of the following things:

1. Understanding who you are and how you fit in.

“The first fruit of this [sociological] imagination—and the first lesson of the social science that embodies it,” Mills argues, “is the idea that the individual can understand her own experience and gauge her own fate only by locating herself within her period.”

Who you are is bound up in when and where you are. Which groups do you belong to, and how do they tend to fare in this world? What advantages have you had? What disadvantages? To what extent are your individual problems–personal and intimate as they may be–actually bound up in larger political, economic, social, cultural, and historical processes playing out before our eyes?

Answering these great questions is not always easy. It can be humbling to acknowledge how fortunate or unfortunate your childhood was, how blind you were to your privilege, or conversely, how viciously you have been abused simply for being born into the wrong group. But you need to understand your true place in the world and how our society really works, in order to become the best possible future version of yourself.

2. Thinking critically and challenging the status quo.

All is not well in the world right now.

We are confronted by several society- and species-threatening problems. Our major political, economic, and media institutions, which have done an excellent job engineering these threats, seem incapable of doing anything to stop them.

We’re going to have to make some major changes if we want to survive the twenty-first century. The fallacy that things must be as they are for a good reason cannot hold us back. We must question everything and be brave enough to innovate.

The sociological imagination is what will allow us to correctly diagnose the major weaknesses of our society and innovate new, fairer forms of social organization without losing touch with people’s everyday struggles.

3. Empathizing with self and others.

You still must bear the consequences of the misfortunes that happen to you. But you are probably not as responsible for those outcomes as you think you are. Probably you are just doing the best you can amidst this maelstrom of personal troubles and social forces buffeting all of us about. So too is nearly everyone you meet.

The sociological imagination reminds us that major social issues are crashing into the living rooms of millions on a daily basis. So give yourself a break. Give other well-intentioned people a break, too. Life ain’t easy.

4. Making sense of one’s life and problems.

I am a male, cisgendered, able-bodied, highly educated, White, American, suburban professional. In other words, I’m about as privileged as one can be.

There’s only one domain in which I can’t say I’m privileged: mental health. For more than 30 years, I’ve been battling PTSD, ADD, anxiety, depression, and alcoholism.

For a long time, it felt so unfair. It was like the whole world had been set up for me to succeed, but because I could never get my shit together in my head, I had failed to live up to my potential.

But that’s the random, senseless brutality of the system in which we live. It’s no fairer for me to struggle with mental health than it is for anyone to have to struggle because of their race, gender, disability, education, age, or nationality. Nor did I or anyone else with privilege ask to be born into those advantaged groups. Can any of those group associations really tell me who I am or what I deserve?

Nowadays, it’s easier for me to accept my lot in life. I feel enormous compassion for those who have had to struggle as much or even more than I have. At the same time, I’m far more appreciative of the struggles I don’t have, and refuse to take them granted. I’ve eaten a lot of humble pie learning about how frequently I have unwittingly participated in the oppression of people who don’t look like me and I have tried to learn as much as I can about how to be a supportive ally to those who are oppressed.

The sociological imagination has helped me feel more comfortable in my own skin and recognize some tough truths about myself. I truly believe much of what is good about who I have become over the past 15 years is due to insights I gained from the sociological imagination.

5. Making sense of the world

The sociological imagination is so useful as a tool for personal inquiry it can be easy to forget there’s a whole science of social inquiry built upon it.

In truth, the sociological imagination is more than just a theory. It’s a requirement, a demand: If you want to understand social life, you have to look at the whole picture.

• You can’t uncritically draw conclusions from the infinitesimally small slice of life you’ve personally experienced–which is what most people do.
• You can’t look at problems in isolation, blame the victims, or invoke some platitude about things working out for the best–which is what most other people do.
• You have to consider all the relevant factors: political, economic, social, cultural, historical, personal, psychological, and so on.

Only then will you be in a position to determine, as scientifically as possible, which factors are most influential, without deciding ahead of time whether they are “good” or “bad.”

6. Finding solutions to social problems

I used to teach the course on Social Problems at George Mason University. It was wonderful to teach so many intelligent, passionate young women and men.

The only problem was the course content. As important and meaningful as it was, after 15 weeks of dwelling on the greatest social problems of our time, the students were inevitably a little depressed. They didn’t want to just learn about the problems. They wanted solutions.

The truth is, many proposed solutions to our problems are woefully inadequate because they fail to consider the wide range of influences required by the sociological imagination. Any solution to the social problem of obesity, for example, that does not take into account the wide range of political, economic, social, and cultural factors contributing to its explosion is not likely to work. Only after we do the work demanded by the sociological imagination can the real work of innovating and implementing reliable solutions begin.

I believe that solutions lacking a sociological imagination are bound to fail. Do you agree or disagree? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

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