Let me confess a sin. The opening chapter from C Wright Mills’ The Sociological Imagination was the very first piece of required reading handed to me as an undergraduate. It also holds the distinction of beginning a chain of photocopied chapters and essays that were filed away in my waste paper bin. Like many first years, scholarly activity initially came second to binge drinking and intimate trysts with the toilet bowl. And so this classic statement of introductory sociology got the body swerve treatment, and Imagination remained one of the many canonical works I hadn’t got round to reading. Two decades on and I’m beginning university afresh, albeit now as a lecturer. So, belatedly, I was quite pleased that Monday morning’s introduction to social theory tutorial required I read the self-same chapter I unceremoniously dumped all those years ago.

What then is this thing, the ‘sociological imagination’? Using the state of 50s America as his jumping off point, Mills argued that the popular sense, the popular mood was suffused with a strange sense of unease. It was a condition in which people were told by their papers, their screens, their politicians and ideologues that they lived in a state of freedom. An American could be whoever they wanted to be and follow their own inclinations and desires. But the scope of this freedom was very much limited to every American’s private life. Hence the popular feeling, the hard-to-place sensation that all wasn’t safe and well was an outcome of the friction between the boxed-in character of private/familial social relations inside the home, and the uncertain, potentially terrifying buffeting of large, invisible, unknowable and impersonal social forces outside it. Continue reading →