The Sociological Imagination

By the fact of his living he contributes, however minutely, to the shaping of this society and to the course of its history, even as he is made by society and by its historical push and shove.

They cannot cope with their personal troubles in such ways as to control the structural transformations that usually lie behind them.

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.

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.

What they need, and what they feel they need, is a quality of mind that will help them to use information and to develop reason in order to achieve lucid summations of what is going on in the world and of what may be happening within themselves.