The Sociological Imagination

consciousness. Some would like to speak about a mutation of collective consciousness which leads to a conception of man as an organism dependent not on nature and individuals, but rather on institutions. This institutionalization of substantive values, this belief that a planned process of treatment ultimately gives results desired by the recipient

... See more

As citizens, he argued, we need two essential moral “powers” or “capacities.” First, the “capacity for a conception of the good”—in other words, the ability to reflect on and pursue our own idea of how we want to live. Second, the “capacity for a sense of justice”—the ability to form our own view about how we should organize society, and to coopera

... See more

Each of us is sewn by invisible threads into the superorganism. We are cells in the beast of family, company, and country. If those social ties are severed we begin to shrivel and die. There’s more. Hard work and the pursuit of challenge have seldom been demonstrated to hurt us, but we can be damaged powerfully by the lack of control. And without s

... See more

It is difficult to determine whether these questions are more of a personal or more general (collective) nature. It seems to me that the latter is the case. A collective problem, if not recognized as such, always appears as a personal problem, and in individual cases may give the impression that something is out of order in the realm of the persona

... See more