Sublime

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.

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.

Dans la glaciation politique des sciences sociales américaines des années 1950, Wright Mills apparaît en effet comme un franc-tireur, attaquant aussi bien les constructions théoriques pompeuses d’un Talcott Parsons que la division extrême des objets de recherche pratiquée par l’empirisme caractéristique du tournant béhavioriste. Il proclame son att

collectivity? The relationship of an individual to history and time? What kinds of public roles seem important and privileged?