SOCIOL 3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: The Sociological Imagination, C. Wright Mills, Social Forces
Week 2 | Tuesday 01.15.2019
Voices from Marginalized People
- Traditionally as an academic discipline, sociology is very self-conscious in its attempts to high
perspectives and voices of everyday people, people historically marginalized
- Trying to highlight and center people on the margins of society on their problems and frustrations
Open disclaimer for class: it is difficult to talk about these social issues without getting political
Ex: a homeless bum
- Maybe he made some bad choices in life -- maybe he didn't go to college
- Maybe there were external social factors that led him this way
In many of the quotes discussed last week, we see problems both on the individual and societal level
All of them have a profound awareness of their social problems
Broad and social forces are affecting their everyday life
Society is not an abstraction. It is composed of human beings.
- Bc of the demands of daily life, be of all the distractions that exist in the world, it can be difficult
to stand back and look at society in a scientific and sober way
- Most people know when their needs are not met, they know how economic and societal
influences are affecting their life
The Promise of the sociological imagination
- C Wright Mills, 1959
- Task of the book was to clarify relationship between the individual self and the wider society
- The sociological imagination -- the sociological viewpoint that prof wishes to instill in students
Passage #1:
Nowadays people often feel that their private lives are a series of traps, they sense that within their
everyday worlds, they cannot overcome their troubles, and in this feeling, they are often quite correct.
What ordinary people are directly aware of 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 places, they move vicariously and remain spectators. And the more aware they become,
however, vaguely, of ambitions and threats which transcend their immediate locales, the more trapped
they seem to feel.
- Series of traps: trapped by structural circumstances
- People talking about their everyday personal troubles = trapped by the existence in which
they were living out
- Trapped by society, constrained by their social conditions
Passage #2:
Underlying this sense of being trapped are seemingly impersonal changes in the very structure of
continent-wide societies. The facts of contemporary history are also facts about the success and failure of
individual men and women. When a society is industrialized, a peasant becomes a worker, a feudal lord is
Document Summary
Traditionally as an academic discipline, sociology is very self-conscious in its attempts to high perspectives and voices of everyday people, people historically marginalized. Trying to highlight and center people on the margins of society on their problems and frustrations. Open disclaimer for class: it is difficult to talk about these social issues without getting political. Maybe he made some bad choices in life -- maybe he didn"t go to college. Maybe there were external social factors that led him this way. In many of the quotes discussed last week, we see problems both on the individual and societal level. All of them have a profound awareness of their social problems. Broad and social forces are affecting their everyday life. Bc of the demands of daily life, be of all the distractions that exist in the world, it can be difficult to stand back and look at society in a scientific and sober way.
