This is the task that Steve Fuller sets himself in this major new invitation to study Sociology. The book: Critically examines the history of the social sciences to discover what the key contributions of sociology have been and how relevant they remain.
Demonstrates how biological and sociological themes have been intertwined from the beginning of both disciplines, from the 19th century to the present day. Covers virtually all of sociology's classic theorists and themes. Provides a glossary of key thinkers and concepts. This book sets the agenda for imagining sociology in the 21st century and will attract students and professionals alike. The book: Critically examines the history of the social sciences to discover what the key contributions of sociology have been and how relevant they.
Wright Mills is best remembered for his highly acclaimed work The Sociological Imagination, in which he set forth his views on how social science should be pursued. Hailed upon publication as a cogent and hard-hitting critique, The Sociological Imagination took issue with the ascendant schools of sociology in the United States, calling for a humanist sociology connecting the social, personal, and historical dimensions of our lives.
The sociological imagination Mills calls for is a sociological vision, a way of. This highly acclaimed study of the social sciences critiques the ascendant "schools" of sociology in this country and reassesses the tradition of classic sociological analysis. The sociological imagination Mills calls for is a sociological vision, a way of looking at the world that can see links between the apparently private problems of the individual and important social issues.
Wright Mills is one of the towering figures in contemporary sociology and his writings continue to be of great relevance to the social science community. Generations of sociology students have enjoyed learning about the discipline from reading his best known book The Sociological Imagination. Over the years the title has become a term in itself with a variety of interpretations, many far removed from the original.
The chapters in Part One of this book begins with general issues around the nature and significance of the sociological imagination, continue through discussions of modes of theorising and historical explanation, the relationship between history and biography, and the intellectual and political relationship of Mills to Marxism.
They conclude with considerations on issues of class, power, and warfare. No one runs it altogether, but in so far as any group does, the power elite. They ought to be about man and society and sometimes they are. These ac- tions are often rather orderly, for the individuals in the system share standards of value and of appropriate and practical ways to behave. Some of these standards we may call norms; those who act in accordance with them tend to act similarly on similar occasions.
That this is a metaphor I am now going to forget, because I want you to take as very real my Con- cept: The social equilibrium. There are two major ways by which the social equilibrium is maintained, and by which—should either or both fail—disequi- librium results. Part of this social making of persons consists in their acquiring motives for taking the social actions required or expected by others.
By Tine' of course, I refer to whatever action is typically expected and approved in the social system. The first problem of maintaining social equilibrium is to make people want to do what is required and expected of them. That failing, the second problem is to adopt other means to keep them in line. The best classifications and definitions of these social controls have been given by Max Weber, and I have little to add to what he, and a few other writers since then, have said so well.
One point does puzzle me a little: given this social equilibrium, and all the socialization and control that man it, how is it possible that anyone should ever get out of line? This I cannot explain very well, that is, in the terms of my Systematic and General Theory of the social system.
About these two problems, I recommend that whenever you come upon them, you undertake empirical investigations, end of translation Perhaps that is enough. In the meantime, we have three tasks: first, to char- acterize the logical style of thinking represented by grand theory; second, to make clear a certain generic confusion in this particu- lar example; third, to indicate how most social scientists now set up and solve Parsons' problem of order.
My purpose in all this is to help grand theorists get down from their useless heights. The basic cause of grand theory is the initial choice of a level of thinking so general that its practitioners cannot logically get down to observation. They never, as grand theorists, get down from the higher generalities to problems in their historical and structural contexts. This absence of a firm sense of genuine prob- lems, in turn, makes for the unreality so noticeable in their pages.
One resulting characteristic is a seemingly arbitrary and certainly endless elaboration of distinctions, which neither enlarge our un- derstanding nor make our experience more sensible. This in turn is revealed as a partially organized abdication of the effort to describe and explain human conduct and society plainly.
When we consider what a word stands for, we are dealing with its semantic aspects; when we consider it in relation to other words, we are dealing with its syntactic features. These are three 'dimensions of mean- ing' which Charles M. I, No. University of Chicago Press, Its practitioners do not truly understand that when we define a word we are merely inviting others to use it as we would like it to be used; that the purpose of definition is to focus argument upon fact, and that the proper result of good definition is to transform argument over terms into disagreements about fact, and thus open arguments to further inquiry.
The grand theorists are so preoccupied by syntactic meanings and so unimaginative about semantic references, they are so rigidly confined to such high levels of abstraction that the 'typol- ogies' they make up—and the work they do to make them up— seem more often an arid game of Concepts than an effort to define systematically—which is to say, in a clear and orderly way—the problems at hand, and to guide our efforts to solve them.
One great lesson that we can learn from its systematic absence in the work of the grand theorists is that every self-conscious thinker must at all times be aware of—and hence be able to con- trol—the levels of abstraction on which he is working.
The capac- ity to shuttle between levels of abstraction, with ease and with clarity, is a signal mark of the imaginative and systematic thinker. Around such terms as 'capitalism' or 'middle class' or 'bureauc- racy' or 'power elite' or 'totalitarian democracy,' there are often somewhat tangled and obscured connotations, and in using these terms, such connotations must be carefully watched and con- trolled. Around such terms, there are often 'compounded' sets of facts and relations as well as merely guessed-at factors and obser- vations.
These too must be carefully sorted out and made clear in our definition and in our use. To clarify the syntactic and the semantic dimensions of such conceptions, we must,be aware of the hierarchy of specificity under each of them, and we must be able to consider all levels of this hierarchy.
And to what extent are we entitled to assume that, by definition, the term implies asser- tions about the political order as well as economic institutions?
Such habits of mind I suppose to be the keys to systematic thinking and their absence the keys to the fetishism of the Con- cept. Perhaps one result of such an absence will become clearer as we consider, more specifically now, a major confusion of Parsons' book.
Seemingly, this is deliberate in the interest of making the con- cern of sociologists a specialized endeavor distinct from that of economists and political scientists. Sociology, according to Par- sons, has to do with 'that aspect of the theory of social systems which is concerned with the phenomena of the institutionalization of patterns of value-orientation in the social system, with the con- ditions of that institutionalization; and of changes in the patterns, with conditions of conformity with and deviance from a set of such patterns, and with motivational processes in so far as they are involved in all of these.
We would also like to find out why there is a variety of such values and why they change. When we do find a more or less unitary set of values, we would like to find out why some people do and others do not conform to them, end of translation As David Lockwood has noted,7 such a statement delivers the sociologist from any concern with 'power,' with economic and political institutions.
I would go further than that. This state- ment, and, in fact, the whole of Parsons' book, deals much more 6 Parsons, op. VII, 2 June Those in authority attempt to justify their rule over institutions by linking it, as if it were a necessary consequence, with widely believed-in moral symbols, sacred emblems, legal formulae.
These central conceptions may refer to a god or gods, the Vote of the majority,' 'the will of the people,' 'the aristocracy of talent or wealth,' to the 'divine right of kings,' or to the allegedly extra- ordinary endowment of the ruler himself. Social scientists, follow- ing Weber, call such conceptions legitimations,' or sometimes 'symbols of justification.
Similarly in psychological analysis, such master symbols, rele- vant when they are taken over privately, become the reasons and often the motives that lead persons into roles and sanction their enactment of them. If, for example, economic institutions are pub- licly justified in terms of them, then references to self-interest may be acceptable justification for individual conduct. But, if it is felt publicly necessary to justify such institutions in terms of 'public service and trust,' the old self-interest motives and reasons may « H.
Gerth and C. Legitima- tions that are publicly effective often become, in due course, effective as personal motives. This is, indeed, a useful and important sub- ject. The relations of such symbols to the structure of institutions are among the most important problems of social science. Such symbols, however, do not form some autonomous realm within a society; their social relevance lies in their use to justify or to oppose the arrangement of power and the positions within this arrangement of the powerful.
Their psychological relevance lies in the fact that they become the basis for adherence to the struc- ture of power or for opposing it.
We may not merely assume that some such set of values, or legitimations, must prevail lest a social structure come apart, nor may we assume that a social structure must be made coher- ent or unified by any such 'normative structure.
In fact, for modern Western societies—and in particular the United States—there is much evidence that the opposite of each of these assumptions is the more accurate.
Often—although not in the United States since World War II—there are quite well organized symbols of opposition which are used to justify insurgent move- ments and to debunk ruling authorities. The continuity of the American political system is quite unique, having been threat- ened by internal violence only once in its history; this fact may be among those that have misled Parsons in his image of The Normative Structure of Value-Orientation.
Just as often, or even more often, such moral identities as men of some society may have rest on the fact that institutional rulers successfully monopolize, and even impose, their master symbols. In order to lend continuity to the sequence of these symbols, they are presented as in some way connected with one another. Or, we may add, the Concept of 'normative order' may be fetishized.
I have, of course, just paraphrased Marx and Engels speaking of Hegel. There is of course an interplay between justifying symbols, institutional authorities, and obedient persons. At times we should not hesitate to assign causal weight to master symbols—but we may not misuse the idea as the theory of social order or of the unity of society. There are better ways to construct a 'unity,' as we shall presently see, ways that are more useful in the formula- tion of significant problems of social structure and closer to observable materials.
So far as 'common values' interest us, it is best to build up our conception of them by examining the legitimations of each insti- tutional order in any given social structure, rather than to begin by attempting first to grasp them, and in their light 'explain' the society's composition and unity.
GRAND THEORY 39 institutional order have taken over that order's legitimations, when such legitimations are the terms in which obedience is successfully claimed, or at least complacency secured.
Social structures that display such universal and central symbols are naturally extreme and 'pure' types. At the other end of the scale, there are societies in which a dominant set of institutions controls the total society and super- imposes its values by violence and the threat of violence.
This need not involve any breakdown of the social structure, for men may be effectively conditioned by formal discipline; and at times, unless they accept institutional demands for discipline, they may have no chance to earn a living.
A skilled compositor employed by a reactionary newspaper, for example, may for the sake of making a living and holding his job conform to the demands of employer discipline. In his heart, and out- side the shop, he may be a radical agitator. Many German socialists allowed themselves to become perfectly disciplined soldiers under the Kaiser's flag—despite the fact that their subjective values were those of revolutionary Marxism.
It is a long way from symbols to 11conduct and back again, and not all integration is based on symbols. To emphasize such conflict of value is not to deny 'the force of rational consistencies. We might well imagine a 'pure type' of society, a perfectly disciplined social structure, in which the dominated men, for a variety of reasons, cannot quit their prescribed roles, but nevertheless share none of the dominator's values, and thus in no way believe in the legitimacy of the order.
It would be like a ship manned by galley slaves, in which the disciplined movement of the oars reduces the rowers to cogs in a machine, and the violence of the whipmaster is only rarely needed. The galley slaves need not even be aware of the ship's 11 Gerth and Mills, op.
But perhaps I begin to describe rather than to imagine. And that, of course, may be true of any institutional order, not only of the political and economic. A father may impose demands upon his family by threatening to withhold inheritance, or by the use of such violence as the political order may allow him.
Even in such sacred little groups as families, the unity of 'common values' is by no means neces- sary: distrust and hatred may be the very stuff needed to hold a loving family together.
A society as well may of course flourish quite adequately without such a 'normative structure' as grand theorists believe to be universal. I do not here wish to expound any solution to the problem of order, but merely to raise questions. For if we cannot do that, we must, as demanded by the fiat of quite arbitary definition, assume the 'normative structure' which Parsons imagines to be the heart of 'the social system. Events that are beyond human decision do happen; social arrangements do change without benefit of explicit decision.
But in so far as such decisions are made and in so far as they could be but are not the problem of who is in- volved in making them or not making them is the basic prob- lem of power. We cannot assume today that men must in the last resort be governed by their own consent.
Among the means of power that now prevail is the power to manage and to manipulate the consent of men. Surely in our time we need not argue that, in the last resort, coercion is the 'final' form of power. But then we are by no means constantly at the last resort. Authority power justified by the beliefs of the voluntarily obedient and manipulation power wielded unbeknown to the powerless must also be considered, along with coercion.
In fact, the three types must constantly be sorted out when we think about the nature of power. In the modern world, I think we must bear in mind, power is often not so authoritative as it appeared to be in the medieval period; justifications of rulers no longer seem so necessary to their exercise of power.
Further- more, such ideologies as are available to the powerful are often neither taken up nor used by them.
Ideologies usually arise as a response to an effective debunking of power; in the United States such opposition has not been recently effective enough to create a felt need for new ideologies of rule. Today, of course, many people who are disengaged from prevailing allegiances have not acquired new ones, and so are inattentive to political concerns of any kind. They are neither radical nor reactionary. They are inactionary. If we accept the Greek's definition of the idiot as an altogether private man, then we must conclude that many citizens of many societies are indeed idiots.
This—and I use the word with care—this spiritual condition seems to me the key to much modern malaise among political in- tellectuals, as well as the key to much political bewilderment in modern society. Intellectual 'conviction' and moral TDelief are not necessary, in either the rulers or the ruled, for a structure of power to persist and even to flourish.
So far as the role of ide- ologies is concerned, the frequent absence of engaging legitima- tion and the prevalence of mass apathy are surely two of the central political facts about the Western societies today. But we are not at all helped by the deviant assumptions of Parsons, who merely assumes that there is, presumably in every society, such a Value hierarchy' as he imagines. Moreover, its implications systematically impede the clear formulation of sig- nificant problems: To accept his scheme we are required to read out of the picture the facts of power and indeed of all institutional structures, in particular the economic, the political, the military.
In this curious 'general theory,' such structures of domination have no place. In the terms provided, we cannot properly pose the empirical question of the extent to which, and in what manner, institutions are, in any given case, legitimated. The idea of the normative order that is set forth, and the way it is handled by grand theorists, leads us to assume that virtually all power is legitimated.
In fact: that in the social system, 'the maintenance of the complementarity of role-expectations, once established, is not problematical No special mechanisms are required for the explanation of the maintenance of complementary interaction-orientation. Structural antagonisms, large-scale revolts, revolutions— they cannot be imagined.
Not only does the 'collective behavior' of terrorized masses and excited mobs, crowds and movements—with which our era is so filled—find no place in the normatively created social structures 12 Parsons, op. Virtually any problem of substance that is taken up in the terms of grand theory is incapable of being clearly stated.
Worse: its statement is often loaded with evaluations as well as obscured by sponge-words. It is, for example, difficult to imagine a more futile endeavor than analyzing American society in terms of 'the value pattern' of 'universalistic-achievement' with no mention of the changing nature, meaning and forms of success characteristic of modern capitalism, or of the changing structure of capitalism itself; or, analyzing United States stratification in terms of 'the dominant value system' without taking into account the known statistics of life-chances based on levels of property and income.
Indeed,' Alvin Gouldner has remarked, 'the extent to which Parsons' efforts at theoretical and empirical analysis of change suddenly lead him to enlist a body of Marxist concepts and assumptions is nothing less than bewildering It almost seems as if two sets of books were being kept, one for the analysis of equilibrium and another for the investigation of change.
Lockwood, op. It makes one entertain the hope that grand theorists have not lost all touch with historical reality. It is possible to be brief about it because in the development of social science it has been re-defined, and in its most useful state- ment might now be called the problem of social integration; it does of course require a working conception of social structure and of historical change.
Unlike grand theorists, most social scien- tists, I think, would give answers running something like this: First of all, there is no one answer to the question, What holds a social structure together?
There is no one answer because social structures differ profoundly in their degrees and kinds of unity. In fact, types of social structure are usefully conceived in terms of different modes of integration. When we descend from the level of grand theory to historical realities, we immediately realize the irrelevance of its monolithic Concepts.
With these we can- not think about the human variety, about Nazi Germany in , Sparta in seventh century B. Merely to name this variety is surely to suggest that whatever these societies may have in common must be discovered by empirical examination. To predicate anything beyond the most empty formalities about the historical range of social structure is to mistake one's own capacity to talk for all that is meant by the work of social investigation.
One may usefully conceive types of social structure in terms of such institutional orders as the political and kinship, the mili- tary and economic, and the religious. Having defined each of these in such a way as to be able to discern their outlines in a given historical society, one asks how each is related to the others, how, in short, they are composed into a social structure. In that classical liberal society each order of institutions is conceived as autono- mous, and its freedom demanded from any co-ordination by other orders.
In the economy, there is laissez faire; in the religious sphere, a variety of sects and churches openly compete on the market for salvation; kinship institutions are set up on a marriage market in which individuals choose one another. Not a family- made man, but a self-made man, comes to ascendancy in the sphere of status. In the political order, there is party compe- tition for the votes of the individual; even in the military zone there is much freedom in the recruitment of state militia, and in a wide sense—a very important sense—one man means one rifle.
The principle of integration—which is also the basic legitima- tion of this society—is the ascendancy within each order of insti- tutions of the free initiative of independent men in competition with one another.
It is in this fact of correspondence that we may understand the way in which a classic liberal society is unified. Within the political order there is more fragmentation: Many parties compete to influence the state, but no one of them is powerful enough to control the results of eco- nomic concentration, one of these results—along with other factors —being the slump. The Nazi movement successfully exploits the mass despair, especially that of its lower middle classes, in the economic slump and brings into close correspondence the political, military, and economic orders.
One party monopolizes and re- makes the political order, abolishing or amalgamating all other parties that might compete for power. In these main orders there is, first, a corresponding concen- tration of power; then each of them coincides and co-operates in the taking of power. President Hindenburg's army is not interested in defending the Weimar Republic, or in crushing the marching columns of a popular war party.
Big business circles are willing to help finance the Nazi party, which, among other things, promises to smash the labor movement. And the three types of elite join in an often uneasy coalition to maintain power in their respective orders and to co-ordinate the rest of society. Rival political parties are either suppressed and outlawed, or they dis- band voluntarily. Kinship and religious institutions, as well as all organizations within and between all orders, are infiltrated and co-ordinated, or at least neutralized.
The totalitarian party-state is the means by which high agents of each of the three dominant orders co-ordinate their own and other institutional orders. The symbol spheres of all institutions are controlled by the party. With the partial exception of the religious order, no rival claims to legitimate autonomy are permitted. There is a party monopoly of formal communications, including educational insti- tutions.
All symbols are recast to form the basic legitimation of the co-ordinated society. The principle of absolute and magical leadership charismatic rule in a strict hierarchy is widely pro- mulgated, in a social structure that is to a considerable extent held together by a network of rackets. For the above account, see Gerth and Mills, op.
Useful work on such problems will proceed in terms of a variety of such working models as I have outlined here, and these models will be used in close and empirical connection with a range of historical as well as contemporary social struc- tures. If, for example, we observe American society at the time of Tocqueville and again in the middle of the twentieth century, we see at once that the way the nineteenth century structure 'hangs together' is quite different from its current modes of integration.
We ask: How have each of its instutional orders changed? How have its relations with each of the others changed? What have been. And, in each case, what have been the necessary and sufficient causes of these changes?
Usually, of course, the search for adequate cause requires at least some work in a comparative as well as an historical manner. In an over-all way, we can summarize such an analysis of social change, and thus formulate more economically a range of larger problems, by in- dicating that the changes have resulted in a shift from one 'mode of integration' to another.
For example, the last century of Ameri- can history shows a transition from a social structure largely integrated by correspondence to one much more subject to co- ordination. The general problem of a theory of history can not be separated from the general problem of a theory of social structure.
I think it is obvious that in their actual studies, working social scientists do not experience any great theoretical difficulties in understanding the two in a unified way. Perhaps that is why one Behemoth is worth, to social science, twenty Social Systems. I do not, of course, present these points in any effort to make a definitive statement of the problems of order and change—that is, of social structure and history.
Perhaps these remarks are also useful to make more specific one aspect of the promise of social science. And, of course, I have set them forth here in order to indicate how inadequately grand theorists have handled one major problem of social science. In The Social System Parsons has not been able to get down to the work of social science because he is possessed by the idea that the one model of social order he has constructed is some kind of universal model; because, in fact, he has fetishized his Concepts.
It is not used to state more pre- cisely or more adequately any new problem of recognizable sig- nificance. It has not been developed out of any need to fly high for a little while in order to see something in the social world more clearly, to solve some problem that can be stated in terms of the historical reality in which men and institutions have their con- crete being. Its problem, its course, and its solutions are grandly theoretical. The withdrawal into systematic work on conceptions should be only a formal moment within the work of social science.
It is useful to recall that in Germany the yield of such formal work was soon turned to encyclopedic and historical use. That use, pre- sided over by the ethos of Max Weber, was the climax of the classic German tradition. In considerable part, it was made pos- sible by a body of sociological work in which general conceptions about society were closely joined with historical exposition. Clas- sical Marxism has been central to the development of modern sociology; Max Weber, like so many other sociologists, developed much of his work in a dialogue with Karl Marx.
But the amnesia of the American scholar has always to be recognized. In grand theory we now confront another formalist withdrawal, and again, what is properly only a pause seems to have become permanent.
Skip to content. Toggle navigation. Author : C. Wright Mills is best remembered for his highly acclaimed work The Sociological Imagination, in which he set forth his views on how social science should be pursued. Hailed upon publication as a cogent and hard-hitting critique, The Sociological Imagination took issue with the ascendant schools of sociology in the United States, calling for a humanist sociology connecting the social, personal, and historical dimensions of our lives.
The sociological imagination Mills calls for is a sociological vision, a way of looking at the world that can see links between the apparently private problems of the individual and important social issues. The Sociological Imagination. Get Books.
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