The Sociological Imagination: Understanding the Relationship between Experience and Society

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Concept of Social Imagination.
“The Sociological Imagination,” by Charles Wright Mills seeks to encourage individuals
to view their lives in a different perspective from the one they hold. The book encourages people
to desist from hiding their personalities but rather open to all the good the world has to offer. The
book seeks to reconcile two different concepts in reality that are abstract which are the individual
and the society. The book presents the concept of sociological imagination which is defined by
Wright as "The vivid awareness of the relationship between experience and the wider society."
The sociological imagination can be said to be one's ability to see things from a social
perspective and how they do interact and have an influence on someone. For one to have a
sociological imagination, one should be able to pull him/herself from the condition he/she is in
and reason from an alternative point of view(Crossman).
Mills starts by criticizing the trends in sociology that were present by then, and he then
proceeds to explain sociology in his perspective. Mills proposes his ideal version of sociological
practice that it is dependent on one’s view of the world and the historical context at the time and
the immediate surrounding (environment) in which the individual exists. Mills further
emphasizes on the importance of getting to see connections between individual experience, the
agency and the social structure. An instance can be through our experiences with our “personal
troubles” such as not having the ability to pay our bills being actually "public issues" since social
problems do affect many. Mills also does recommend us to avoid strict adherence to one theory

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since practicing sociology in one way will tend to produce biased results and recommendations.
Mills urges the social experts to work in the field of social science as a whole rather than
specializing in a single field such as economics, sociology or political science. Mills had the
perspective that sociology can show us that society happens to be responsible for most of our
problems. His argument had the perspective that sociology had the role of transforming personal
problems into public ones (Mills 11).
Forces that may seem remote and impersonal may be linked to incidents that do take place
in an individual's life. This means that people majorly tend to look at their own personal
problems as issues that are social and connecting individual experiences with those of the
society. For instance, women who are forced to live under repression might link the conditions in
which they live in. The same could also apply to people who have lived under poverty
conditions; they would also link their conditions to those of the society in which they live in.
Another instance could be in the case of a person being unemployed; the person will tend to link
his unemployment to that of the society which he or she lives in (Janis, Irving, and Leon 18).
My parents never had much of an influence in my life, I grew up very distanced from
them and the ways in which they were raised. My life was influenced more from personal
reasons that happened to me and did not connect to my parents. I grew up with a lot of hardships
that I had to overcome. At around age 13 or 14, I was physically attacked by a guy who was 19.
Instead of letting my friends and family comfort me, I isolated myself from the rest of the world
almost completely. After, I kind of just shut down and stuck to myself. When I was 15 or 16, I
decided to let someone into my life that I fell for, and they committed suicide. From that, I didn't
just isolate myself, I lost myself. I grew so angry that I turned on my parents, and the people that