C. Wright Mills: Exact Imagination, Late Work

Abstract

For Mills, ideas and ideals – to be clear, realist ideas, utopian ideals – and their relationship to history-making, should serve as fulcra for sociological analyses. The “promise of sociology,” the discussion of which opens The Sociological Imagination, was meaningful only in relation to the promise of reason and freedom in democratic society. Humanity is a largely and increasingly self-formative (and self-destructive) species, especially late in evolutionary development. To think this way is to exhibit the sociological imagination, which is not appreciably different than what and how Marx thought stripped of 19th-century blind spots. If the optimistic side of Mills’ theory of postmodernity – what Zygmunt Bauman, in a slightly different context, called “modernity without illusions” – offered the possibility of the sociological imagination as the potential “common denominator” of a self-aware (post-)modern world against threat of the total determination.