The Analysis of the Sociological Imagination

1800 Words8 Pages
To consider society as a whole and to understand its structure, the components of society should be understood. None of the individuals are able to act or react independently of their milieu that they live within. The society, that individuals live in, shapes them while the individuals have been building the structures, norms and institutions of this society. Are the most important component individuals, who created the economic, political and structural terms of the society, able to grasp the interaction between them and society? That was the question Mills pointed at in his work; individuals are not able to fully comprehend the contradiction and the interaction between their life and the social structures that they had built. On the other hand ‘the more aware they become, the more trapped they seem to feel’ (Mills 1959:3), where they cannot find the connection between the way of their life and the course of history, which effected mainly the structures of their society and milieu which surrounds them as an orbit. Mills analysed and showed the strong interaction between those components where they only can be understandable by understanding all and looking beyond them. He introduced ‘Sociological Imagination’; being able to see the private troubles and public issues and the capacity to shift from one perspective to another. What he meant; the private troubles must be examined in the context of the social issues. In our days people feel like they are bounded by society where they seem to be trapped by social norms of this society. They can only overcome their troubles if they can see the connection between their life and the society’s history, and the norms and structures were created by this history. To be able to understand the connection the history of the society and the complexity of their lives have to be understood both. The conflicts and troubles that the
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