“The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relation between the two within society. That is its task and its promise. To recognize this task and this promise is the mark of the classic social analyst.” (C. Wright Mills. 1959:6. The Sociological Imagination)

Sociology's primary concern is with human interaction. Human interaction cannot occur without significant symbols, symbols given shared meaning. Therefore, this primary concern of sociology becomes meaningless if interaction is not situated within its socio-cultural roots that give rise to those 'shared meanings'. In other words, interaction based on symbols given shared meaning (or language) cannot be understood without being situated within a social structure. For it is within a social structure, its network of social institutions, held together by a culture (the material basis of culture) that all of human life is enacted (as 'roles' associated with various social positions within those institutions). These roles give rise to shared understandings of ‘reality’ as well as set boundaries on what is considered 'rational' in a culture.

Since these social positions that people occupy (status) and the roles that they enact in the most part preexist (and will post-exist) them, human interaction cannot be understood by reference to the individual or to his or her private circuits of life alone. Language is not invented by the individual and therefore consciousness is not self generated but socially imposed and determines psychological outlook, mind as well as identity. Social life gets 'socially constructed' only contextually, within the context of a preexisting language that is firmly rooted within a preexisting social structure, a structure larger than the individual and his/her primary group. Once you assume the existence of language, it leads to a culture and culture cannot be explained without reference to social institutions and a social structure (Gerth & Mills 1964). No human interaction has ever been observed empirically without a preexisting social structure. Detaching language and the individual from the structure within which his/her life is enacted, that is detaching the 'individual' from the social means reducing the social being to a mere biological organism indistinguishable from other animals. What are distinctly human traits, language, reflexivity and consciousness all occur within the context of a preexisting social structure.

Roles enacted within a social structure do not translate into a uniform reality for all simply because people occupy various combinations of positions within the network of social institutions, the various positions that constitute their biographical maps. The resulting uncommon experiential reality based on varying biographical maps brings about the diversity of outcomes for different people, yet all of those 'maps' are situated within a social structure. If people's experiential reality can be controlled through preformed roles and ascribed statuses, as in bureaucratized social structures, we get what sociologists have described as 'mass society', where biographies of people are standardized and implicitly controlled leading to uniform outcomes.

The sociologist is also interested in history because no preexisting social structure is unmarked by historical events and occurrences, which then translate into the mark of history on individual biographies. In order to understand a social structure, it must be historically situated and in order to understand the biography of an individual, a group or a nation, it must be structurally situated. Detaching an individual from the group, a group from the nation, a nation from the international system, means that the entire social logic based on which the part exists (and interacts) within the whole is obfuscated and skewed. This intersection of biography, history and social structure is what C. Wright Mills referred to as the Sociological Imagination (1959) and its primary purpose that is centered around the “social problem” in the tradition of the classical sociologists, is an ability to translate personal troubles that occur within the private circuits of individual lives and local milieu into public issues that are situated within a social (and global) structure and represent the setup of a society and its link to the wider International System.

Ignoring social structure and claiming to study individuals alone (or 'language' and scripts) is not sociology. The 'task and promise' of the sociological imagination (Mills 1959:6) of using the biography's link to a (historically formed) social structure is not fulfilled by semantics based 'social' analysis. For those (like the postmodernists) who claim that there is no structure and no history, their analysis is at best a sociological hallucination for they, “...do not possess the quality of mind essential to grasp the interplay of man/woman and society, of biography and history, of self and world” (Mills 1959:4). In other words they lack the sociological imagination.


References

Gerth, Hans and C. Wright Mills. 1964. Character and Social Structure: The Psychology of Social Institutions. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Worth.

Mills, C. Wright. 1959. The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University Press


Muhammed Asadi