Useful of social imagination to the society and how can be used to solve social problems
The Sociological Imagination is C. Wright Mills’s 1959 statement about what social science should be and the good it can produce. In this way, it is a polemical book. It has a vision for sociology, and it criticizes those with a different vision. For Mills, the stakes are high. He thinks contemporary society is characterized by institutional crisis and the confinement of men. A sociological imagination, he argues, can help lead the way out of these problems.
Mills was writing at a time in which sociology was still a fairly new discipline in the United States. Not every university had a sociology department, and it wasn’t until after World War II that sociology was considered a central part of the academic system. As a consequence, sociologists at the time actively debated how to do sociology and what it meant to study society. It was necessary both to assert the importance of sociology and to come to an understanding of what sociology entailed.
