The Promise, C. Wright Mills

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.