1. The Sociological
Imagination

2. C. Wright Mills
C. Wright Mills coined the famous phrase “Sociological
Imagination," which is used throughout sociology today.
The Sociological Imagination is the concept of being
able to "think ourselves away" from the familiar routines
of our daily lives in order to look at them anew.
Mills defined Sociological Imagination as "the vivid
awareness of the relationship between experience and
the wider society." It is the ability to see things socially
and how they interact and influence each other. To have
a Sociological Imagination, a person must be able to
pull away from the situation and think from an
alternative point of view.

3. The Sociological Imagination
The Sociological Imagination is
stimulated by a willingness to
view the social world from the
perspective of others.
It involves moving away from
thinking in terms of the
individual and their
problems, focusing rather on
the social circumstances that
produce social problems.

4. Private Issues & Public Issues
There is a strong tendency in liberal democracies towards seeing human behaviour in terms of
individual characteristics, abilities, choices and preferences.
We tend to experience whatever happens in our own lives as unique and private, and also to
interpret what happens to other people as unique and private to them.
These are seen as ‘private troubles’.
Sociologists, on the other hand, are more interested in the relationship between what happens to
individuals in their lives and the larges processes of social, economic and political change that
might be said to lie underneath or behind those happenings.
The discipline of Sociology encourages you to look for the social processes and structures that
give a generalised pattern to those private troubles and thus turn them into ‘public issues’.

5. Example – Unemployment
Private Trouble Public Issue
When 1 person is unemployed, that When 3 million people are
is a ‘Private Trouble’. unemployed, that is a ‘Public Issue’.

6. Example – Fertility
Private Trouble Public Issue
When 1 couple never has a When increasing numbers of
baby, that is a ‘private trouble’. couples never have a baby, that is
a ‘public issue’ referred to as the
‘declining fertility rate’.

7. The Thinking of The Sociological
Imagination
‘Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding
both, yet men do not usually define the troubles they endure in terms of historical change.
Seldom aware of the intricate connection between the patterns of their own lives and the course of
world history, ordinary men do not usually know what this connection means for the kind of men they
are becoming and for the kinds of history making in which they might take part.
What they need, is a quality of mind that will help them to see what is going on in the world and what
may be happening within themselves.
It is this quality that may be called The Sociological Imagination’.
C. Wright MiIls