THE PROMISE
form the social and personal climate of contemporary American
society. In this climate, no problems of 'the private life* can be
stated and solved without recognition of the crisis of ambition
that is part of the very career of men at work in the incorporated
economy.
It is true, as psychoanalysts continually point out, that people
do often have 'the increasing sense of being moved by obscure
forces within themselves which they are unable to define/ But it
is not true, as Ernest Jones asserted, that 'man's chief enemy and
danger is his own unruly nature and the dark forces pent up
within him/ On the contrary: 'Man's chief danger' today lies in
the unruly forces of contemporary society itself, with its alienating
methods of production, its enveloping techniques of political
domination, its international anarchy—in a word, its pervasive
transformations of the very 'nature' of man and the conditions
and aims of his life.
It is now the social scientist's foremost political and intellectual
task—for here the two coincide—to make clear the elements of
contemporary uneasiness and indifference. It is the central demand
made upon him by other cultural workmen—by physical
scientists and artists, by the intellectual community in general.
It is because of this task and these demands, I believe, that the
social sciences are becoming the common denominator of our
cultural period, and the sociological imagination our most needed
quality of mind.
In every intellectual age some one style of reflection tends to
become a common denominator of cultural life. Nowadays, it is
true, many intellectual fads are widely taken up before they are
dropped for new ones in the course of a year or two. Such enthusiasms
may add spice to cultural play, but leave little or no
intellectual trace. That is not true of such ways of thinking as
'Newtonian physics' or 'Darwinian biology/ Each of these intellectual
universes became an influence that reached far beyond
any special sphere of idea and imagery. In terms of them, or in
terms derived from them, unknown scholars as well as fashion-