THE SOCIOLOGICAL IMAGINATION
tury social science by the zealous search for laws' presumably
comparable to those imagined to be found by natural scientists.
In the absence of an adequate social science, critics and novelists,
dramatists and poets have been the major, and often the only,
formulators of private troubles and even of public issues. Art does
express such feelings and often focuses them—at its best with dramatic
sharpness—but still not with the intellectual clarity required
for their understanding or relief today. Art does not and cannot
formulate these feelings as problems containing the troubles and
issues men must now confront if they are to overcome their uneasiness
and indifference and the intractable miseries to which
these lead. The artist, indeed, does not often try to do this. Moreover,
the serious artist is himself in much trouble, and could
well do with some intellectual and cultural aid from a social
science made sprightly by the sociological imagination.
5
It is my aim in this book to define the meaning of the social
sciences for the cultural tasks of our time. I want to specify the
kinds of effort that lie behind the development of the sociological
imagination; to indicate its implications for political as well as
for cultural life; and perhaps to suggest something of what is required
to possess it. In these ways, I want to make clear the
nature and the uses of the social sciences today, and to give a
limited account of their contemporary condition in the United
States.2
2 I feel the need to say that I much prefer the phrase, 'the social studies' to
'the social sciences'—not because I do not like physical scientists (on the contrary,
I do, very much), but because the word 'science' has acquired great
prestige and rather imprecise meaning. I do not feel any need to kidnap the
prestige or to make the meaning even less precise by using it as a philosophical
metaphor. Yet I suspect that if I wrote about 'the social studies/
readers would think only of high school civics, which of all fields of human
learning is the one with which I most wish to avoid association. 'The Behavioral
Sciences' is simply impossible; it was thought up, I suppose, as a
propaganda device to get money for social research from Foundations and
Congressmen who confuse 'social science' with 'socialism.' The best term
would include history (and psychology, so far as it is concerned with human
beings), and should be as non-controversial as possible, for we should argue
with terms, not fight over them. Perhaps 'the human disciplines' would do.