THE SOCIOLOGICAL IMAGINATION
able commentators came to re-focus their observations and
re-formulate their concerns.
During the modern era, physical and biological science has
been the major common denominator of serious reflection and
popular metaphysics in Western societies. 'The technique of the
laboratory' has been the accepted mode of procedure and the
source of intellectual security. That is one meaning of the idea
of an intellectual common denominator: men can state their
strongest convictions in its terms; other terms and other styles
of reflection seem mere vehicles of escape and obscurity.
That a common denominator prevails does not of course mean
that no other styles of thought or modes of sensibility exist. But
it does mean thatjnore general intellectual interests tend to slide
into this area, to be formulated there most sharply, and when so
formulated, to be thought somehow to have reached, if not a
solution, at least a profitable way of being carried along.
The sociological imagination is becoming, I believe, the major
common denominator of our cultural life and its signal feature.
This quality of mind is found in the social and psychological
sciences, but it goes far beyond these studies as we now know
them. Its acquisition by individuals and by the cultural community
at large is slow and often fumbling; many social scientists
are themselves quite unaware of it. They do not seem to know
that the use of this imagination is central to the best work that
they might do, that by failing to develop and to use it they are
failing to meet the cultural expectations that are coming to be
demanded of them and that the classic traditions of their several
disciplines make available to them.
Yet in factual and moral concerns, in literary work and in
political analysis, the qualities of this imagination are regularly
demanded. In a great variety of expressions, they have become
central features of intellectual endeavor and cultural sensibility.
Leading critics exemplify these qualities as do serious journalists—
in fact the work of both is often judged in these terms.
Popular categories of criticism—high, middle, and low-brow, for
example—are now at least as much sociological as aesthetic. Novelists—
whose serious work embodies the most widespread definitions
of human reality—frequently possess this imagination, and do