THE PROMISE
How does any particular feature we are examining affect, and
how is it affected by, the historical period in which it moves?
And this period—what are its essential features? How does it
differ from other periods? What are its characteristic ways of
history-making?
(3) What varieties of men and women now prevail in this society
and in this period? And what varieties are coming to prevail?
In what ways are they selected and formed, liberated and repressed,
made sensitive and blunted? What kinds of Tiuman nature'
are revealed in the conduct and character we observe in
this society in this period? And what is the meaning for liuman
nature' of each and every feature of the society we are examining?
Whether the point of interest is a great power state or a minor
literary mood, a family, a prison, a creed—these are the kinds of
questions the best social analysts have asked. They are the intellectual
pivots of classic studies of man in society—and they are
the questions inevitably raised by any mind possessing the sociological
imagination. For that imagination is the capacity to shift
from one perspective to another—from the political to the psychological;
from examination of a single family to comparative assessment
of the national budgets of the world; from the theological
school to the military establishment; from considerations of an oil
industry to studies of contemporary poetry. It is the capacity to
range from the most impersonal and remote transformations to the
most intimate features of the human self—and to see the relations
between the two. Back of its use there is always the urge to
know the social and historical meaning of the individual in the
society and in the period in which he has his quality and his
being.
That, in brief, is why it is by means of the sociological imagination
that men now hope to grasp what is going on in the world,
and to understand what is happening in themselves as minute
points of the intersections of biography and history within society.
In large part, contemporary man's self-conscious view of
himself as at least an outsider, if not a permanent stranger, rests
upon an absorbed realization of social relativity and of the transformative
power of history. The sociological imagination is the
most fruitful form of this self-consciousness. By its use men whose