THE SOCIOLOGICAL IMAGINATION
capacities for supreme effort or willing degradation, for agony or
glee, for pleasurable brutality or the sweetness of reason. But in
our time we have come to know that the limits of Tiuman nature*
are frighteningly broad. We have come to know that every individual
lives, from one generation to the next, in some society;
that he lives out a biography, and that he lives it out within some
historical sequence. By the fact of his living he contributes, however
minutely, to the shaping of this society and to the course of
its history, even as he is made by society and by its historical push
and shove.
The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and
biography and the relations between the two within society. That
is its task and its promise. To recognize this task and this promise
is the mark of the classic social analyst. It is characteristic of
Herbert Spencer—turgid, polysyllabic, comprehensive; of E. A.
Ross—graceful, muckraking, upright; of Auguste Comte and
Emile Durkheim; of the intricate and subtle Karl Mannheim. It is
the quality of all that is intellectually excellent in Karl Marx; it is
the clue to Thorstein Veblen's brilliant and ironic insight, to
Joseph Schumpeter's many-sided constructions of reality; it is the
basis of the psychological sweep of W. E. H. Lecky no less than
of the profundity and clarity of Max Weber. And it is the signal
of what is best in contemporary studies of man and society.
No social study that does not come back to the problems of biography,
of history and of their intersections within a society has
completed its intellectual journey. Whatever the specific problems
of the classic social analysts, however limited or however
broad the features of social reality they have examined, those
who have been imaginatively aware of the promise of their work
have consistently asked three sorts of questions:
(1) What is the structure of this particular society as a whole?
What are its essential components, and how are they related to one
another? How does it differ from other varieties of social order?
Within it, what is the meaning of any particular feature for its
continuance and for its change?
(2) Where does this society stand in human history? What are
the mechanics by which it is changing? What is its place within
and its meaning for the development of humanity as a whole?