THE SOCIOLOGICAL IMAGINATION
mentalities have swept only a series of limited orbits often come
to feel as if suddenly awakened in a house with which they had
only supposed themselves to be familiar. Correctly or incorrectly,
they often come to feel that they can now provide themselves
with adequate summations, cohesive assessments, comprehensive
orientations. Older decisions that once appeared sound now seem
to them products of a mind unaccountably dense. Their capacity
for astonishment is made lively again. They acquire a new way of
thinking, they experience a transvaluation of values: in a word,
by their reflection and by their sensibility, they realize the cultural
meaning of the social sciences.
Perhaps the most fruitful distinction with which the sociological
imagination works is between 'the personal troubles of milieu'
and 'the public issues of social structure/ This distinction is an
essential tool of the sociological imagination and a feature of all
classic work in social science.
Troubles occur within the character of the individual and
within the range of his immediate relations with others; they
have to do with his self and with those limited areas of social life
of which he is directly and personally aware. Accordingly, the
statement and the resolution of troubles properly lie within the
individual as a biographical entity and within the scope of his
immediate milieu—the social setting that is directly open to his
personal experience and to some extent his willful activity. A
trouble is a private matter: values cherished by an individual are
felt by him to be threatened.
Issues have to do with matters that transcend these local environments
of the individual and the range of his inner Me. They
have to do with the organization of many such milieux into the
institutions of an historical society as a whole, with the ways in
which various milieux overlap and interpenetrate to form the
larger structure of social and historical life. An issue is a public
matter: some value cherished by publics is felt to be threatened.
Often there is a debate about what that value really is and about
what it is that really threatens it. This debate is often without
focus if only because it is the very nature of an issue, unlike