THE PROMISE
use it with sensibility is to be capable of tracing such linkages
among a great variety of milieux. To be able to do that is to
possess the sociological imagination.
What are the major issues for publics and the key troubles of
private individuals in our time? To formulate issues and troubles,
we must ask what values are cherished yet threatened, and what
values are cherished and supported, by the characterizing trends
of our period. In the case both of threat and of support we must
ask what salient contradictions of structure may be involved.
When people cherish some set of values and do not feel any
threat to them, they experience well-being. When they cherish
values but do feel them to be threatened, they experience a crisis
—either as a personal trouble or as a public issue. And if all their
values seem involved, they feel the total threat of panic.
But suppose people are neither aware of any cherished values
nor experience any threat? That is the experience of indifference,
which, if it seems to involve all their values, becomes apathy. Suppose,
finally, they are unaware of any cherished values, but still
are very much aware of a threat? That is the experience of
uneasiness, of anxiety, which, if it is total enough, becomes a
deadly unspecified malaise.
Ours is a time of uneasiness and indifference—not yet formulated
in such ways as to permit the work of reason and the play
of sensibility. Instead of troubles—defined in terms of values and
threats—there is often the misery of vague uneasiness; instead
of explicit issues there is often merely the beat feeling that all is
somehow not right. Neither the values threatened nor whatever
threatens them has been stated; in short, they have not been
carried to the point of decision. Much less have they been formulated
as problems of social science.
In the 'thirties there was little doubt—except among certain
deluded business circles that there was an economic issue which
was also a pack of personal troubles. In these arguments about
'the crisis of capitalism/ the formulations of Marx and the many
unacknowledged re-formulations of his work probably set the
leading terms of the issue, and some men came to understand