La imaginación sociológica (Sociologia) (Spanish Edition)
(Mills refleja los problemas teóricos, prácticos y morales...)
Mills refleja los problemas teóricos, prácticos y morales de las ciencias sociales y de las escuelas de sociología estadounidenses, que al mismo tiempo resulta una nueva formulación y una defensa del análisis sociológico clásico que da orientación cultural a nuestros estudios humanos.
(Assailli par une pléthore d'informations, l'homme moderne...)
Assailli par une pléthore d'informations, l'homme moderne a du mal à saisir le lien entre son expérience intime et les bouleversements de l'histoire ou les contradictions qui déchirent les institutions. Dans cet ouvrage classique, C. Wright Mills plaide pour une conception non positiviste et non technocratique des sciences sociales, permettant aux citoyens de tirer parti de l'information et d'exploiter leurs capacités rationnelles en toute lucidité. Critiquant avec un humour ravageur aussi bien le jargon de la " suprême-théorie ", dédaigneuse du concret, que le positivisme myope d'un " empirisme abstrait " qui s'arrête au ras des faits, Mills explicite l'approche sociologique de l'histoire et de la diversité humaine. Enfin, il explore le rapport des sciences sociales aux valeurs et leur contribution à la dynamique de la démocratie, qui implique que toutes les personnes affectées par une décision humaine aient leur mot à dire dans cette décision. L'ouvrage est complété par un appendice destiné aux étudiants et aux jeunes chercheurs, " Le métier d'intellectuel ", où l'auteur offre à la fois une méthode concrète et une éthique de la recherche. Par la clarté et la vigueur de son argumentation, L'imagination sociologique est non seulement une introduction à la sociologie qui n'a pas pris une ride, mais un plaidoyer pour la vertu libératrice d'un savoir critique et responsable.
Charles Wright Mills was an American sociologist and social critic.
Background
Charles Wright Mills was born on August 28, 1916, in Waco, Texas. He was the son of Charles Grover Mills and Frances Ursula Wright. His father was a drummer for an insurance company in the early 1920's, a position that kept him on the road much of the time. Mills grew up under his doting mother's strong Catholic influence. His childhood was not an especially happy one. He never had a circle of friends. There was for him no 'gang, ' no 'parties. He lived in Waco until he was seven, but moved frequently thereafter: Fort Worth, Wichita Falls, Dallas, and Sherman, Texas.
Education
Mills attended both public and parochial schools, regularly earning a reputation as a poor student, a rebel, and a loner. Until 1934, Mills remained an indifferent student. Then, suddenly, he took up reading and began the lifelong habit of keeping a journal. His notebooks were filled with personal recollections, quotations, ideas for further research, and rough drafts of sections of essays and books. Mills attended Texas A and M University, in 1934-1935, then transferred to the University of Texas at Austin, where he earned a B. A. in 1938 and an M. A. in philosophy in 1939. From Texas he went to the University of Wisconsin, where he studied under Hans Gerth, receiving a Ph. D. in sociology in 1942.
Career
Mills spent his adult life in an institution that he regarded with mixed emotions: the academy. He was an associate professor of sociology at the University of Maryland from 1941 until 1945. After a year (1945 - 1946) as a Guggenheim fellow, he was associated with Columbia University for the rest of his life, initially as director of the Labor Research Division of the Bureau of Applied Social Research (1945 - 1948), and then as assistant professor (1946 - 1950), associate professor (1950 - 1956), and professor of sociology (1956 - 1962). Mills also held visiting appointments at the University of Chicago (1949), Brandeis University (1953), and the University of Copenhagen (1956 - 1957). At Columbia, Mills quickly became a figure of controversy in both academic sociology and leftist intellectual circles. From about 1956 until his death, Mills sought fresh perspectives on American and global dilemmas, moving in several directions with striking speed and characteristic determination. On the domestic front, and in the Western world generally, he continued his search for new levers of change that would combine knowledge and moral vision with power in order to enlarge the scope of human freedom. Having given up on traditional agencies of change, Mills turned to intellectuals and to the young. He challenged his academic peers in The Sociological Imagination (1959), and encouraged young radicals in his widely circulated "Letter to the New Left" (1960). At the same time he broadened the scope of his study, exchanging an earlier preoccupation with American themes for a concern with the major global drifts of the epoch: socialism in advanced Communist nations and revolutionary upheavals in the developing world. Mills operated in more than one intellectual theater during this period. His sense of urgency, based on the accelerating tempo of historical change, its global interconnectedness, and the threat of a nuclear catastrophe, persuaded him to communicate his developing outlook immediately and impatiently to a wide audience. Hence his public image was of a free-swinging polemicist, the author of The Causes of World War III (1958) and Listen, Yankee: The Revolution in Cuba (1960). Simultaneously, though, he was undertaking an ambitiousventure in sociological theory, a "six- to nine-volume comparative study of the world range of present-day social structures. " Mills did not live to realize this ambition. A tireless worker like his father, he developed a heart condition that led to his death in West Nyack, New York.
Achievements
Mills was an influential American sociologist whose work concerned itself not only with the American power structure and elites, but also with the responsibilities of postwar intellectuals. His advocacy of political engagement over disinterested observation had a profound impact on the coming 1960's "New Left" student movement. His legacy is that of a loner: he left no political party, no doctrine, no school of thought. But he did produce a coherent body of work that is still widely read. He kept alive a tradition of native American radicalism in the nonradical 1950's. And he inspired part of a new generation of sociologists to take seriously the challenges and responsibilities of intellectuals.
Mills's mature work was a sustained, many-sided attempt to understand the historical present, to pursue large historical, political, and moral questions in the light of a central goal: "the presumptuous control by reason of man's fate. " For Mills the sociological imagination represented the most comprehensive mode of social vision in the twentieth century. It does not focus exclusively on what he called "the personal troubles of milieu, " which "occur within the character of the individual and within the range of his immediate relations with others. " Nor does it merely illuminate "the public issues of social structure, " which "have to do with the organization of many milieux into the institutions of an historical society as a whole. " Rather, the sociological imagination entails a comprehensive effort to "grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society. " Beyond this, it is a form of self-consciousness, a way of defining oneself both as a character and as an actor in the historical present. Mills's main theoretical investigations of American society led him toward despair as the sociological imagination brought the realities of the cold war into focus. Rather than succumb to this mood, though, he continued to search for ways out of the national and international impasse.
His studies of the major echelons of American society The New Men of Power (1948), a portrait of labor leaders; White Collar (1951), an analysis of the new middle classes; and The Power Elite (1956), an examination of interlocking corporate, political, and military elites form parts of an overall effort to understand the American "present as history and the future as responsibility. "
Quotations:
"You can never really understand an individual unless you also understand the society, historical time period in which they live, personal troubles, and social issues. "
"The more we understand what is happening in the world, the more frustrated we often become, for our knowledge leads to feelings of powerlessness. We feel that we are living in a world in which the citizen has become a mere spectator or a forced actor, and that our personal experience is politically useless and our political will a minor illusion. "
"Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both. "
"It is the political task of the social scientist — as of any liberal educator — continually to translate personal troubles into public issues, and public issues into the terms of their human meaning for a variety of individuals. It is his task to display in his work — and, as an educator, in his life as well — this kind of sociological imagination. And it is his purpose to cultivate such habits of mind among the men and women who are publicly exposed to him. To secure these ends is to secure reason and individuality, and to make these the predominant values of a democratic society. "
"By the power elite, we refer to those political, economic, and military circles which as an intricate set of overlapping cliques share decisions having at least national consequences. In so far as national events are decided, the power elite are those who decide them. "
"The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society. This is its task and its promise. "
"People with advantages are loath to believe that they just happen to be people with advantages. They come readily to define themselves as inherently worthy of what they possess; they come to believe themselves 'naturally' elite; and, in fact, to imagine their possessions and their privileges as natural extensions of their own elite selves. "
"To really belong, we have got, first, to get it clear with ourselves that we do not belong and do not want to belong to an unfree world. As free men and women we have got to reject much of it and to know why we are rejecting it. "
"Nobody talks more of free enterprise and competition and of the best man winning than the man who inherited his father's store or farm. "
"Seldom aware of the intricate connection between the patterns of their own lives and the course of world history, ordinary people do not usually know what this connection means for the kind of people they are becoming and for the kind of history-making in which they might take part. "
"Power is not of a man. Wealth does not center in the person of the wealthy. Celebrity is not inherent in any personality. To be celebrated, to be wealthy, to have power requires access to major institutions. "
"For we cannot adequately understand 'man' as an isolated biological creature, as a bundle of reflexes or a set of instincts, as an 'intelligible field' or a system in and of itself. Whatever else he may be, man is a social and an historical actor who must be understood, if at all, in close and intricate interplay with social and historical structures. "
"Whatever sociology may be, it is the result of constantly asking the question, what is the meaning of this?"
"Every revolution has its counterrevolution - that is a sign the revolution is for real. "
"What one side considers a defense the other considers a threat. In the vortex of the struggle, each is trapped by his own fearful outlook and by his fear of the other; each moves and is moved within a circle both vicious and lethal. "
Personality
A man without a party, a movement, or a received ideology, Mills worked alone, cutting against the grain of what he considered the smug "American celebration" that devitalized radical intellectual life in the 1950's. He was thrown back on the formidable strengths of his personality moral vision, courage, determination and the tools of his craft: reason and historical-sociological analysis. Because of his restless energy and compelling presence, Mills was easily turned into a hero by admiring students, a man larger than life. But if he possessed (and cultivated) heroic virtues, he also displayed large defects. Although his faults and merits have been debated since his death, no clear portrait emerges; he was a tissue of contradictions, a complex man. As Harvey Swados remarked, Mills was "egomaniacal and brooding, hearty and homeless, driven by a demon of discontent and ambition, with faith only in the therapy of creative work, whether intellectual or physical. In all of his writing, as in his lecturing and his public stance, and indeed in his private existence, it was the blending of these forces that gave his work and life its ineluctable impact, its sense of a powerful mind and a forceful personality at grips not only with the petty and the ephemeral but with the profoundly important questions. " In the welter of conflicting recollections, Mills's intellectual seriousness stands out. His intellectual thrust in the late 1940's and 1950's reflects a systematic attempt to make an "adequate statement" about what he considered a tragic separation of knowledge and moral vision from power in America.
Quotes from others about the person
As Ralph Miliband observed: "Mills was a man on his own, with both the strength and also the weakness which go with that solitude. He was on the Left, but not of the Left, a deliberately lone guerrilla, not a regular soldier. He was highly organized, but unwilling to be organized, with self-discipline the only discipline he could tolerate. "
Interests
Mills's expanding interests required extensive travel and reading in new fields.
Connections
Mills apparently was ambivalent about marriage; although divorced three times, he was never unmarried for long. He married Dorothy Helen Smith in 1937. They were divorced three years later, but remarried in 1941. They had one daughter. After a second divorce from Dorothy Smith on July 9, 1947, Mills married Ruth Harper the following day. They had one daughter. Mills and Ruth Harper were divorced in May 1959, and on June 11 of that year he married Gloria (Yaroslava) Surmach. They had one son.
