The Sociological Imagination Enables Us

In Our Time, What Is At Issue Is The Very Nature Of Man, The Image We Have Of His Limits And Possibilities As A Man. History Is Not Yet Done With Its Exploration Of The Limits And Meanings Of Human Nature.

Not Wishing To Be Disturbed Over Moral Issues Of The Political Economy, Americans Cling To The Notion That The Government Is A Sort Of Automatic Machine, Regulated By The Balancing Of Competing Interests.

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.

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.

For The First Time In American History, Men In Authority Are Talking About An 'emergency' Without A Foreseeable End... Such Men As These Are Crackpot Realists: In The Name Of Realism They Have Constructed A Paranoid Reality All Their Own.