C. Wright Mills Re-Loaded?

Steve Fuller, The New Sociological Imagination. London: Sage Publications,
2006. 240 pp.

Over half a century ago, BBC Radio broadcast a series of lectures by C. Wright
Mills that were later published as The Sociological Imagination. In this book,
reprinted many times over the years, C. Wright Mills provided a provocative,
trenchant and compelling critique of the prevalence and the poverty of
‘grand theory’ and ‘abstracted empiricism’ in sociology. Motivated largely
by the goal of charting out plausible alternatives to the emergent narrow
professionalism in sociology, Mills famously described the ‘sociological imagination’
as the ability to connect troubles and issues, biography and history
and the range of their intricate relations. As he pointed out, within that range
the life of the individual and the making of societies occur; and within that
range, the sociological imagination has its chance to make a difference in the
quality of human life in our time. He also convincingly argued that ‘the sociological
imagination’ was not necessarily the provenance of card-carrying sociologists and indeed held out the hope that it would, in due course, emerge as the common denominator of any serious reflection on the social condition of humanity. To a large extent, various versions of ‘the sociological imagination’
have indeed informed the work of intellectuals across the various
disciplinary divides and beyond. Despite the fact that they may be unaware
of it, contributors to serious magazines such as The Nation, Harper’s, New
York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, London Review of
Books, The New Yorker, etc. constantly deploy the ‘sociological imagination’.

Since the publication of The Sociological Imagination and the dozens of
reprints of it that followed, many sociologists have constantly worried about
the impact of their work in providing plausible accounts of the social world.
While some sociologists continued with the relentless formalism and abstracted
empiricism that Mills criticized, others vented their anxieties about the trajectory
of the discipline and its role or lack thereof in informing public debates
over contentious issues. Despite some transformations of the discipline in the
1960s, intellectual anxieties about the discipline as well as confidence about
its future continued to be expressed from a variety of perspectives, in a variety
of publications (Collins, 1986; Halliday and Janowitz, 1992; Calhoun, 1992;
Cole, 2001; Marshall, 1990; Horowitz, 1993; Patterson, 2002; Levine, 2005;
Jacoby, 1987; Bryant and Becker, 1990).

However, though Mills penned avigorous and hopeful defense of the importance of the sociological perspective,he harbored deep doubts, even at the height of his tragically brief career, about the direction in which the discipline seemed to be headed. Among other issues, he was most concerned with its practitioners’ obsession with a narrow, over-professionalized focus where little attempt was made to trace
the interconnections between micro- and macro-aspects of social life. As he
recounts his experience at a typical graduate student orientation at Columbia
University:

"I simply sat in a chair in a corner and one by one these guys would
come up to me, sort of approaching the pariah – curiosity stuff. They
were guys working on their Ph.D.’s, you see, and after they’d introduced
themselves, I’d ask, ‘What are you working on?’ It would always
be something like ‘The Impact of Work-Play Relationship among the
Lower Income Families on the South Side of the Block on 112th Street
between Amsterdam and Broadway.’ And then I would ask ‘Why’?"
(Mills and Mills, 2000: 12)

At roughly about the same time, another ‘big-picture’ sociologist, Barrington
Moore Jr at Harvard, was writing about the dominant style of sociological
research that found its way in the leading journals of the discipline. Like Mills, he drew attention to the "many generalizations that social scientists seek with a technical apparatus and logical rigor that contrasts ludicrously with the results" and to illustrate this point Moore quoted from a recently
published paper in the American Sociological Review. According to the
author of a paper titled ‘Male Sex Aggression on a University Campus’:

"...the experience of being offended was not altogether associated with
trivial situations as shown by the fact that 20.09 per cent were offended
by forceful attempts at intercourse and 6.2 per cent by aggressively
forceful attempts at sex intercourse . . . A 3 _ 3 table yielding a Chi
square significant at the .05 level suggests that episodes of lesser offensiveness
are concentrated in the fall and more offensive in the spring."
(Moore, 1958: 129–30)

Despite the many outstanding individual sociologists who consciously sought
to address the issue of ‘why’, incorporating causality and meaning, there
seems to be little doubt that the dominant trend, partly reinforced by the
reward structure within the discipline, has been to shy away from asking the
big questions. It is not only a question of heeding Mills’s warning to prospective
sociology students to avoid the fate of becoming ‘mere specialists’. After
all, specialists do provide invaluable empirical material that plays a very
significant role in the production of ‘big picture’ sociology. Rather, it is a
question of raising the issue of ‘why’ in a self-conscious manner to generate
a measure of clarity about the social world.

Over five decades since Mills’s important attempt to get sociology back
on the rails, many social and intellectual transformations have occurred.
Against the backdrop of these intellectual and social upheavals, the issue of
rethinking sociology in particular and the very concept of the social and
human sciences in general has been the preoccupation of a number of intellectuals
(Wallerstein, 1996). With the emergence of the ‘new biology’ and a
particular strand of environmentalism that seeks to position humans as just
another species within the larger natural order and disorder, the very idea of
a social and human science has been questioned by a number of scholars. In
light of the new biology, biosocial theories of human behaviour and neuroscience,
a number of questions have emerged. Are humans really that unique
that we need anthropocentric social science divorced from biology to understand
them? If we take a broader view of the natural world and the position
of humans within it, would evolutionary biology and neuroscience, rather
than social science, not make better analytical and environmental sense? It is
not just the scientists who are raising such questions. Indeed the evolutionary
psychologist David Barash in a book titled Madame Bovary’s Ovaries:
A Darwinian Look at Literature (Barash and Barash, 2005) has sought to
promote what he and his co-author daughter call ‘Darwinian literary criticism’.
Many literary critics such A. S. Byatt (2006) promptly jumped on this new professional bandwagon, even as other practising natural scientists such as Raymond Tallis (2008) among others have trenchantly criticized this intellectual turn. Within the scientific community as well, there is a wide diversity
of opinion about the exact implications of Darwin’s evolutionary theory.
There has been no shortage of acrimonious debates on this issue. Richard
Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould, for example, read and interpret Darwin in
quite a different way than do E. O. Wilson, David Barash, Richard Dawkins and Peter Singer. Some intellectuals appear to accept the idea that even though there is no need at this particular point of time to scrap the social sciences completely, the very idea of a field devoted exclusively to the human species smacks of arrogant and self-righteous anthropo-centrism.

In _The New Sociological Imagination_ Steve Fuller takes up the challenge of
defending the besieged social and human sciences.. His important book raises a number of critical issues that cannot be avoided if one seeks to make serious sense of the texture and trajectory
of the global condition of humanity.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Barash, D. and Barash, N. R. (2005) Madame Bovary’s Ovaries: A Darwinian Look
at Literature. New York: Delacorte Press.

Bryant, C. G. A. and Becker, H. A., eds (1990) What Has Sociology Achieved? London:
Palgrave.

Byatt, A. S. (2006) ‘Observe the Neurones’, The Times Literary Supplement, 22
September.

Calhoun, C. (1992) ‘Sociology, Other Disciplines and the Project of a General
Understanding of Life’, in Halliday and Janowitz (1992) Sociology and its Publics.
Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, pp. 137–95.

Cole, S., ed. (2001) What’s Wrong With Sociology? London: Transaction.

Collins, R. (1986) ‘Is 1980’s Sociology in the Doldrums?’, American Journal of
Sociology 91(5): 1336–55.

Halliday, T. C. and Janowitz, M., eds (1992) Sociologists and its Publics. Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press.

Horowitz, I. L. (1993) The Decomposition of Sociology. New York: Oxford University
Press.

Jacoby, R. (1987) The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe.
New York: Basic Books.