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The Sociological Imagination Essay examples

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Having written The Sociological Imagination in 1959, C. Wright Mills was brought up in a society far more different and archaic than the idea of contemporary society today. The ideals that were imparted to him during his lifetime provided a framework to the ideals that are imparted to people today; however, like all incarnations, processes and ideas adapted to situate themselves into the transitioning threads of society. Through his elaboration on the sociological imagination, C. Wright Mills portrays the plight of the average citizen during his time period in a jaded light thereby providing a limited, but nonetheless relevant scope of the sociological plight of the average citizen in contemporary society. Within the first paragraph of…show more content…
While this idea and concept remains relevant to society today, the example Mills uses seem to be pertaining to the society that he knows to be true. For instance, Mills describes how contemporary society is attributed to the individual successes and failures of men and women. Instead, I find that to be imprecise. History should be about how society evolves or changes and the collective forces of the individual changes in the lives of men and women make up history, not simply the individual successes and failures. Another example of Mills’s balance of precision and imprecision is when he discusses the first fruit of this imagination. He writes to the testament that we can only understand our fate and our experience once we find ourselves in society; our sociological location. He also adds on by discussing how we can only understand our experiences by looking at the experiences of those in similar circumstances to us. I feel as if a relevant example of this would be the poverty cycle that explains why it is so difficult for someone to break out of poverty. But, on that same token, I think Mills’s overestimates his theory: there are notable examples of people surpassing any limits imposed by their sociological location and situating themselves into new locations. Mills’s often seems to coin a theory that has relevance, but is defied by history itself. Through his notable examples on the relationship between
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