C. Wright Mills 50 Years On: The Promise and Craft of Sociology Revisited

The Promise

Mills wrote The Sociological Imagination while on a Fulbright fellowship at the University of Copenhagen during the 1956–7 academic year. The title of this book was to be ‘Autopsy of Social Science’, for in the Grand Theory of Talcott Parsons, which papered over conflicts and injustices, and the abstracted empiricism of Paul Lazarsfeld, whose methods obscured and deformed empirical content, Mills thought that American sociology had broken its promise (see Geary, 2009). What The Sociological Imagination offered by way of response was both a critique of the then state of American sociology and a justification for the mode of sociological scholarship that Mills had already started to articulate through books such as White Collar (Mills, 1951) and The Power Elite (Mills, 1956). The key motif of The Sociological Imagination is the importance of understanding the relationship between biography and history, or what Mills calls ‘the personal troubles of milieu’ and ‘the public issues of social structure’ (Mills, 1959: 14). In a famous passage, Mills explains that ‘Troubles occur within the character of the individual and within the range of his immediate relations with others’, whereas ‘Issues have to do with matters that transcend these local environments of the individual and the range of his inner life’ (Mills, 1959: 14–15). The task of sociology is to make connections between the two realms. It is to identify the larger social forces that furnish our most intimate personal troubles, and to translate the ‘personal troubles’ of biography into ‘public issues’ of history and society. This is the task of sociology and at the same time its promise: to connect the ‘major issues for publics’ to ‘the key troubles of private individuals’ (1959: 17) in order to show both how we are produced as subjects and how we can be more than what we are already (see Gitlin, 2000: 230).

For Mills, sociology is a navigation device. It is a set of competences and a way of holding to the world that is to provide clues about how to defend oneself against its whims and mystifications. It is to do so by instilling a particular quality of mind – a sociological imagination – which makes the unfamiliar more familiar and treats the familiar as a source of astonishment (see Bauman, 2011: 160–72; Mills, 1959: 14). The value of the sociological imagination is not simply that it can be used to produce an empirical understanding of the world, but also that it can promote a critical sensibility which seeks to link the most intimate personal experiences to wider social forces, and to seek out the public issue or problem contained in the private trouble. This critical sensibility, arguably, is more important today than ever. For in a neoliberal world which seeks to tear asunder private troubles from public issues, and thereby turn social uncertainty into a personal failure that is divorced from any collective cause or remedy, the linking of biography and history is a vital part of a sociology that is both politically and publicly engaged.

Mills’ vision of the ways in which sociology can play an active role in the world of human affairs by connecting private lives to public issues finds contemporary expression in the work of Zygmunt Bauman. This is perhaps no accident. Mills travelled to Warsaw, where Bauman held his first lecturing post, at least twice: in July 1957 and then again in January 1959, when he presented two papers to the Polish Academy of Sciences that were to become chapters of The Sociological Imagination (ch. 9, ‘On Reason and Freedom’, and ch. 10, ‘On Politics’). Bauman’s description of this second visit is remarkable:

Mills’s reception in Warsaw was mixed. Many sought his company and found him addressing their thoughts and cravings. Others, dazzled and enamoured by whatever stood for ‘American sociology’, were nonplussed and embarrassed. Mills did not represent that sociology … Mills, after all, was a thorn in the flesh of the thoroughly conformist sociological establishment, having assaulted, one by one, every single one of its sacred cows. He was deviance incarnate, the critic of the American creed among its preachers and admirers. No wonder that to some of my colleagues, about to embark on a Rockefeller or Ford Foundation fellowship, Mills was a sort of Typhoid Mary. (in Bauman and Tester, 2001: 27)

Mills clearly made a lasting impression on Bauman (for his reading of Mills, see Bauman, 2008: 234–5). While Mills only makes fleeting appearances in Bauman’s recent work, both the spirit and content of his ‘promise’ can be detected in the political ambitions of the latter’s critical project. Some have gone as far as to characterize Bauman’s work as ‘another rendition of C. Wright Mills’s “sociological imagination”’: ‘both a meeting place between public issues and private troubles and a veritable remedy to awaken the sleeping sociologist in all of us’ (Blackshaw, 2005: 60). The interests of Mills and Bauman intersect most prominently in Bauman’s analysis and critique of what he calls liquid modernity: a new-found world of uncertainty and transience in which the molecular bonds between social atoms are becoming ever weaker (for an overview of this position, see Gane, 2004: 17–46). For Bauman, the main threat to sociality and freedom is no longer totalitarianism, or the overarching powers of the state, but individualization: a process through which private lives colonize and then overrun the public sphere. The consequences of this development are formulated in distinctly Millsian terms, for Bauman argues that there are no longer adequate means for translating private troubles into public issues and, beyond this, for connecting individual to collective freedoms. The problem is that under conditions of liquid modernity, citizens, namely those interested in acting on shared biographical experiences that cannot be reduced to any single individual concern, are destined to become me-centred consumers. Bauman reflects that under such conditions the ‘convergence and condensation of individual grievances into shared interests and then into a joint action is a daunting task, since the most common troubles of individuals-by-fate are these days non-additive’ (Bauman, 2000: 35). Put simply, in advanced consumer society, the task of connecting what Mills calls ‘the personal troubles of milieu’ and ‘the public issues of social structure’ is becoming ever more challenging. Arguably, it is precisely this challenge that the later work of Bauman, from In Search of Politics (Bauman, 1999) onwards, seeks to address.

While Bauman translates many of Mills’ concerns into a contemporary sociological idiom, others have been more critical of the promise of Mills’ sociological imagination, along with the type of public sociology to which it is tied. Michael Burawoy argues that Mills’ tendency to see life as being controlled by a combination of corporate, military and political elites is ‘likely to lead to cynicism and apathy rather than anger and action’, and, moreover, that his belief in the freedom of the public sphere is little more than a backward-looking appeal to a ‘bygone period of Jeffersonian democracy’ (Burawoy, 2008: 371). He also accuses Mills of being an elitist on the grounds that his ‘modus operandi’ was ‘to talk down to publics’ (Burawoy, 2008: 372), and says back to Mills: ‘you don’t believe there really are any publics except the New York intellectuals that surround you’ (Burawoy, 2008: 372). Burawoy’s answer is to demarcate ‘traditional public sociology’ (of which Mills’ work is deemed to be a part) from newer, more organic forms that seek to forge ‘a dialogic relation between sociologist and public in which the agenda of each is brought to the table’ and ‘in which each adjusts to the other’ (Burawoy, 2005: 267). This move is part of a broader four-fold division of sociological practice and reason, within which public sociology is said to exist side by side with ‘policy sociology’ (which works ‘in service of a goal defined by a client’; Burawoy, 2005: 266), ‘professional sociology’ (which ‘supplies true and tested methods, accumulated bodies of knowledge, orienting questions, and conceptual frameworks’; Burawoy, 2005: 267), and ‘critical sociology’ (the purpose of which is ‘to examine the foundations … of the research programs of professional sociology’; Burawoy, 2005: 268). This is not the place to examine the distinctions and connections between these different types of sociology, nor the Parsonian model which sits beneath this typology (see Burawoy, 2005: 293). Rather, what is of interest is the higher definition of sociology that, for Burawoy, these types are to serve, and, following this, where sociology is to be located in a general division of labour within the social sciences. Burawoy positions sociology in the following way: ‘If the standpoint of economics is the market and its expansion, and the standpoint of political science is the state and the guarantee of political stability, then the standpoint of sociology is civil society and the defence of the social’ (Burawoy, 2005: 287). If sociology is to study the state and the market, it is to do so from the ‘standpoint’ of civil society (whatever exactly this is), and is to be engaged in a critical project to resist their excesses along with their capacity to colonize the social. It is in such a project that, for Burawoy, the value of the discipline lies:

Civil society is very much a contested terrain but still, I would argue, in the present conjuncture the best possible terrain for the defence of humanity – a defence that would be aided by the cultivation of a critically disposed public sociology. (Burawoy, 2005: 289)

Burawoy and Bauman, albeit in different ways, advance a strong case for a critical sociology that is publicly engaged. The work of both is framed implicitly (in the case of Bauman) and explicitly (in the case of Burawoy) by the writings Mills, and yet each breaks with Mills in important ways: in Bauman through the exercise of a political imagination that is deployed to address the current dislocation of private troubles and public issues; in Burawoy through a dismissal of Mills’ ‘elitism’. This charge of elitism is harsh. Mills long had the ambition of writing a book through the biographical stories of everyday people (‘A sort of folklorish thing along class lines’; Mills, 2000a: 105). Through his writings on Cuba, Puerto Rico, labour movements and war, Mills arguably paid more attention to his ‘publics’ and did more to shape public debate than any other US sociologist of his generation. It is also worth remembering the political conditions under which Mills worked: the FBI had had an interest in him dating back to the late 1940s (see Mills, 2000a: 136–7). Burawoy, however, takes issue not only with the public face of Mills’ sociology, but with his work within the academy, which, he argues, attempted to ‘destroy professional sociology’ (Burawoy, 2008: 374). Again, this is debatable. For what Mills sought to resist at all costs was not simply the professionalization of the discipline but the invasion of a ‘bureaucratic ethos’ into sociological work. Mills is particularly fierce on this point. He argues that the emergence of ‘applied social research’ involves dealing with ‘clients’ rather than ‘the public’ (Mills, 1959: 115–16) and, beyond this, the codification of methodological techniques that block rather than exercise a sociological imagination (for a further discussion of this point, see Gane, 2012a). For Mills, the discipline was in danger of being dominated by ‘intellectual administrators and research promoters’ or ‘executives of the mind’, and by research technicians whose followers ‘are less restless than methodical; less imaginative than patient; above all they are dogmatic’ (Mills, 1959: 117–18). Mills, then, was not simply against the professionalization of the discipline; rather, he questioned the technocratic ethos and the fetishism of method and technique that was becoming commonplace more broadly with the academy. Against these developments, he strived for sociological work born out of an encounter with empirical problems and infused by theoretical and methodological practices of attentiveness.

Mills also asked difficult questions of the connection between sociological research and the ways in which it was directed, increasingly, by money. In the case of the studies produced by abstracted empiricists (such as Lazarsfeld) he observes that they ‘are usually quite expensive’ and because of this ‘have had to be shaped by some concern for the problems of the interests that have paid for them’ (Mills, 1959: 75). In the fourth chapter of The Sociological Imagination he discusses at length these new types of ‘practicality’ that were beginning to shape the discipline. He accuses his colleagues of connecting themselves, ‘in fact and in fantasy, with the top levels of society, in particular, with enlightened circles of business executives and with generals having sizeable budgets’ (Mills, 1959: 108). He observes that, in this respect, the ‘positions’ and ‘publics’ of social scientists are changing, for increasingly social scientists not only accept the status quo but ‘formulate problems out of the troubles and issues that administrators believe they face’ (Mills, 1959: 108). Mills, to some extent anticipating the later positions of Bauman and Burawoy, argues that the research agendas of sociology were being squeezed by the interests of the state on one hand, and by the market on the other (see Mills, 1959: 115). His argument, by way of response, was that if sociology was to remain true to its promise then it should not be fixated with being ‘bureaucratically relevant’. Rather, it had to be free to set its own research problems and then pursue these in ways that had not been theoretically and methodologically prescribed by agencies either inside or outside the academy (including agencies such as the ‘corporation, army, state, and also their adjuncts, especially advertising, promotion and public relations’; Mills, 1959: 115).

Here, at the heart of Mills’ Sociological Imagination, lies a political position that asserts not only the value of intellectual freedom but also the importance of a certain type of intellectual work. Daniel Geary observes that Mills believed that the ‘diffusion of the sociological imagination within American culture contained the political promise of helping individuals better understand and control the larger structural forces that shaped their lives’ (Geary, 2009: 177). This promise is tied, in The Sociological Imagination, to a ‘politics of truth’ that distinguishes three potential kinds of roles for intellectuals. First, the ‘philosopher king’: the ‘man of reason’ who looks down and pronounces; second, the ‘advisor to the king’, who acts like a court poet and bureaucratic flunky; and finally, there is social science, which is to operate like a ‘sort of public intelligence apparatus, concerned with public issues and private troubles and with the structural trends of our time underlying them both’ (Mills, 1959: 181). Mills’ ambition was to ‘take it big’, and to ask how sociological reason might invite a form of democratic participation. He questioned individualism and what today have become individualized choices that read off of a neoliberal script. He writes: ‘Freedom is not merely the chance to do as one pleases; neither is it merely the opportunity to choose between sets of alternatives.’ Rather: ‘Freedom is, first of all, the chance to formulate the available choices, to argue over them – and then, the opportunity to choose. That is why freedom cannot exist without an enlarged role of human reason in human affairs’ (Mills, 1959: 176). If sociology is to be effective as a critical device, then such freedom should apply to the discipline itself. For this to happen, as stated above, the problems posed and addressed by sociological research should not be moulded by the bureaucratic ethos of the academy, nor predefined and to be handed to us by either state or market. The value of The Sociological Imagination is that it asks what sociological problems are, how such problems confront us from the lived empirical world, and how they can be addressed theoretically and methodologically. On this latter point, Mills is decisive: theory or method should never simply be ready-made, and nor should they ‘determine the problems’ (Mills, 1959: 67). The task instead is to let empirical problems determine the theoretical and methodological means through which they can be addressed. It is at this point that, for Mills, the promise of sociology (its underlying ambition) coincides with what he calls its craft, which refers not simply to methodology but also the literary and stylistic practices through which such a sociology is to be inscribed.

The Craft

The appendix to The Sociological Imagination, entitled ‘On Intellectual Craftsmanship’, serves as a bold reminder of many of the above arguments: that the ‘fetishism of method and technique’ (Lazarsfeld) should be avoided at all costs, as should the ‘Byzantine oddity of associated and disassociated Concepts’ (Parsons); that the sociological imagination should be used to address ‘the problems of social structure in which biography and history intersect’; and that, above all, one should not succumb to the ‘illiberal practicality of the bureaucratic ethos’ (Mills, 1959: 246–8). But there are also some important ideas expressed in this appendix that do not feature prominently elsewhere in this book, in particular that ‘social science is the practice of a craft’ (Mills, 1959: 215). This idea of craft had long been of interest to Mills (the origins of this appendix lie in a piece first written in 1952 [see Mills, 2000b: 43–62]; see also his essay ‘The Man in the Middle’ [Mills, 2000b: 180–3]), and as early as 1946 he described his White Collar project as a ‘thing of craftsmanship and art as well as science’ (Mills, 2000a: 101). In the appendix of The Sociological Imagination this combination of art and science takes a number of different forms. Mills urges us, for example, to use our imagination to explore different techniques of cross-classification and to experiment by deliberately inverting our senses of scale and proportion. He adds that it is valuable to view the objects of our research from different extremes and perspectives: ‘let your mind become a moving prism catching light from as many different angles as possible’ (Mills, 1959: 236). Mills hints at this idea of sociology as a craft at the outset of the book, where he describes the sociological imagination in terms of

the capacity to shift from one perspective to another – from the political to the psychological; from examination of a single family to comparative assessment of the national budgets of the world; from the theological school to the military establishment; from considerations of an oil industry to studies of contemporary poetry. It is the capacity to range from the most impersonal and remote transformation to the most intimate feature of the human self – and to see the relations between the two. (Mills, 1959: 13--14)

In the appendix of The Sociological Imagination, Mills develops this notion of the craft and its concern for questions of perspective and scale. In this part of the text, the craft refers to the imaginative labours that are needed in order for the promise of the discipline – its capacity to connect biography to history – to be fulfilled. The craft is a way of thinking that brings into view relations between the individual and the social that have previously gone unnoticed, and does so by exercising an imagination that ‘is often successfully invited by putting together hitherto isolated items, by finding unsuspected connexions’ (Mills, 1959: 221). The craft is about imaginative methodological and theoretical work that puts the promise of sociology to work, and in so doing enables us to think about things, including our own lives, differently.

But there is, however, a further quality to Mills’ idea of the craft: ‘literary craftsmanship’. For sociology to be effective, especially beyond the academy, it must have literary ambitions. Mills’ assessment of the quality of the sociological writings of his time is damning. He argues that there is a ‘serious crisis in literacy’, in which sociologists are ‘very much involved’ (Mills, 1959: 239). Mills’ position here is an extension of his earlier attack on Parsons and Lazarsfeld, and is just as fierce in tone. He observes that ‘a turgid and polysyllabic prose does seem to prevail in the social sciences’ (Mills, 1959: 239), and adds that this style of writing has nothing to do with the complexity of the subject matter. Mills explains the prevalence of this style, instead, in terms of a quest for status. He declares: ‘Desire for status is one reason why academic men slip so readily into unintelligibility. And that, in turn, is one reason why they do not have the status they desire’ (Mills, 1959: 240). This thirst for status is said to be driven by an underlying desire for the sociologist to achieve recognition as a ‘scientist’; something, he argues, that led to sociology written in clear and accessible prose (including, presumably, his own work) to be dismissed by many as mere journalism. Howard Becker (2007) has recently responded to this situation by arguing that sociologists have never had a monopoly on social analysis, and, beyond this, that the work of artists, playwrights and novelists might contain new ideas for social researchers in terms of the ways in which we convey not only the content of our research but also our moral and political commitments. This is an idea that finds a previous expression in the work of Mills (see Gane, 2012a: 156), who argued that ‘the sociological imagination is very well developed indeed’ outside the academy ‘in much English journalism, fiction and above all history’ (Mills, 1959: 26). Mills is here interested in the possibility of learning from stylistic practices and research techniques that lie beyond the immediate boundaries of the discipline. Most importantly, he reminds us of a basic question that is crucial to any sociology that has a ‘public’ aspiration: ‘For whom am I trying to write?’ (Mills, 1959: 240). The problem, for Mills, is not just how to involve ‘publics’ in sociological research, as stated by Burawoy, but also how to communicate such research to an audience beyond the academy, hence the need to focus on the practice or craft of writing.

Mills’ answer is to explore the possibility of what he calls ‘sociological poetry’, or a style of writing that sits somewhere between art and science in exploring the ‘ratio of meaning to fact’ (Mills, 2000: 34). This question of the written form of sociology and, more specifically, how writing raises ‘a claim for the attention of readers’ (Mills, 1959: 240), has, to date, largely been neglected by readers of Mills, and by the discipline more generally (a notable exception is Andrew Abbott’s attempt to create a ‘lyrical sociology’ from ‘critical literature on lyrical poetry’; see Abbott, 2007: 73). It is tied, in turn, to a set of deeper questions about the politics of sociological inscription, including the ways in which the craft of sociology, including its written craft, is at risk of being shaped and constrained by the ‘bureaucratic ethos’ of the modern academy. Read through a contemporary lens, we might extend Mills’ concern by asking whether the current institutional ethos of classifying and ranking intellectual work poses a threat both to the imagination of the discipline and to public sociology that is designed to work beyond the institutional boundaries of the university (see Back, 2007: 160–1). It might be observed that the current pressure on academics not only to publish but to publish the right type of work in the right places is not exactly new. Russell Jacoby reminds us that Hans Gerth – Mills’ teacher, friend and co-author – ‘was desperate for publications’ as these, increasingly, were ‘the only coin of the American academic realm’ (Jacoby, 2000: 155). But in the post-Millsian world, the bureaucratic ethos, which previously was shorthand for the marketization of research, has developed into a more aggressive neoliberal culture which, arguably, is starting to penetrate the craft of sociology itself. This development has been accompanied by the remodelling of the contemporary university along business lines (see Bailey and Freedman, 2011; Readings, 1997), a development that Mills detected in his writings on the bureaucratic ethos, and by the emergence of new mechanisms for governing or auditing research (see Burrows, 2012; Gane, 2012b) that encourage routinized forms of writing and research that can easily be assessed and quantified. Under such conditions, risk-taking in sociological thinking and writing, as advocated by Mills (1959: 216–17), who encourages us to explore the free play of our sociological imaginations by capturing ‘fringe-thoughts’ and experimenting with different literary styles, is becoming ever more difficult.

Steve Fuller offers a blunt assessment of this development and, more generally, the audit culture that has come to dominate life within the contemporary academy: ‘[t]he result is institutionalized cowardice’ (Fuller, 2009: 86). This is not the place to discuss in detail this extension of what Mills called the bureaucratic ethos, or the logic or impact of audits such as the UK Research Assessment Exercise (RAE). But one further development is worthy of comment: that the ongoing metricization of the discipline has been accompanied by changes in the writing and inscription practices through which sociological knowledge is transmitted within and beyond the academy. It is changing the basis of the sociological craft. In one of the few articles of its kind, Roger Burrows and Aiden Kelly observe that of the 3729 research outputs submitted to the 2008 RAE, 526 (14.1%) were single or co-authored books and 2366 (63.4%) were journal articles published in a staggering 847 different journals (Burrows and Kelly, 2012: 143). There is something to be said here about the media through which sociological knowledge is communicated, and of the role of audits such as the RAE in packaging intellectual work in an increasingly standardized format. Perhaps the age of the book or, more precisely, the research monograph, the classical medium for the transmission of sociological ideas both within and beyond the academy, is now over? If this is the case, then, as Mills asked, what is the future of the written craft of the discipline? One thing is clear from the above figures: with the majority of sociological writings now scattered across many different specialist journals the discipline is increasingly looking inwards rather than to its ‘publics’. By way of response, we might ask: who has access to these journals? How widely are they read and what is the reach of this knowledge? It might be argued that the present article is caught in this same trap. But the basic question Mills helps us to pose back to the academy, and which must be addressed as part of any public sociology, is of the destination and purpose of sociological research. Again, for Mills, the key question is: ‘For whom am I trying to write?’ (Mills, 1959: 240).

Such questions are ever more pressing in today’s ‘information societies’ and ‘knowledge-based’ economies. One of the authors of the present article remembers being part of a ‘data analysis session’ with a group of commercial qualitative researchers. Suddenly the discussion – which was just getting going – was called to a halt. The corporate ethnographer announced: ‘I’ve got enough for a PowerPoint presentation!’ This was telling as the threshold of ‘enough knowledge’ had been reached. There are questions to be asked here about the attentiveness of sociologists (both inside and outside the academy) and their audiences in a world of what Nigel Thrift (2005) has called ‘knowing capitalism’. Mike Savage and Roger Burrows (2007) have taken a strong position on such questions by arguing that the established methodological craft of the discipline is under threat, particularly insofar as empirical sociology is now overshadowed by the capacity of industry and commerce to know patterns of behaviour and taste in more sophisticated ways than sociologists and social researchers. They cite the example of the capacity of Amazon.com to almost automatically anticipate what we like and want to buy next. The concern is that academic research is being out-manoeuvred by freelance fact-makers in policy think-tanks and corporate research: corporations have more resources, and the think-tanks better networks and access. This situation is perhaps an extension of Mills’ earlier concern for the squeezing of sociological expertise by the market, on one hand and, on the other, by the state (see above). By way of response, Savage and Burrows (2009) call for a new ‘politics of method’, which is open to and potentially uses new kinds of transactional data that are available, while at the same time taking up what they call the ‘cudgel of critical sociology’. This is no time, they argue, citing sample-surveying and interviewing as examples, for methodological or, more broadly, disciplinary complacency.

In the face of this ‘crisis’, what is to be done? One of the most important aspects of Mills’ argument in The Sociological Imagination is that a crisis (which for him was one of method and theory) is both a threat and an opportunity. The Sociological Imagination tackled two main threats. First, in answer to the pincer movement of methodological and conceptual fetishism which was placing a stranglehold on the discipline, Mills argued that sociology should be defined by pressing empirical problems which then determine the methods and theories deployed to tackle them, rather than vice versa (see Fraser, 2009; Gane, 2012a). Second, in response to the bureaucratic ethos that was beginning to direct the problems of sociological research and the means through which they could be tackled, Mills asserted the power of creative and imaginative sociological thinking while at the same time asking searching questions about the underlying ‘politics of truth’ (Mills, 1959: 75) of the discipline. Along these lines it is perhaps possible to search for the possibilities that are contained within the current ‘crisis’. One opportunity, for example, is to conceive of new forms of live or real-time sociology that, through the use of new digital technologies, seek to bring a more ‘crafty and artful’ approach to the discipline (see Back and Puwar, 2012). Another is to rethink the techniques and focus of empirical sociology in a world of digital data, and to question again the role of description and sustained critical attention in the discipline. The challenge here is to develop the critical sensibility of a sociological imagination that opens ways of understanding ‘knowing’ forms of capitalism without being immediately captured by them. Thrift argues that today knowing capitalism draws on the language and ideas of academia to make sense of its own practices, and that because of this sociology ‘now has a direct line to capitalism’ (Thrift, 2005: 33). But this does not necessarily have to be the case, for through a Millsian lens the promise of sociology has much more to offer. In the face of crisis, Mills offers the following advice:

Avoid the fetishism of method and technique. Urge the rehabilitation of the unpretentious intellectual craftsman, and try to become such a craftsman yourself. Let every man be his own methodologist; let every man be his own theorist; let theory and method again become part of the practice of a craft. Stand for the primacy of the individual scholar; stand opposed to the ascendency of research teams of technicians. (Mills, 1959: 246)

What matters, for Mills, is that pressing empirical problems are addressed in imaginative and inventive ways that are never reducible to an underlying bureaucratic ethos. In the spirit of Mills, it is not enough to observe the crisis. Rather, it is necessary to think again about the promise of the discipline and, beyond this, what might be brought to this promise by the kinds of critical attentiveness, of dialogue and critique, and of different forms of writing or inscription that are central to the sociological craft.

Conclusion: Mills’ Gift to the Future

From its early beginnings sociology promised to provide an account of society through careful empirical investigation (Renwick, 2012). As has already been shown, Mills was deeply sceptical of the technocratic ethos and the fetishism of method and technique. Instead, he insisted that the vocation of thinking sociologically is an imaginative trade and a crafty craft. For Mills, sociology should re-enchant and enliven the senses, to fill up experience and make it vivid and rich. In a letter to William Miller in 1952, he wrote a kind a manifesto for an attentive life. As an invitation to such a sensibility, it deserves quoting at length:

You ask for what one should be keyed up? My god, for long weekends in the country, and snow and the feel of an idea and New York streets early in the morning and late at night and the camera eye always working whether you want or not and yes by god how the earth feels when it’s been ploughed deep and the new chartreuse wall in the study and wine before dinner and if you can afford it Irish whiskey afterwards and sawdust in your pants cuff and sometimes at evening the dusky pink sky to the northwest, and the books to read never touched and all that stuff the Greeks wrote about and have you ever read Macaulay’s speeches to hear the English language? And to revise your mode of talk and what you talk about and yes by god the world of music which we just now discover and there’s still hot jazz and getting a car out of the mud when nobody else can. That’s what the hell to get keyed up about. (Mills 2000a: 174)

For Mills, fostering alertness in the world is what we should be ‘keyed up’ about. This is a matter of remaining intellectually awake before the beautiful and terrifying dimensions of social life. In this vision, sociology is a vocation in living an observant life: a life that is finely attuned to the challenges, puzzles and complexities of the empirical world. This kind of critical attentiveness is a powerful warrant, regardless or perhaps even in spite of the empirical crisis posed by the awesome power of corporate and state knowledge.

There have, of course, been huge processes of economic transformation in the half century since Mills’ death – the passage from Fordism to post-Fordism, from the production of things to a reliance on information. The traps of today are of a profoundly different quality. The moral careers scripted by Fordism but also within large public bodies like the BBC have also been re-written. Georgina Born, in her study of the BBC, points out the devastating effects that the new culture of freelancing has had, undermining creativity and the accumulation of skill (Born, 2004). Here biography is being dissolved within what Richard Sennett calls the ‘culture of new capitalism’ (Sennett, 2006). Part of our current circumstance is that any sense of the biography of the worker and the skills she has accumulated is deemed of little relevance. The New Capitalism, according to Sennett, requires not skills or craft but adaptability or the potential to acquire new skills required in some future situation. He concludes that in the ‘fresh page of the present’ way of working: ‘skills extinction is a durable feature of technological advance’ (Sennett, 2006: 98). This results in a kind of erosion of the relationship between history and biography and, for Sennett and many others, the demands of mercurial flexibility are every bit as suffocating as the Iron Cage of Fordist bureaucracy.

In the 50 years since Mills’ death, we have also had to confront the fact that sociological rationality or reason can be unreasonable in that it automatically includes some groups of people and not others. This fact to some extent applies to Mills’ own work. Bauman has argued persuasively that sociology developed a mimetic relationship with modernity’s bureaucratic modes of ‘rational action’ that had consequences with regard to what the sociological imagination is trained on and the ‘inadmissibility of ethical problematics’ (Bauman 1989: 29). Novelist and close friend Harvey Swados wrote of Mills, in a frank tribute published after his death, that he was unaffected by the atrocities of totalitarianism: ‘For him Nazism was something that could be comprehended by reading Neumann and some other books; there were no horrible unplumbable depths. Hence he was impatient with my continual reminding him of German anti-Semitism’ (Swados, 1968: 206). The same might also be said of his relationship to American racism.

Mills’ unpublished manuscript Contacting the Enemy – which was planned to be a series of letters to Tovarich – a fictional Russian intellectual – contains a letter ‘On race and religion’ written in the summer of 1960. Expressing contempt for southern racism he admits:

The point is I have never been interested in what is called the ‘Negro Problem’. Perhaps I should have been and should be now. The truth is, I’ve never looked into it as a researcher. I have a feeling that if I did it would turn out to be a ‘white problem’ and I’ve got enough of those on my hands just now. (Mills, 2000a: 314)

Todd Gitlin, in an afterword to the fortieth anniversary edition of The Sociological Imagination, observes that while Mills himself hated racism, he ‘did not sufficiently apply his sociological imagination to the vexing, central problem of race’ (Gitlin, 2000: 239). But this was not the only blind-spot in Mills’ work (see Kemple and Mawani, 2009). For while his sociological imagination could have acted as a resource for making the private dimensions of women’s experience admissible within sociology, instead his work had a tendency to reproduce the discipline’s androcentric bias (in statements such as ‘Every man his own methodologist!’; Mills, 1959: 137). A year after Mills died, Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique. This work, which starts with an essay called ‘The Problem That Has No Name’, has an almost Millsian quality:

The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night – she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question – ‘Is this all?’ (Friedan, 1963: 11)

It wasn’t simply that Mills was uninterested in the experience of women. In 1953 he wrote a review of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex for The Nation. Even though Mills’ review was positive it was not published. Entitled ‘Women: The Darling Little Slaves’, it only became available after his death in a posthumous collected of his essays edited by Irving Horowitz (Mills, 1963). While Mills accepted much of de Beauvoir’s critique of male domination, he was critical of the validity of her generalizations, her lack of a systematic analysis or any attention to women’s suburban privilege. His lines of critique at times reveal the crude nature of his own sensitivity to what he termed the ‘male–female problem’. For example, he writes:

[de Beauvoir] does not stress enough the real power that many women have and use: if man is transcendent and authoritarian, woman is often manipulative: the form of power for the immanent. If men command, then women seduce. Resentment often causes a frigidity, real or feigned, which is often used as a feminine tool of power. (Mills, 1963: 344)

It is easy to find fault with Mills’ work and its blind-spots. Nevertheless, we would argue that Mills’ vision of what sociology can be, in its exercise of an attentive and imaginative craft, still has much to offer. Gitlin observes that one of the attractions of Mills’ work today is that it is ‘charged – seared – by a keen awareness of human energy and disappointment, a passionate feeling for the human adventure and a commitment to dignity’ (Gitlin, 2000: 230). More than this, Mills’ writings continue to be attractive because they offer a position from which it is possible to assess the current state of the discipline, and because they contain a promise to cultivate a critical sensibility: a mechanism to weigh and judge the significance of the vast profusion of information being generated about humankind. Even here, there are limits to Mills’ work, as sociology’s promise now has to open out to new kinds of questions and the sorts of human beings we are becoming in a hyper-connected and yet profoundly divided world. But through Mills it is possible to pose a set of important and pressing questions. How, for example, does biography interact with history in a world of social networking, in which people are witnesses while at the same time broadcasting themselves in unprecedented ways? How might we make sense of the biography of things or the ‘non-human’ in this connection? What of the individualization of collective relations, the evaporation of history and the loneliness of personal responsibility that seem to suggest the importance of the relation between the individual and the historical?

Such questions return us to the promise of the discipline. The value of sociology for Mills lies in its ability to link the most intimate personal experiences to wider social forces, and in being responsive to the specific problems of any period but also to their social costs and human wreckage. This suggests that while we feel the impact of the financial crisis or austerity and insecurity up close, we should not ‘take it personally’. Against the drive of neoliberalism to make social uncertainty into individual culpability, sociology’s promise works in the opposite direction. It invites an opening out to the world through a heightened sensory attentiveness, which in turn makes possible a different kind of social imaginary. Mills’ gift to the future is a sociological sensibility furnished by its tradition, but one that is constantly re-tuned to the circumstances and problems of the present. It is a promise that is worth keeping.