C.W. Mills’ notion of the ‘social milieu’ and its relevance for contemporary society

Introduction: Mills’ version of sociology

At the time of his early death in 1962, at the age of 45, C.W. Mills was the best known figure in American sociology. His fame and subsequent interest in his work can be attributed to the popularity of his book The Sociological Imagination (1983 [1959]) and in particular his argument that sociology should be critical of the existing social and economic orders that constitute contemporary capitalism. A feature of Mills’ writings was that he often set out his arguments in the form of a critique of other sociologists, who he felt were unwilling to extend the discipline to address important political and social challenges of the time. Not surprisingly, his writings generated a hostile reaction from colleagues and, despite their wider impact, were viewed as largely irrelevant to the concerns of mainstream academic sociology.

In recent years, interest in his writings across the disciplines of politics and sociology has concentrated on Mills’ studies on elites and his notion of ‘abstract empiricism’, the latter term being one he deploys against those contemporary sociologists who remain focussed on the collection of data rather than the attempt to address key political and economic problems. We aim to take up Mills’ work more broadly, and to situate it within the classical tradition espoused by writers such as Marx and Weber, as well as the American pragmatist tradition exemplified by theorists such as Dewey and Mead, all of whom sought in different ways to challenge consensus, and link sociological inquiry to issues of character, outlook, and comportment. Moreover, a large part of what we would argue is especially significant about Mills’ work, and at the heart of his idea of the sociological imagination, is his emphasis on the need to attend both to the involved situatedness of individuals within their immediate surroundings – with what Mills called their ‘social milieu’ – and the larger socio-political context in which they are also necessarily embedded. The social milieu cannot be understood other than as it belongs within such a wider societal structure and is developed with that wider structure explicitly in view, and yet as also brought to bear in the concrete terms of individual life and personal experience. The notion of milieu must thus be understood as implying a situational relationality in which social actors are embedded.

Mills’ notion of the social milieu, understood in such a ‘relational’ (Pyyhtinen, 2016) and ‘topological’ fashion (the latter term being taken from the work of Malpas, e.g. 2012), does not imply the reduction of social inquiry merely to the empirical observation or description of the particularity of social life as given in specific spatially demarcated locales. Mills refuses any approach that loses sight of the larger scale horizons of social inquiry and social theory, just as, like Mead (1932, 1934), he insists on the necessary inter-relatedness of individual character and behaviour with a wider intersubjective and social landscape. However, this emphasis on the individual in relation is not contrary to a place-oriented analysis but essential to it. Place and situation can only be understood relationally (Malpas, 2012, 2021; also Pyyhtinen, 2017; Gieryn, 2000). Those analyses that take an emphasis on place to imply simply a focus on ‘thick’ description or a withdrawal from large-scale theorising misconstrue the complex and dynamic character of what is at issue. Using the framework of topological thinking enables Mills’ work to be seen in a different light at the same time as it also enables a better understanding of what might indeed be involved in the sociological thematisation of place and space as key concepts.

In much contemporary social theory, both space and place are often viewed as essentially constructs of more basic social and political forces (the so-called spatial and topological turn is thus not a turn to space and place as such but rather a turn towards a focus on space and place as that in which the social and political become evident). In this paper, however, and in the topological thinking referred to above, place refers to a much more basic idea. Drawing on its long philosophical history as well as its contemporary elucidation, we understand place in terms of that bounded situatedness that grounds the very appearance of social and political life. As such, place is not to be treated as identical merely with any form of simple spatial location nor with any particular set of spatially-located phenomena (to do so would be to reduce place to some form of space whereas it is crucial for our approach that place be distinguished from space even though it also, in a certain sense, encompasses it; see Malpas, 2012). As we use it in relation to Mills, place is more or less identical with the notion of relational situatedness – a situatedness that is materially realised at the same time as it encompasses the experiential and the ‘symbolic’, the personal and the social.

Mills was not the only writer to recognise the significance of the situated character of human life and experience, but he went further than many others in showing how the insights derived from an understanding of that complex situatedness might be used to reconnect the personal and the political in productive ways. Thus, whilst there is much to critique in the way Mills presented some of his arguments, his larger view of sociology, and the emphasis on political engagement that went with it, particularly as elaborated in connection with the idea of social milieu, had an enormous impact on the development of social activism in the United States (see Hayden, 2006). It remains instructive in the face of many contemporary problems and challenges. ¹

In looking to establish and elaborate upon the enduring significance of Mills’ ideas, as well as their original impact, one has first to consider the very strong reaction to his writings at the time of their first appearance. Why did so many academics find it necessary to voice their opposition to Mills’ form of inquiry? In the United States, the late 1940s and 1950s was a time of heightened tensions with the USSR, and many left-wing activists were accused of being communist sympathisers. Mills’ writings on Cuba and the USSR generated animosity from outside the discipline as well as within. But he was also attacked by eminent writers within sociology who viewed his claims as a threat to their view that sociology should try to operate as a detached and objective mode of social science. Those academics hostile to Mills claimed his sociological writing was overtly polemical and relied too often on both unqualified assertions and declarative statements. ² They also suggested that his characterisation of the realm of politics implicitly established a simplistic binary divide between good and bad actors that failed to acknowledge the complex subject positions that can be held at any one time. As one of his critics Rose (1967) argued, Mills was prone to make broad sweeping statements about social groups without recognising that many within such groups hold contradictory views. Oakes, a more recent critic, claims that Mills’ style ‘employed arresting catchwords and phrases, simplifying complex issues by capturing them in pithy and trenchant language. Panache and flair were more important than penetrating arguments or carefully wrought analysis’ (Oakes, 2013: 254).

There is some merit in these criticisms, and it must be admitted that Mills’ depictions of social groups are often overly simplistic. But we should also note that what many of his critics objected to most of all was Mills’ view of sociology as an entry to political action rather than a standing back from it. Mills wanted sociologists to develop a way of thinking – what he often referred to as ‘the sociological imagination’ – that recognised individual life as necessarily emplaced and inseparably bound up with the world as a whole (in a way that can be seen as echoing, though not as directly influenced by, the similar emphasis on human being ‘in-the-world’ evident in phenomenological and hermeneutic thinking). Situatedness, rather than implying separateness, is indeed what connects – embeddedness in the social milieu is also embeddedness in the world. Recognition of the character of individual life as bound up with the world was seen by Mills as a necessary starting point for any successful sociological interpretation or critique of the political realm. In this respect, as Gane and Back (2012: 405) point out, ‘for Mills, sociology is a navigation device. It is a set of competencies and a way of holding to the world that is to provide clues about how to defend oneself against its whims and mystifications’. In other words, sociology is an overtly political mode of engagement that cannot rest on the collection and analysis of data but must entail an outlook or orientation that aims to advance social change and that is founded in an understanding of the situatedness of that very engagement.

Social meaning and individual character

Mills saw his and other sociologists’ task as making explicit the connections between individual concerns and public issues. As he explained, often these concerns are internalised and not recognised for what they really are: ‘men in masses have troubles, but they are not usually aware of their meaning and source: men in publics confront issues, and they usually come to be aware of their public terms’ (Mills, 1983 [1959]: 207). For Mills, individuals therefore need to see themselves through their relations with others and the wider society – in their worldly situatedness – to understand the troubles and indignities they personally experience. The role of sociology is to make this connection apparent, and thereby to make clear the significance of these experiences. In a letter Mills sent to a colleague, he used the term ‘sociological poetry’ to convey what he thought was required from sociologists. ‘It is a style of experience and expression that reports social facts and at the same time reveals their human meanings (Mills, 2008: 34). The explicit invocation of ‘meaning’ here is significant and is suggestive, particularly in the light of Mills’ larger account, of a degree of convergence between Mills’ position and the rising interest in phenomenological and broadly humanistic thinking that occurred across many disciplines in the 1970s – although, in Mills’ case, not only did it predate that development, but it also arose from different sources.

The importance attached to how meaning is discovered and maintained is discussed in sections of Mills’ book, The Power Elite (1970). It was here that he wrote:

we do not want to be so busy ourselves with details that we take the world in which they exist for granted. We neither take the world for granted nor believe it to be a simple fact. Our business is with facts only in so far as we need them to upset or clinch our ideas. Facts and figures are only the beginning of the proper study. Our main interest is in making sense of the facts we know or can readily find out. We do not want merely to take an inventory, we want to discover meanings, for most of our important questions are questions of meaning. (Mills, 1970: 364)

Mills also advocated for the view that sociologists should prioritise the different ways that power relations structure society and pursue a critical line of inquiry towards those who enact power both in corporations and government. It was this critical inquiry that Mills thought was essential if sociology was to break out of its narrow confines and reconnect to its classical tradition and engage the interest of the wider public. He was scathing of social scientists who chose to align with policymakers and those who saw their role as improving the administrative functions of government. These sociologists were never likely to provide any serious critique of statecraft and their work effectively legitimised government. As Gane and Back point out in their assessment, Mills ‘strived for a sociological work born out of an encounter with empirical problems and infused by theoretical and methodological practices of attentiveness’ (Gane and Back, 2012: 408).

Mills’ ambition for sociology as a starting point for political engagement can partly explain the style of writing he chose to adopt. That style can be described as deliberative and instrumental, in so far as he wanted his readers not just to enhance their understanding of society but also to engage in collective struggles. As we argue later in this paper, individual character was of fundamental importance for Mills, and he wanted his colleagues to be bolder and more strident in their social critique (as was Mills himself, and not only in matters of social critique). However, his characterisation of those who did not share his outlook meant that he was perhaps too dismissive of his critics and overly trustful of his own observations.

Some were irritated by the way that Mills chose directly to critique a person’s character and approach. Consider, for example, Mill’s complaint that ‘others have developed several stereotyped ways of writing which do away with the full experience by keeping them detached throughout their operation. It is as if they are afraid to take the chance of modifying themselves in the process of their work’ (Mills, 2008: 33–4). Although such a comment, and others like it, may have partly been written to provoke, it also contains an important insight that is, in part, an echo of Weber’s famous conception of social science as a ‘vocation’ (Weber, 1989 [1919]). If scientific work is indeed something to which we are ‘called’, then it cannot be conducted as an enterprise from which the scientist stands entirely apart and unaffected.

Our own situatedness is the basis on which scientific inquiry is possible, but such inquiry must itself reflect back upon that very situatedness (indeed, only thus can any idea even of value-freedom be possible – and though this is an issue on which Mills and Weber may be thought to part company, matters are a little more complicated than may at first be assumed). ³

It might be thought that the strength of the sociological imagination is at odds with Mills’ criticisms of those who did not share his own theoretical presuppositions. And this inconsistency is surely indicative of a blindness in Mills’ approach – a lack of awareness of the risks that attend on too single-minded a scientific attitude and the biases to which such single-mindedness can give rise. Two points are worth mentioning here. First, there is no mechanism that can rule out bias in scientific practice – and bias can also have a positive role in such practice (as both Popper (1959) and Kuhn (1962) have argued, as has Gadamer (1981) more generally). Indeed, it is not primarily at the level of the individual scientist that scientific self-correction operates, but at the level of science as a larger collective enterprise that is also worked out over time (i.e. historically). Second, many of Mills’ strongest commitments concerned the overall comportment of the sociologist rather than theoretical claims about specific sociological phenomena. And part of that commitment included an insistence on a certain critical and imaginative engagement, that was no less critical or imaginative for the vehemence with which Mills may have argued for it.

One of Mills’ core arguments is that sociological analysis is not an end-point but rather that from which sociologists and citizens can make their own judgements as to how they might respond to unfolding political events. In this regard, Mills’ ambition does indeed connect with that of Weber (who always affirmed the importance of valuation in scientific work, even if he came also to argue for a form of value-freedom) and of others in the classical sociological tradition such as Marx, Dewey, Mead and Veblen, and as a counter to contemporaries such as Talcott Parsons. Mills described Parsons’ approach as a ‘formal and cloudy obscurantism’ (Mills, 2000: 81), restricted largely to the development of descriptive categories and an analytic system narrowly focussed on the explanation of societal conflicts. Here Mills’ refusal of overly ‘abstract’ theorisation can be seen as the other side of his emphasis on a situated or topological mode of thinking – an emphasis that operates against both the one-sided thinking of any form of narrow ‘empiricism’ and of empty theorisation. Mills thus chided theorists, like Parsons, who sought to limit sociology to the classification and demarcation of differences in the social world. This mode of sociology is ‘full of distinctions which rarely shed light on experience or for that matter our understanding’ (Mills, 1983 [1959]: 42). He noted too that ‘tacitly by their affiliations and silence, or explicitly in their work, the social scientist often sanctions these, rather than speak out the truth against them’ (Mills, 2008: 21).

There is surely considerable truth in Mills’ observation that, despite its origins as a ‘positive’ science, sociology has often been reluctant to explore how knowledge might be deployed to address political challenges – an issue that remains significant even if one is sceptical about (or even suspicious of) the capacity for sociology, or any other science, to bring about social or political change in any directed fashion. ⁴ Mills’ version of sociology required searching for and then looking to address the injustices that make up the social world. His way of practising sociology required both a reflexive disposition and an active political orientation. As Mills explained, ‘the shaping of the society we shall live in and the manner in which we shall live in it are increasingly political.…any philosophy that is not a personal escape involves taking a political stand…because of the expanded reach of politics, it is our personal style of life and reflection we are thinking about when we think about politics’ (Mills, 2008: 19). Mills also noted the self-evident fact that ‘serious differences among social scientists occur not between those who observe without thinking and those who would think without observing; the differences have rather to do with two kinds of thinking, what kinds of observing and what kind of links, if any, there are between the two’ (Mills 1983:42).

Concepts of power and identity

For Mills, the gathering of empirical data was a necessary part of sociological work. But the gathering of such data, like sociological work itself, was only useful or relevant inasmuch as it connected with larger societal problems. Taken on its own, such accumulation of information fails to provide any structural insight (since it leaves out the interconnection between phenomena and their larger situational context) while also lacking any capacity to address problems of inequality, injustice, and the undue influence of elites or to shed light on how to address those problems. Mills was entirely dismissive of abstract forms of sociology that have no real connection to the human actions enacted in everyday settings. In an essay titled ‘IBM Plus Reality Plus Humanism = Sociology’ (in Mills, 1967 [1956]), Mills noted the existence of disagreements within the discipline, but argued that sociology must prioritise observation and dispense with abstract categorisations as the means by which to engage with concrete social and political issues. However, doing so also required a better understanding of the operation and maintenance of power – hence Mills’ interest in elites and the institutions formed by and around them. The study of elites was important for three more specific reasons: first, the positions people hold often determine their life chances and opportunities; second, the outlook of individuals is formed largely in relation to the values they encounter and the roles they perform within institutions; third, the institutional position elite actors occupy often shape whether or not they identify with the interests of the elite group (Mills, 1970: 367).

The influence of Max Weber is evidently present in Mills’ work – as one might expect, given Mills’ background and his association with Hans Gerth (with whom he worked on the translation of Weber) – but so too is that of Marx, as is clear from Mills’ concern with the exploitative features of capitalist production and the way these shape human experience. There are echoes of Marx in Mills’ observation, for instance, that ‘for life in a society of masses implants insecurity and furthers impotence; it makes men uneasy and vaguely anxious; it isolates the individual from the solid group; it destroys firm group standards. Acting without goals, the man in the mass just feels pointless’ (Mills, 1970: 323). What Mills did not share, however, was Marx’s optimism in the revolutionary potential of the proletariat, viewing Marxists who clung to such a revolutionary hope as having embraced the ‘labour metaphysic’ (Mills, 2008: 263).

Particularly significant in relation to Mills’ own intellectual situation is his indebtedness to the ideas and modes of thinking of American pragmatism – his doctoral thesis was titled ‘A Sociological Account of Pragmatism’ (in Mills, 1964) and dealt directly with Pierce, Dewey, and James. When Mills asserted that ‘in social feeling, we merge our private life in the wider life of the community, and in doing so, immensely transcend self and realize being in its widest way’ (Mills, 1964: 443), Mills was drawing directly on Mead and Dewey’s understanding of identity. As Horowitz (1983: 140) points out, ‘Mills adopted “a politics of exposure” and shared with Dewey a view “that philosophers are involved in a struggle between living in an open, tentative work of experience and a closed world of dogmatism and certitude”‘. Whilst in no way a straightforward adherent to pragmatist thinking, ‘what Mills most importantly learned from pragmatist thought was a processual way of approaching the study of social life, and to study social phenomena in the context of time and place’ (Nilsen and Brannen, 2013: 94). Here the pragmatist heritage on which Mills drew informed his interest in the concrete situatedness in the midst of larger social structures, not only of sociological phenomena but also of sociological and scientific inquiry as such.

The social milieu

This idea of situatedness brings us directly to the claim we indicated at the start of this paper, namely, that Mills’ notion of the social milieu has continuing relevance to the attempt not just to understand but to engage with and address contemporary social and political issues. Moreover, part of the reason for its relevance is precisely the way in which it insists on a focus on the concrete situatedness of action, as that is nevertheless also embedded in a larger societal structure. If one is to take the idea of situation seriously, then one must begin with what immediately presents itself to us in its situatedness – including the situatedness of the sociologist or scientist. This necessitates a focus, at least initially, on individual action and judgement in relation to social interaction and underpinned by human character and disposition, as it is expressive of individual motives and concerns, and so also as it connects with what we saw earlier is the domain of human meaning.

Mills’ sociological investigation of the social milieu shares a similarity with the work of Max Weber and his use of the concept of Verstehen (a concept which, although associated with Weber, originates in the work of Wilhelm Dilthey and Georg Simmel ⁵ ). The idea of Verstehen (literally, ‘understanding’), as applied by Weber, and as taken up in interpretive sociology more broadly, entails an emphasis on grasping the meanings and meaningful context of human action as the necessary precondition for any understanding or explanation of such action. Verstehen can thus be seen already to bring with it an emphasis on situatedness, since understanding, in this sense, is always contextual – always tied to the situatedness of the actor and the action. ⁶

The investigation of meaning and the social milieu in Mills’ work is intended to provide insight into the ways in which an individual’s choices and practices not only constitute societal outcomes but are also shaped by them. Mills recognised that although any individual biography is always emplaced in a historical setting it is also involved in the active constitution of that historical emplacement. In other words, an individual’s actions are based on past experience and critical reflection at the same time as they are also shaped by wider cultural processes of which the individual is largely (perhaps almost completely) unaware. The importance Mills attached to investigating the social milieu explains why he was so keen to admonish what he called ahistorical sociology, which he argued ‘tended to be static or very short term studies of limited milieux’ (Mills, 1983 [1959]: 165). In sociology, however, the chance ‘to understand how smaller milieux and larger structures interact, and…to understand the larger causes at work in these limited milieux…required us to deal with historical materials (Mills, 1983 [1959]: 165). Historical reflection is an essential component of any genuine sociological inquiry.

For Mills, an investigation of the social milieu does not require the demarcation, in any precise way, of the societal constraints that bear down on any individual’s choices. What has to be acknowledged is the general point that the operation of power within the spheres of government and the market profoundly shapes human experience, but exactly how it does so will vary according to circumstances and cases. Mills was adamant that the distinction ‘between social structure and personal milieu is one of the most important available in sociological studies’, and he added that ‘it offers us a ready understanding of the position of “the public” in America today’ (Mills, 1983 [1959]: 8). It was in Character and Social Structure, written with Hans Gerth, that the social milieu is most clearly explained. In the preface to this book, Gerth and Mills wrote that ‘our general purpose is to study the personalities of men in connection with types of social-historical structure. We wish to analyse conduct and character by understanding the motivations of men who occupy different positions within various social structures. And we wish to understand how creeds and symbols contribute to the motivations required for the enactment of given roles by persons within organisational structures’ (Gerth and Mills, 1954: xviii). Character and Structure is an attempt to integrate the disciplines of sociology and psychology by locating the individual in a setting that takes seriously the past. Gerth and Mills ‘locate modern men- and ourselves – as historical actors’ (Gerth and Mills, 1954: xix) since all individual actions have affects that are generative both for the present and the future. ‘What is needed…is a conception of social structure as an articulation of various institutional orders and functions’ (Gerth and Mills, 1954: xiii).

The contemporary significance of social milieu can thus be seen to rest on its conception of human activity as situated or placed – which includes spatial and material situatedness as well as historical (these being inseparable from one another) – experience being constituted within such spatialised, materialised, historicised situatedness. In a passage that directly echoes elements of Mead’s thinking, Mills writes that ‘Social conduct consists of the actions of one person orientated towards another, and most of the actions of men are of this sort. Man’s action is interpersonal. It is often informed by awareness of other actors and directly orientated to their expectations and to expectations of their behaviour’ (Gerth and Mills, 1954: 10). As they explained, ‘by a milieu we understand the social setting of a person that is directly open to his personal experience. It is a surface of his daily social life. In his day-to-day life, he acts in a variety of milieus – the home, the place of work, the scene of amusement, the street’ (Gerth and Mills, 1954: 354). So, whilst life is experienced personally, social life itself is far more extensive and so sociology must investigate the relations and practices in which all such individual experience is situated and takes place. ⁷

Gerth and Mills were insistent that sociologists should seek ‘to go beyond the milieu itself to explain the change observed in it. And this means we come upon the idea of structures’ (Gerth and Mills, 1954: 354). Structures as defined by Gerth and Mills are ‘the modes of integration by which various milieus are linked together to form a larger context and dynamics of social life’ (Gerth and Mills, 1954: 354). It is structures which can be said to constitute the whole in which all life takes place. It is important to make clear that structures are not understood as elements apart from and in addition to individual action. Instead, structures can only really be said to exist in and through the myriad of actions in which individuals live out their lives – they belong to those actions understood in their inter-relation.

As noted earlier, the incapacity to address structural and political constraints is explored in The Power Elite (1970), first published in 1956. In a chapter titled ‘The Mass Society’, Mills claimed that people who live in a largely metropolitan society ‘develop in their defence a blasé manner that reaches deeper than a manner. They do not, accordingly, experience genuine clashes of viewpoint, genuine issues. And when they do, they tend to consider it mere rudeness’ (Mills, 1970: 320). He goes on to write that individuals are ‘sunk in their routines, they do not transcend, even by discussion much less by action, their more or less narrow lives. They do not gain a view of the structure of their society and of their role as a public within it’ (Mills, 1970: 320). For Mills, routines and habitual ways of thinking are obstacles that prevent individuals seeing social reality as it is. ‘Each is trapped by his confining circle; each is cut off from easily identifiable groups. It is for people in such narrow milieux that the mass media can create a pseudo world beyond, and a pseudo world within themselves as well’ (Mills, 1970: 321). The mass media becomes the primary way of understanding political realities, and as such individuals become disorientated and lose sight of what is true and false.

Mills saw his task as showing that the ‘private troubles’ of individuals though experienced subjectively were often traceable to political and collective actions, especially the decisions of elites and governments to fashion society in ways that were inimical to their interests. Understanding society in this way made it possible to comprehensively investigate the political realm, especially those aspects that were shaped by capitalism. The discipline, in his view, could only be successful if sociologists took on the task of looking and bringing into the open the social injustices around them. Sociologists needed to navigate and then map the tensions within capitalist society rather than differentiating and then categorising social groupings or seeking to establish causal inferences from empirical data. Mills’ understanding of place is that it is made up of unequal power relations and actualised through social experience. Places are thus inextricably bound up, on Mills’ account, with social relations even though they are not simply reducible to them.

It is perhaps Mills’ belief in the potential of human sociality that explains why he retained his optimistic political outlook. Mills thought that so long as publics live in this milieux they have the capacity to ‘transcend them – individually by intellectual effort; socially by public action. By reflection and debate and by organized action, a community of publics comes to feel itself and comes in fact to be active at points of structural relevance’. So, sociology is not just a way of seeing but also a social practice that should eventuate in collective action. Only through collective action can the political world be understood and then reshaped.

The appropriate strategies to sustain collective forms of action to address the inequalities wrought by capitalism has never been settled, but Mills thought he had found a way forward. Collective action can only be progressed if individuals first use their capacities to understand their milieu.

The knowledgeable man in the genuine public is able to turn his personal troubles into social issues, to see their relevance for his community and his community’s relevance for them. He understands that what he thinks and feels as personal troubles are very often not only that but problems shared by others and indeed not subject to solution by one individual but only by modifications of the structure of the groups in which he lives and sometimes the structure of the whole society. (Mills, 1970: 318)

Sociology as experience and practice

Mills was, as we have already seen, a strong advocate of the idea that his colleagues in sociology should interrogate the nature of lived experience and explore why individuals feel or act in particular ways and not others. In this respect, his writing serves as an invitation for sociologists to establish the link between subjective experience and the political and social forces that are in circulation at any point in time. As Mills explained, ‘we are aware of much more than what we have ourselves experienced, and our experience itself is always indirect and always guided. The first rule for understanding the human condition is that men live in a second hand world’ (Mills, 2008: 174). Our experiences are sometimes indirect and yet we have a capacity to exercise our sociological imagination to consider the everyday in new and insightful ways. Here, Mills recognised that it is foremost our capacity to be attentive to the world that makes sociological knowledge possible (Gane and Back, 2012: 408). As Fraser (2008: 63) points out, Mills’ ‘The Sociological Imagination is as much about the experience of sociology – about the experiences of being a sociologist and about what experience understood in sociological terms ideally makes possible for others – as it is about the complexity of relations between theory, method and data’.

Mills was aware that his readers would be interested in ways to develop their attentiveness and he suggested they establish a set of practices that he termed ‘craftsmanship’. For Mills, craftsmanship enables us to overcome our personal limitations and connect to others. ‘As practice, craftsmanship stands for the classic role of the independent artisan who does his work in close interplay with the public, which in turn participates in it’ (Mills, 2008: 181). He goes on to write that ‘in craftsmanship there is no ulterior motive for work other than the product being made and the processes of its creation.…As he gives to work the quality of his own mind and skill, he is also further developing his own nature; in this simple sense, he lives in and through his work, which confesses and reveals him to the world’ (Mills, 2008: 182). The significance of Mills’ conception of human agency is considerable because of the emphasis it places on morality and independence of thought. As Rustin (1963: 24) explained, Mills recognised the political implications of ‘human beings as creative, morally responsible, and autonomous, understood as living within and shaping historical, institutional, and cultural contexts’.

Mills argued that craftsmanship provides a way to enhance our freedoms. As he explained, ‘human society, in brief, ought to be built around craftsmanship as the central experience of the unalienated human being and the very root of free human development. The most fruitful way to define the social problem is to ask how a society can be built. For the highest human ideal is: to become a good craftsman’ (Mills, 2008: 183). Mills’ discussion of craftmanship is clearly informed by the writings of Dewey, and no more so when stating that that human action should be premised on actual experience rather than a priori theorising. How experience is made use of ‘consists, in considerable part, of the capacity to shift from one perspective to another, and in the process to build up an adequate view of a total society and of its components’ Mills (1980: 232). As Horowitz states: ‘Mills certainly remained a firm adherent to the pragmatic canon of truth as involvement’ (Horowitz, 1983: 45).

The investigation of human experience and the social milieu are, as we saw earlier, the starting point for sociological investigation and for wider communication. Mills recognised that reaching out to the wider public is essential to address social challenges; as he writes, ‘men in masses have troubles, but they are not usually aware of their meaning and source: men in publics confront issues, and they usually come to be aware of their public terms’ (Mills, 1983 [1959]: 207). Here, Mills made the important point that an individual needs to see themselves as part of a collective society to make sense of the troubles and indignities they personally experience. It was for this reason that he saw sociology as a vehicle for people to understand the causes of their troubles and link these troubles to the power structures of society. The ultimate aim for all sociological endeavour must be to establish a more democratic and open society or, at the very least, attend to the injustices that stem from inequality. Consider for example the passage from an essay titled ‘Knowledge and Power’ in which Mills wrote that

as a type of social man, the intellectual does not have any one political direction, but the work of any man of knowledge, if he is the genuine article, does have a kind of political relevance: his politics, in the first instance, are the politics of truth, for his job is to find out as much of the truth as he can, and to tell it to the right people, at the right time and, in the right way. (Mills, 1958: 611)

Conclusion: The challenges of the contemporary world

What theoretical and practical conclusions can be drawn from the preceding discussion? Theoretically, one of the key claims is that a large part of the significance of Mills’ notion of the social milieu lies in its understanding of the way in which individual experience is embedded in the immediacy of its social context as well as broader social and political structures. Through his elaboration of the idea of the social milieu, Mills was able not only to set out his ideas for a social and politically engaged version of sociological inquiry, but also to counter those critics who advanced an entirely ‘value-free’ or disengaged approach. The sociological imagination, as envisaged by Mills, thus embeds sociology in that which initially gives rise to it and which also provides the means by which it can be pursued (a point that also extends well beyond sociology). In a contemporary context, in which a commitment to a version of the ‘disengaged’ and the value-free has resurfaced around notions of the objective and ‘evidence-based’, especially as applied in policy contexts, recognition of the importance of social milieu and the connection to the sociological imagination provides an important corrective. ⁸

In proposing a sociologically informed political engagement, Mills was not seeking to re-fashion society in accordance with an earlier precapitalist period but rather to orientate society towards more genuine democratic arrangements where associations could be formed across both class and national boundaries. Here, a contrast can be drawn to distinguish Mills from those social theorists who have sought to fashion a political future predicated on either an ideological apparatus or system. Mills’ notion of the individual within the social milieu serves as a ‘grounded’ riposte to those who cast collective and concretely focussed action as secondary to the task of postulating a Weltanschauung or worldview. ⁹

Finally, if we consider the most significant policy-related challenges such as climate change, inequality, and social alienation, it can be said that not only do these stem from the societal structures that are already in place but they also hinder the types of collective action required for their amelioration. Yet as Mills understood so well, knowledge by itself is of little value unless communicated and acted upon. As he explained: ‘simply understanding is an ideal of the man who has the capacity to know the truth but not the chance, the skill, or the guts, as the case may be, to communicate them with political effectiveness’. What is required is that ‘we must constantly shuttle between the understanding which is made possible by detachment and the longing and working for a politics of truth in a society that is responsible’ (Mills, 1959: 301).