Presidential Address On THE SOCIOLOGICAL IMAGINATION REVISITED.

This article presents a critical analysis of the book "The Sociological Imagination," by C. Wright Mills which represented a mid-century rejection of U.S. positivist, functional social theory in favor of a critical sociology of the European Frankfurt version. Although Mills introduced the term postmodern into U.S. sociology, his work is distinctly modernist in thrust, and hence unsuited to the problems confronting sociology. The book asked of sociologists trained during the 1960s a politically informed sociology, methodologically sensitive to human experience and based on the work of the classical social theorists Mills admired. It challenged them to develop a sociological imagination that would nurture a form of self-consciousness capable of comprehending biography, history, world politicsm and particular societies as intertwined totalities. In the book, Mills constructed images and pictures of society, men, and history real only within his ten chapters. The interplay of three conversations and four texts structures the work. The former comprise Mill's interactions with himself and with the influential theorists who guided him, and the discourse between the reader and Mill's book. The latter includes Mill's biographical history with himself as a sociologist, as well as his interpretations of the texts of his sociological contemporaries, of the texts of the classical social theorists he emulates, and of the text of American society he hopes to understand.