ABSTRACT
In 1959 sociologist C. Wright Mills offered a trenchant critique of empiricist and theoreticist social science, outlining a strategy for rejecting what he thought had become a mainly reductionist and technique-driven bureaucratic enterprise. His path-breaking book The Sociological Imagination is concerned to illustrate the rise of a 'bureaucratic ethos' and the implication of this for social life as well as the impact this ethos was having on the process, objectives and organization of social science and knowledge production. Mills argued for a particular 'quality of mind' that he believed necessary for the production of holistic and politically engaging descriptions and understandings of social reality. As a methodology it offers a hopeful and humanist sociological practice, and as a politics it denigrates liberalism and liberal social science as being ahistorical and blind to its own oppressive conditions of existence. The sociological imagination promises empirically informed theorizing and theoretically informed empirics for speculation, perspectivalism and synthesis.
