ABSTRACT
Max Weber, the one great man we sociologists can plausibly claim as own, once wrote: "No sociologist should think himself too good, even in his old age, to make tens of thousands of quite trivial computations in his head and perhaps for months at a time". Yet sociology aspires to be more than a loose grouping of semiautonomous specialties—not to speak of the armory of research techniques plus an esoteric vocabulary that it is in danger of becoming. The trouble with contemporary sociologists is that from the mixed ingredients of the sociological imagination they have extracted a few mental skills and thought-ways and set them up as the royal road to truth. Literary men and journalists who regularly sneer at the graceless verbosity and obsessive methodolatry of sociologists are likely to applaud much of what C. Wright Mills says without paying very close attention to it.
