ABSTRACT
Mills’s famous dictum holds that personal troubles are public problems. What seem to be the private troubles of a single person are the result, at the individual level, of solving the problems of the society that person lives in. Being without a job is a terrible personal trouble, but it is neither the result nor the fault of anything the unemployed have done. Rather, it is the working out, for them, of society’s inability or unwillingness to provide full employment.
