ABSTRACT
It is nearly 50 years since I first read C. Wright Mills’ Sociological Imagination. I read it before I began my sociology studies at London University, and though I did not fully understand it (at that time, indeed, I had never even heard of the sociological debates referred to), I do remember consciously taking away one thing from that seminal work. I gleaned that sociology is about making connections between seemingly disparate historical and present-day social phenomena in order to produce new knowledge of the relationships between them. And also that, because all disciplines, models, paradigms, definitions and statistics necessarily delimit meanings and lead to ideological closure, it is desirable, in order to create new knowledge, constantly to deny the already-known by crossing disciplines, puncturing models, denying paradigms, questioning definitions and going behind the statistics to get some inkling of why they take the form they do. Of course, I didn’t put it like that at the time. Rather, in 1967, I fitted Mills into a worldview that I already espoused – and without realising that I had just read one of the greatest books in sociology.
