ABSTRACT
C. Wright Mills (1959) set out to develop among all of us a self-consciousness that was inherently about power and politics in their social context. The sociological imagination, as taught in introductory sociology, connects us to essentially political themes: personal troubles, public issues, and the interplay between biography and social history. The troubles we hear about-for example, unemployment, providing mental health services to war veterans, and failures of our schools-all have a personal dimension, a human face, and very real biographies. What Mills wants us to understand is that these personal troubles are often really public issues that are the result of larger, social, and global forces. These forces are even more apparent at this point in social history, as technology and globalization push societies together, structuring interactions in ways never seen before. Mills was influenced by his own historical epoch in 1959 but, nonetheless, was offering timeless lessons for political sociology about the nature of power, and the role of biography and the public. Mills believed that the sociological perspective brought great “promise” to the study of politics and power, valuable to building insights into the study of power, politics, and society, ultimately distinguishing political sociology from other disciplines of study.
