Sociological Imagination Essay

Mills (1959/2000) wrote that “an individual can understand his own experience and gauge his own fate only by locating himself within his period” (p.5) and he must use his sociological imagination to do so. This commentary will first look at Mill’s concept of the sociological imagination and will then argue that he was correct in his statement that in order to understand one’s own experiences, one must understand his or her place in society at any given time in history. The works of Karl Marx and Émile Durkheim will be drawn upon to support this argument. To illustrate how one must locate him or herself within one’s period to understand personal experiences, the role of women as housewives will be explored from a feminist perspective.

The Sociological Imagination

Mills argued that the history of society and the individual are intertwined and cannot be separated; he reasoned that historical facts, trends or statistics represent individuals and their experiences. He maintained that individuals live their lives within their generation and time in history, they can be part of altering the course of history and they

It enables individuals to alter their perspective from personal contemplation to societal consideration so they are conscious of the fact that their lived experiences are where history meets biography within society (Mills, 1959/2000). Durkheim also maintained that individual behaviour stems from society and so the individual is merely part of the historical framework of social norms and rules and he asserted that society and social rules shape individuals’ ideology and behaviour (Morrison,