“The sociological imagination allows us to grasp history and biography and the relationships between the two within society. » - C. Wright Mills, The Sociological ImaginationSay no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essayC. Wright Mills defined sociological imagination as “the vivid awareness of the relationship between personal experience and society as a whole.” When he published his book in 1959, his attempt was to connect these two seemingly unrelated and abstract concepts of life: "the individual" and "society." For most people, their “world” is made up of relatively small groups like family, friends, co-workers, neighbors, etc. Their understanding of the world also stems almost entirely from this understanding of their “universe.” However, what Mill attempted to illustrate is that our personal experiences, the people we interact with and how we interact, the positions we hold in life, our goals and ambitions are all related to larger, more complex societal patterns that were historically created and maintained by the people who came into this world before us. To better understand this, he provided insight into the relationship between structure (social institutions) and action (personal experience) by explaining that often what we consider to be our "personal problems" – such as not having enough money to buy food or pay our bills – is actually a “public problem” – the result of a larger social problem that affects many people, such as systematic economic inequality and poverty. Thus, who we are and where we come from (our biography) is related to the larger world that exists beyond our existence (historically created social constructs) and the sociological imagination allows us to think in terms of this relationship and the practice of this thinking is the essence of “sociological thinking.” This seems simple enough to understand and one would assume that everyone already thinks this way. However, in reality, this is not really the case. I will elaborate further—with reference to the writings of André Beteille, Allan Johnson, and James F. Garner—what makes such thinking so distinctly “sociological.” And also what is not. Understanding sociology in terms of “social life” is problematic, because it cultivates the tendency to confuse common sense and sociological thinking. Allan Johnson and André Beteille have both highlighted the seriousness of this misconception, as it feeds the misconception that when someone comments on something "social" they are "thinking sociologically." When Beteille mentions that "sociology seems, by contrast, to be grist to everyone's mill," he is referring to this common misconception and then sets out to challenge this misconception. Common sensual thought, by its very nature, is localized, personal and informal. It is localized because it is limited by time and space as well as by the degree of integration of the individual into society. Therefore, we can say that "common sense is not that common" since what is common sense for someone from a particular point of view may be less common for another person from a particular point of view. different geographical, cultural and historical context. Common sense is personal because it depends heavily on the individual. It is informal because common sense lacks the technical resources necessary for research – concepts, methods, approaches, techniques, schools of thought – which cannot be replaced even by some sort ofVery well informed and articulate common sense thinking. In contrast, sociological thinking is general, external and disciplined. It is general and external because it requires reflection in terms of the whole of human society. The greatest contribution to this approach was made by Emile Durkheim, Max Weber and Karl Marx, the builders of modern sociology. Sociological thinking is not limited to an individual's beliefs but rather it is about "where" and "how" the individual participates in the larger world and "why" their participation takes place in a particular way and not from another. As Allan Johnson says: “We are always participating in something larger than ourselves, and if we are to understand social life and what happens to the people in it, we must understand what we are participating in and how we are doing it. let's participate. that” when he develops what he considers to be the “only thing” that sociology could teach everyone. It is essential to think not just in terms of the individual or just the collective, but both the collective and the individual, the relationship between them, how they influence and are influenced by each other . It truly is “the forest and the trees”. . Sociological thinking makes us understand that, despite everything we think we know about the world, there is everything we don't know either. Furthermore, sociological thinking is disciplined because it is based on empirical reasoning, careful observations and largely requires the systematic use of comparisons. These help a sociologist to think in terms of broader human society and to find interconnections between different areas of social life. Meaningful, unsuspected connections are often only reached by sifting through piles of connections that are “trivial and easily accessible to common sense.” As a sociologist, our thinking and understanding of the world goes beyond the common sense point of view, which is highly variable. All these factors therefore make sociological thought anti-fatalist and anti-utopian in its approach and differentiate its empirical, generalized and critical knowledge from localized common sense. Durkheim believed that the disciplined application of sociological method and thought would help an individual better understand his or her society and that this understanding would be expanded through the use of systematic comparisons between one's own society and others. To illustrate this, it would be useful to mention Durkheim's classic work on "Suicide" which contributed enormously to denouncing "the illusion of understanding created by common sense". Durkheim went beyond his common sense which viewed suicide as a highly individual act and instead treated it as a “social fact” – as “general, external and coercive” – by studying “suicide rates”. Through his research, he was able to show that suicide rates depend more on an individual's degree of social integration and that the difference in suicide rates across countries, gender, race, and other contexts does not. is not simply the sum total of individual suicides but actually the reflection. of the society in which they live. It is worth mentioning, however, that the distinction between sociological and common sense thinking is not about deliberately making the former seem superior and esoteric in nature by using sophisticated jargon and “technical virtuosity”. According to NK Bose, "There are two kinds of scientists, those who make complex things simple and those who make simple things complex, and his preference was for the former." Although Beteille argues that common sense by itself is insufficient and often fails to simplify complex things, he does notshould not be entirely neglected since common sense is also an element of our social life. Thus, sociological thinking must be alert and thoughtful in order to identify an individual's own biases when studying their own society as well as other knowledge created from a common sense point of view. It must find a balance in the “interpenetration” of common sense with the technical virtuosity of the discipline while moderating the fatalistic and utopian elements of the former. In some cases, it has actually been able to influence common sense on topics such as education, politics, social class and inequality. Allan Johnson emphasized the distinction between sociological thinking and the individualist model of society.thought. Individualistic thinking tends to see everything solely in terms of individuals, which reduces society to a single set of individuals existing independently of each other, at a given time and place. This not only affects how we choose to participate in society, but also how we think about social life and the world as a whole. The “individualist model” has only existed for a few centuries and its roots go back to the 19th century and the United States, where the work of William James – influenced by the century of “European Enlightenment” and “modernist thought” – and later the unconventional ideas of Sigmund Freud – the discovery of the psyche and levels of consciousness – inspired people to think increasingly in terms of individual experience with greater “self-awareness” than before. Johnson illustrated the problems with this way of thinking by explaining that when members of privileged groups react negatively—aggressively or avoid talking about them—to the consequences of their membership resulting in oppression of the prejudiced group, they think d a different point of view. individualistic perspective that shows them as being “imperfect” and having a “personal need” to behave in an oppressive manner. The individualist solution to social problems such as inequalities, natural disasters or terrorism then becomes “a question not of collective solutions but of the accumulation of individual solutions. If we want to reduce global poverty, the individualistic answer is to lift people out of poverty or prevent them from becoming poor by changing the type of people they are, one person at a time. The idea is that he fails to understand the difference between individuals and social systems – he lacks “the forest for the trees”. People and social systems are not identical, but they are closely related to each other and influenced by how the individual chooses to participate in them. Social systems are made up of several different elements that exist in a particular relationship with each other and form a distinct pattern that makes it function as a whole. For example, the family system is made up of certain roles such as that of the mother, the father. , son, daughter, etc. and also certain “ideas” collectively accepted in a society such as “being obedient to one’s parents”, etc. Understanding what constitutes a system, how they work and differ from each other is crucial to understanding the consequences that result when people follow it without questioning its legitimacy, i.e. the path of least resistance. Social systems are reinforced by positive and negative sanctions that ensure compliance. This path of least resistance therefore makes sensible thinking so utopian and fatalistic in nature because there is a tendency to accept things as they are and attach "personal reasons" to "public problems", e.g./