Sociology: The Discovery of Society

LYOSB22 (Available for all periods: 11:30-12:30)

This course examines the fundamental tenets of sociological inquiry, aiming to elucidate the intricate links between individual biographies, social structures, and historical processes. Throughout this exploratory journey, five key domains that define the everyday lives of modern individuals—school, work, love, food, and religion—will be analyzed through the lens of relevant sociological theories, serving as windows into the broader organization of society. 

“The facts of contemporary history are also facts about the success and failure of individual men and women. When a society industrializes, a peasant becomes a worker; a feudal lord is liquidated or becomes a businessman. When classes rise or fall, a person gains a job or becomes unemployed; when the rate of investment goes up or down, someone grows stronger or goes bankrupt. When war breaks out, an insurance salesman becomes a rocket launcher, a store clerk becomes a radar operator; a woman becomes a widow and a child an orphan. Therefore, neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without considering both together.”

“Yet people do not usually approach the personal troubles they endure by relating them to historical change and institutional conflict. They do not attribute the well-being they enjoy to the great changes of the society in which they live. Ordinary people, who are rarely aware of the intricate connections between the patterns of their own lives and the course of world history, also do not know what these connections mean for the kinds of people they are becoming and for the making of history in which they might take part. They lack the quality of mind needed to grasp the interplay between people and society, biography and history, self and world.”

“What they need, and what they themselves feel they need, is ... a quality of mind that might be called ... the sociological imagination ... The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relation between the two within society. That is its task and its promise.”

C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination [1959]. Oxford University Press. Chapter 1, “The Promise.”