The Promise

2 Pages 488 Words

This article, The Promise, was taken straight from the book “The Sociological Imagination”. The author of this book is C. Wright Mills, who was thought of as a very controversial sociologist when The Sociological Imagination was published in 1959. The main idea in this excerpt from Mills’ book is that a normal man doesn’t view things the way that a sociologist might view them. One of the major points he makes is that a single man has “troubles”, while the society he lives in has “issues”. Even though I thought that this article was difficult to read and follow along with, I did pick up on this idea about “troubles” and “issues” pretty easily.
One example that Mills uses in the article is marriage. He explains that a man may have a problem in his marriage, and that problem is the only thing he needs to deal with. At the same time, the divorce rate of this same man’s society may be rapidly increasing. Mills explains that sociologists do not tend to focus on the one man’s problem, instead they try to find out a way to help the society as a whole.
This same idea was used by the sociologists who we read about, and talked about in lecture, who split up 24 boys into groups of 12 each to study the way the boys would react. These scientists found that the boys acted very similar to society. As the days went on with these groups, the boys became loyal to the other boys in their group, and very competitive towards the opposite group. Each separate group of boys also formed somewhat of a hierarchy, as happens in almost any other group in society. When the two groups of boys were then put back into one big group of 24 to complete tasks, the sociologists noticed that the grudges that were previously held were put aside in order to work as a team and complete these tasks.
While reading this article by Mills, I was pretty confused. Not so much by the language that Mills used, but I couldn’t quite get ...