(Download) "Southern Windmill: The Life and Work of Edward Webster (Essay)" by Transformation * eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Southern Windmill: The Life and Work of Edward Webster (Essay)
- Author : Transformation
- Release Date : January 01, 2010
- Genre: Social Science,Books,Nonfiction,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 236 KB
Description
It is exactly 50 years since C Wright Mills (1959) penned his rendition of the sociological imagination as the interplay of biography and history, or, more actively, as transforming private troubles into public issues. Given the currency of Mills's pithy formula, one might expect sociologists to be all the more conscious of the connection between their own biography and history, or between their own personal troubles and public issues. Yet sociologists can be most obtuse about their position in society, silent as to how their ideas are an expression of the world in which they live, and, thus, naive about the limits and possibilities of changing that world. So often, it is as if their ideas soar above the context in which they are produced, as if their creativity is a unique and ineffable quality divorced from their own social worlds. Sociologists are guilty of what Alvin Gouldner (1970) once called methodological dualism--that sociological analysis is for the sociologised not for the sociologist who miraculously escapes the social forces that pin down and constrain everyone else. This asymmetry applies to C Wright Mills himself who harboured all manner of illusions about his self-defined isolation at the margins of academia, unshaped by the forces he described. Moreover, he thought that the analysis of the link between social milieu in which people live and the social structure which shaped that milieu would spontaneously give rise to the transformation of personal troubles into public issues. In other words, he seemed to think that knowledge immaculately produces its own power effects. Although he did have political programmes they were divorced from his sociological analysis. He did not investigate the way sociological imagination has to be connected to political imagination via organisation, institutions, and social movements if it is to contribute to social transformation. In the final analysis, he shared with the academics he criticised the illusion of the knowledge effect, and thus like them justified his separation and insulation from society.
Post a Comment for "(Download) "Southern Windmill: The Life and Work of Edward Webster (Essay)" by Transformation * eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free"