Sociological Imagination

"Know that you inherit and are carrying on the tradition of classic social analysis; so try to understand man not as an isolated fragment.... Try to understand men and women as historical and social actors, and the ways in which the variety of men and women are intricately selected and intricately formed by the variety of human societies. Before you are through with any piece of work, no matter how indirectly on occasion, orient it to the central and continuing task of understanding the structure and the drift, the shaping and the meanings, of your own period, the terrible and magnificent world of human society in the second half of the twentieth century." - Mills CW: The Sociological Imagination. New York, Oxford University Press, 1976 Source: http://bit.ly/pVH77L