Each Day Men Sell Little Pieces If

The More We Understand What Is Happening In The World, The More Frustrated We Often Become, For Our Knowledge Leads To Feelings Of Powerlessness. We Feel That We Are Living In A World In Which The Citizen Has Become A Mere Spectator Or A Forced Actor, And That Our Personal Experience Is Politically Useless And Our Political Will A Minor Illusion.

You Can Never Really Understand An Individual Unless You Also Understand The Society,historical Time Period In Which They Live,personal Troubles, And Social Issues

For We Cannot Adequately Understand 'man' As An Isolated Biological Creature, As A Bundle Of Reflexes Or A Set Of Instincts, As An 'intelligible Field' Or A System In And Of Itself. Whatever Else He May Be, Man Is A Social And An Historical Actor Who Must Be Understood, If At All, In Close And Intricate Interplay With Social And Historical Structures

For The First Time In American History, Men In Authority Are Talking About An 'emergency' Without A Foreseeable End... Such Men As These Are Crackpot Realists: In The Name Of Realism They Have Constructed A Paranoid Reality All Their Own.

It Is The Political Task Of The Social Scientist — As Of Any Liberal Educator — Continually To Translate Personal Troubles Into Public Issues, And Public Issues Into The Terms Of Their Human Meaning For A Variety Of Individuals. It Is His Task To Display In His Work — And, As An Educator, In His Life As Well — This Kind Of Sociological Imagination. And It Is His Purpose To Cultivate Such Habits Of Mind Among The Men And Women Who Are Publicly Exposed To Him. To Secure These Ends Is To Secure Reason And Individuality, And To Make These The Predominant Values Of A Democratic Society.