Let Every Man Be His Own Methodologist,

To Say That You Can 'have Experience,' Means, For One Thing, That Your Past Plays Into And Affects Your Present, And That It Defines Your Capacity For Future Experience. As A Social Scientist, You Have To Control This Rather Elaborate Interplay, To Capture What You Experience And Sort It Out; Only In This Way Can You Hope To Use It To Guide And Test Your Reflection, And In The Process Shape Yourself As An Intellectual Craftsman

[o]ne Could Translate The 555 Pages Of The Social System Into About 150 Pages Of Straightforward English. The Result Would Not Be Very Impressive.

What Ordinary Men Are Directly Aware Of And What They Try To Do Are Bounded By The Private Orbits In Which They Live; Their Visions And Their Powers Are Limited.

For The Corporation Executives, The Military Metaphysic Often Coincides With Their Interest In A Stable And Planned Flow Of Profit; It Enables Them To Have Their Risk Underwritten By Public Money; It Enables Them Reasonably To Expect That They Can Exploit For Private Profit Now And Later, The Risky Research Developments Paid For By Public Money. It Is, In Brief, A Mask Of The Subsidized Capitalism From Which They Extract Profit And Upon Which Their Power Is Based.

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.