With and Beyond Mills: Social Suffering and the Sociological Imagination

This article offers a critical appraisal of C. Wright Mills’s The Sociological Imagination with focus brought to how he sets his sociology into practice. It is designed as an invitation to further dialogue and debate over the methodology of this work. It reviews Mills’s attempt to create a “sociologized pragmatism” and analyzes the contribution of The Sociological Imagination to this project. It argues that the critical praxis that informs the development of research and writing on “social suffering” demonstrates an approach to social inquiry that moves both with and beyond Mills, particularly with regard to the task of cultivating social understanding from conflicts met in lived experience.