Why does Mills believe that people are feeling increasingly trapped by modern life, and how are they responding to their helplessness and understanding their "troubles?
-People are unable to connect their private life with society and the history surrounding them. They don't define their troubles in terms of historical change, or whats going on in society as a whole!
They retreat from society and create safe sanctuaries
Why is more information unnecessary to develop the sociological imagination? Why is a "quality of mind" more important than a "quantity of information?
It is not only information that they need-in this Age of Fact, information often dominates their attention and overwhelms their capacities to assimilate it."
-A quantity of information overwhelms, while a quality of mind clarifies.
Explain what it means to grasp the intersection of history and biography. How does it lead to an awakening, where the familiar becomes strange, terrible, or magnificent?
Every individual lives, from one generation to the next, in some society; a biography, and that he lives it out within some historical sequence."
-People need to understand the connection between their private lives and the history around them.
-It leads
Mills states, "Perhaps the most fruitful distinction with which the sociological imagination works is between the 'personal troubles of milieu' and the 'public issues of social structure.'" Explain.
This means that the sociological imagination connects troubles, which occur in the character of the individual & in the range of his immediate relations with others, and issues, which have to do with the matters that transcend the local environment of the
What particular examples does Mills use to illustrate the intersection between personal troubles and public issues? Can you think of other contemporary social patterns that can be formulated in this way?
He uses unemployment, war, marriage, and the city. Each of these things can be a single person's troubles, but they also effect millions of people, causing them to become societal issues. Ex) of contemporary social pattern-nuclear family is falling apart
What does Mills mean by the statement "ours is a time of uneasiness and indifference?" Of uneasiness, indifference, crisis, and well-being, which state or states of mind best describes our society?
-He means we are anxious, but aren't able to identify troubles/issues clearly
-Our society is uneasy cuz we can't pinpoint our problems