“The sociological imagination allows us to grasp history, biography, and the relationships between the two within society.” ― C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essayC. Wright Mills defined the sociological imagination as “the vivid awareness of the relationship between personal experience and society as a whole.” When he published his book in 1959, his attempt was to connect these two seemingly unrelated and abstract concepts of life: the "individual" and "society". For most people, their "universe" consists of relatively small groups such as families, friends, colleagues, neighbors, and so on. Their understanding of the world also derives almost entirely from this understanding of their “universe.” However, what Mill attempted to illustrate is that our personal experiences, the people we interact with and how we interact, the positions we occupy in life, our goals and ambitions are all linked to larger and more complex patterns in societies that were historically created and maintained by the people who came into the world before us. To understand this better, he offered insight into the relationship between structure (social institutions) and action (personal experience) by explaining that often what we consider our “personal problems” – like not having enough money to buy food or pay bills – is in It is actually a “public issue” – the result of a larger social problem that affects many, such as systematic economic inequality and poverty. Therefore, what/who we are and where we come from (our biography) is linked to the larger world that exists beyond our existence (historically created social constructs) and the sociological imagination allows us to think in terms of this relationship and practice this thinking is the essence of “thinking sociologically”. It seems simple enough to understand and one would assume that everyone already thinks this way. However, in reality, this is not quite the case. I will further examine, with reference to the writings of André Beteille, Allan Johnson, and James F. Garner, what makes such thinking so distinctively “sociological.” And also what doesn't. Understanding sociology in terms of being "about" social life is problematic, as it cultivates the tendency to confuse common sense with sociological thinking. Both Allan Johnson and Andre Beteille have highlighted the seriousness of this misconception as it fuels the mistaken belief that when someone comments on something "social", they are "thinking sociologically". When Beteille states that “sociology seems, on the contrary, to be grist for everyone's mill,” he refers to this common misconception and then proceeds to challenge this misconception. Common sense thinking, by its very nature, is localized, personal, and informal. It is localized because it is constrained by time and space and the degree of an individual's integration with society. Therefore, we can say that "common sense is not so common" since what is common sense for someone from a particular point of view may turn out to be not so common for another who comes from a different geographical, cultural and historical context. Common sense is personal because it depends heavily on the individual. It is informal because common sense lacks the technical resources necessary for research - concepts, methods, approach, techniques, schools of thought - which cannot be replaced with a type of common sensorial thought, even a very well-informed and articulated one. In contrast, sociological thinking is general, external and disciplined. It is general and external because it requires thinking in terms of all human society. The major contribution to this approach wasgiven by Emile Durkheim, Max Weber and Karl Marx, the builders of modern sociology. Sociological thinking is not limited to an individual's beliefs but rather is about "where" and "how" the individual participates in the larger world and "why" their participation takes place in a particular way and not another. As Allan Johnson states: “We are always participating in something larger than ourselves, and if we want to understand social life and what happens to people in it, we must understand what we are participating in and how we participate in it.” it” when he elaborates what he considers “the one thing” that sociology could teach everyone. It is essential to think in terms not just individual or collective, but both collective and individual, the relationship between them, how they influence and are influenced by each other: it is truly about the "forest and the trees". . Sociological thinking makes us understand that despite everything we think we know about the world, underneath there is also everything we don't know. Furthermore, sociological thinking is disciplined because it is based on empirical reasoning, careful observations and largely requires the systematic use of comparisons. These help a sociologist to think in terms of broader human society and find interconnections between different areas of social life. Significant and unsuspected connections are often achieved only by sifting through piles of “trivial and easily accessible to common sense” connections. As a sociologist, thinking and understanding the world goes beyond the common sense point of view which is highly variable. All these factors, therefore, make sociological thought anti-fatalistic and anti-utopian in its approach and differentiate its empirical, generalized and critical knowledge from localized common sense. Durkheim believed that the disciplined application of sociological method and thinking would help an individual better understand their own society, and that this understanding would be broadened through the use of systematic comparisons between their own and other societies. To illustrate this, it would be useful to cite Durkheim's classic work on “Suicide” which contributed immensely to unmasking “the illusion of understanding created by common sense”. Durkheim went beyond his common sense view of suicide as a highly individual act and instead treated it as a “social fact” – as “general, external and coercive” – by studying “suicide rates”. Through his research he was able to demonstrate that suicide rates are more dependent on an individual's degree of social integration and that the difference in suicide rates between countries, gender, race and other contexts is not simply the sum total of suicides individual but in reality a reflection of the society in which they live. However, it must be said that the distinction between sociological thinking and common sense thinking is not to deliberately make the former seem superior and esoteric in nature with the use of sophisticated jargon and “technical virtuosity”. According to NK Bose, "there are two kinds of scientists, those who make complex things simple and those who make simple things complex, and his preference was for the former." Although Beteille argues that common sense by itself is insufficient and often fails to make complex things simple, it should not be completely neglected since common sense is also an element of our social life. Therefore, sociological thinking must be careful and reflective to identify an individual's biases when studying their own society, as well as other knowledge created from a common sensory point of view. It must find a balance in the "interpenetration" of common sense with the technical virtuosity of the discipline, moderating the fatalistic and utopian elements of the former. In some cases, he was actually able to influencecommon sense on issues such as education, politics, class and inequality. Allan Johnson emphasized the distinction between sociological thinking and an individualistic model of thinking. The individualistic way of thinking tends to see everything only in terms of individuals: this reduces society only to a collection of individuals who exist independently of each other, in a given time and place. This not only affects how we choose to participate in society, but also how we think about social life and the world in general. The “individualist model” has only existed for a few centuries and its roots date back to the 19th century and in the United States, where the work of William James – influenced by the era of the “European Enlightenment” and “modernist thought” – and subsequently Sigmund Freud's unconventional insights – the discovery of the psyche and levels of consciousness – have influenced people to think more and more in terms of individual experience with greater “self-awareness” than before. Johnson illustrated the problems with this way of thinking by explaining that when members of privileged groups react negatively – aggressively or avoid talking about it – to the consequences of their membership that result in the oppression of the prejudiced group, they are thinking from a prejudiced perspective individualistic that shows them as "imperfect" and having a "personal need" to behave oppressively. The individualistic solution to social problems such as inequality, natural disasters or terrorism then becomes “a question not of collective solutions but of the accumulation of individual solutions. If we want to have less poverty in the world, the individualistic answer is to lift people out of poverty or stop them from becoming poor, by changing the kind of people they are, one person at a time.” The thinking is that he fails to understand the difference between people and social systems – he fails to understand “the forest for the trees”. People and social systems are not the same thing, but are closely related to each other and influenced by how the individual chooses to participate in them. Social systems are made up of different elements that exist in a particular relationship with each other and form a distinct pattern that makes it work as a whole, for example, the family system is made up of certain roles such as that of mother, father, son, daughter etc. and also of certain "ideas" that are collectively accepted in a society such as "being obedient to one's parents" and so on. Understanding what constitutes a system, how it works, and how it differs from one another is critical to understanding the consequences that result when people follow without questioning its legitimacy, i.e., the path of least resistance. Social systems are strengthened by imposing positive and negative sanctions that ensure compliance. This path of least resistance, therefore, makes common sense thinking so utopian and fatalistic in nature as there is a tendency to accept things as they are and to attribute "personal reasons" to "public problems", for example, blaming one's own "lucky" for being born into a "poor" family. To think sociologically, you need to be able to see everything from different perspectives. It would be useful at this point to cite Max Weber's work on “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” which demonstrated that the intentions and consequences of human actions can be very different from each other. The dominant view prevalent among social theorists until Weber's time was that, for better or worse, religion provided social stability in society. Weber's approach to religion not only defied rhetoric, but was also able to demonstrate the "unsuspected relationship" between religious values ​​and economic action/