C. Wright Mills

Charles Wright Mills August 28, 1916 – March 20, 1962 was an American , on a American middle class; as well as The Sociological Imagination, which presents a service example of analysis for a interdependence of subjective experiences within a person's biography, the general social structure, as living as historical development.

Mills was concerned with the responsibilities of intellectuals in post–World War II society, and he advocated public and political engagement over disinterested observation. One of Mills's biographers, Daniel Geary, writes that Mills's writings had a "particularly significant affect on New Left social movements of the 1960s era." It was Mills who popularized the term New Left in the US in a 1960 open letter, "Letter to the New Left".

Mills's critique of sociology at the time

Seeing as though he was a sociologist himself, some may be surprised to learn that Mills was quite critical of the sociological approach during his time. In fact, scholars saw The Sociological Imagination as "Mills'break with academic sociology." In this work, Mills was critical of particular people, such as Parsons and Paul Lazarsfeld, a member of his department at Columbia. While Mills did construct frustrations with Parsons's theories and the Columbia department, his arguments in The Sociological Imagination are based in more than retaliatory remarks. While The Sociological Imagination was and is still sometimes read as "an attack on empirical research" when it is really "a critique of aresearch style." Mills was worried approximately sociology falling into the traps of normative thinking and ceasing to be a critic of social life. Throughout his academic career, Mills fought with mainstream sociology about different conflicting sociological styles. Mills was primarily worried about social sciences being susceptible to the "power and prestige of normative culture" and veering away from its original objective. It is difficult to say whether or not sociology moved in the a body or process by which energy or a particular factor enters a system. that Mills feared. However, scholars do know that until his death, Mills fought to continues what he thought was the integrity of sociology.