The one with a sociological imagination is able to understand the impact of the action of historical forces on people's inner state and path of life. It helps to explain how, in the tumultuous flow of daily life, people often form a false awareness of their social positions. In this whirlwind of events is the device of modern society, which forms the mental warehouse of people. In addition, people's personal difficulties are based on problems that are independent of them, and public indifference to the individual is manifested in concerns that are socially important.
The first result of the sociological imagination and the first lesson of social science based on it is to understand that a person can understand the experience acquired in life and verify his own destiny only when he determines his place in the context of a given moment, that he can only learn his life chances when he understands what they are from those who are in the same conditions as him. On the one hand, it's a bad lesson, on the other hand it's wonderful. We do not know the limits, the human possibilities in the quest for the conquest of heights and voluntary fall, for suffering and jubilation, for the joy of living and for the pleasure of the game of reason. But at the present time, we have learned that the limits of "human nature" are terribly broad, that each individual from generation to generation lives his biography in a particular society, in an appropriate historical context. By the very fact of its existence, it makes its own contribution, albeit negligible, to the formation of society, to the choice of the direction of its historical development, although it is itself the product of society and of specifically historical social forces.
The sociological imagination makes it possible to understand the history and circumstances of individual human life, as well as to understand their relationship within society. This is a task that can be accomplished with his help. Acceptance of such a task and awareness of its perspectives is a feature of classical social thinking. This characteristic is inherent in Herbert Spencer, very talkative and meticulous, and Edward Ross, Auguste Contour and Emil Durkheim, complex and insightful, who opened the ulcers of society with elegance, but without compromise. It marked all the more remarkable-formulated intellectual achievements of Karl Marx, the source of brilliant ironic epiphanies of Thorstein Veblen multidimensional conceptions of reality of Joseph Schumpeter, it is the psychological basis of D & Lekki flexibility and, in the same way, of great depth and clarity of Max Weber. This feature is inherent in all the best modern achievements in the field of human and social research.
No social study, if it does not address the problems of human life, history and their interaction in society, can accomplish the tasks faced by authors.
Whatever the special questions that touch the classics of social thought, however narrow or, on the contrary, broad is the image of the social reality they study, all those who have clearly understood the perspectives of their work ask themselves three groups of questions over and over again.
1. What is the structure of the society studied as a whole? What are its main elements and how do they relate to each other? How does the structure of the society studied differ from other types of social order? What role do some characteristics of this structure play in the process of reproduction and modification?
2. What place does this society occupy in human history? What are the mechanisms for changing it? What is its place and role in the development of all humanity? What is the impact of a particular element of the structure of the society studied on the relevant historical period and what is this element, in turn, historically due? What is the essence of a particular historical period? What is its difference with other times? What are the characteristic ways for her to "make" history?
3. Which social types predominate in a given society and which will prevail? What kind of selection do they make and how do they form, how do they become free or oppressed, do they become receptive or indifferent? What types of "human nature" are revealed in the social behaviour and character of individuals living in a particular society at a particular time? And what is the impact on the "human nature" of each particular characteristic of the society studied?
These are the kinds of questions that have been asked by the best representatives of public thought, whether it is the great state or the narrow literary rewemhe, the family, the prison or the religious movement. These questions constitute the intellectual framework of classical studies on human behaviour in society, they are inevitably asked by all those with a sociological imagination. Because such an imagination allows sociologists to move from one perspective to the other, from politics to psychology, from the examination of an individual family to the comparative study of the public budgets of different countries, from Sunday school to military unity, from the investigation of an individual company to the study of contemporary poetry.
The sociological imagination according to the calls to pass from the independent study of an individual's will of the historical changes common to the most intimate properties of the human personality, as well as to see the link between them. We are encouraged to seize this opportunity by the constant desire to understand the socio-historical importance of man in a particular society that ensures the manifestation of his human qualities and his very existence.