Experience and Sociology

In preparation for this conference I thought I'd read again C Wright Mills' The Sociological Imagination. Clearly there's a lot in that book about the pitfalls that sociologists face as they bounce about between the fetishisation of the concept on the one hand, and methodological inhibition and pretension on the other. There's much discussion, for example, of the 'unreality' of 'grand theory' which 'neither enlarge[s] our understanding nor make[s] our experience more sensible'; and of the inadequacies of 'scientific method', which Mills argues yields a precision that is neither necessarily empirical nor true. And even if the product of abstracted empiricism were true, it may yet be unimportant. For Mills, the really substantive issue that concerns sociology is not only the difficulty of shuttling between levels of abstractions - 'we must also', he writes, 'speak of problems'.