SCS1001

Mills, C. Wright (2000) "The promise" from
in Mills, C Wright, The sociological imagination pp.3-24, Oxford; Oxford Dictionary Press

1 The Promise

Nowadays men often feel that their private lives are a series of traps. They sense that within their everyday worlds, they cannot overcome their troubles, and in this feeling, they are often quite correct: What ordinary men are directly aware of and what they try to do are bounded by the private orbits in which they live; their visions and their powers are limited to the close-up scenes of job, family, neighborhood; in other milieux, they move vicariously and remain spectators. And the more aware they become, however vafuely, of ambitions and of threats which transcend their immediate locales, the more trapped they seem to feel. 
Underlying this sense of being trapped are seemingly impersonal changes in the very structure of continent-wide societies. The facts of contemporary history are also facts about the success and the failure of individual men and women. When a society is industrialized, a peasant becomes a worker; a feudal lord is liquidated or becomes a businessman. When classes rise or fall, a man is employed or unemployed; when the rate of investment goes up or down, a man takes a new heart or goes broke. When wars happen, an insurance salesman becomes a rocket launcher; a store clerk, a radar man; a wife lives alone; a child grows up without a father. Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both. 
Yet men do not usually define the troubles they endure in term of historical change and institutional contradiction. The well-being they enjoy, they do not usually impute to the big ups and downs…