Sixty years ago, on March 20, 1962, the American sociologist C. Mills Wright Mills died at the age of 46. On the 60th anniversary of his death, we re-read his most influential classic, The Sociological Imagination, and in this way reflect on the imagination of the social sciences. We interviewed chen yingfang (sociology), Ren Jiantao (political science) and Liu Hailong (communication studies) and other three scholars. This article is an interview with sociologist Chen Yingfang.
The relationship between man and society is one of the basic elements of Mills's interpretation of the "imagination". When the individual is trapped in a chaotic daily experience, borrowing the sociological imagination can explore the surrounding world, discover the structural framework of society, understand the relationship of this framework to us, and summarize our state. Chen Yingfang believes that the ability to understand the world around it is essentially learned. For researchers, the challenge is how to form a "problem awareness based on inner value care".
This article is from the B05 of the Beijing News Book Review Weekly's March 18 special topic "Reclaiming the Imagination of Social Sciences".
For more information, see:
Unfortunately, our imagination is as scarce as ever丨 to commemorate the 60th anniversary of Wright Mills' death
Historical Perspectives of Political Science Research 丨 Interview with Ren Jiantao
Written | Luodong
Chen Yingfang, Professor and Doctoral Supervisor of the School of International and Public Affairs, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, is the author of "Youth" and China's Social Change, "The Logic of Urban China", and "Order and Chaos: The "Social Miracle" of Transforming China".
Mills' emphasis on sensibility
Beijing News: Do you remember the first time you read Mills's "Sociological Imagination"?
Chen Yingfang: I can't remember exactly. I was introduced to sociology in the early 1990s. When he first arrived in Japan in 1992, he was a "recruiting foreign scholar" at the Institute of Human Sciences at Kyoto University. Before I went on to pursue my Ph.D. in sociology, I audited sociology at Kyoto University. Then, due to family reasons, he went to Osaka City University for a year of "graduate school" (equivalent to a preparatory student for "graduate school students"), and finally officially took the entrance examination for the sociology major of the graduate school. Learning sociology, and even understanding Mills's scholarship, is a process of groping step by step with your own inner impulses.
Recently, I found out the materials I had brought back from Japan and found that the Japanese version of "Sociological Imagination" that I had in hand was a "new edition" published by the Ikuku Shoten in 1995. It was introduced to Japan in 1965 and translated by Professor Hiroshi Suzuki (a Japanese expert on Mills' theory and author of Mills' Theory), and was first printed 14 times by 1984. In the 1980s and 1990s, Chinese self-funded international students mainly borrowed books from libraries, and they had to think twice about buying new books. Fortunately, at that time, the Japanese used book market was still very good, and photocopiers in universities and convenience stores had become popular. Therefore, except for new books that are directly related to or of particular interest to the topic of the doctoral dissertation, which need to be bought with determination, the rest of the literature mainly relies on old books or abstract copying.
Later, "The Sociological Imagination" was translated into Simplified Chinese. The Sociological Imagination I have in my hand is the first edition translated by Chen Qiang and Zhang Yongqiang and published by Beijing Sanlian Bookstore in July 2001.
Because when I came into contact with Mills's scholarship, I lacked a corresponding understanding of the sociological history of the United States in the 50s and 60s, as well as the trajectory of Mills's academic thought, especially the spiritual conflicts he himself experienced in that era, etc., and mainly combined with my own problems at that time to find academic resources and method references, so for my original research, "Character and Social System" and "Sociological Imagination" seemed to be one - the former had a direct impact on my original research. It is an important reference for my doctoral dissertation, and it also makes me more receptive to the academic value of the latter.
Character and Social Institutions was co-authored by Mills and his teacher Hans Heinrich Gerth and published in 1953. Gus had a significant influence on Mills, and together they co-edited the works of Max Weber. But since Mills published The Power Elite, he has been seen by some in academia as a radical outlier and has drifted away from some friends, including Gus. In the past two days, I turned out "Character and Social System", and found that there were still a few pages of reading notes that I had written at the beginning, summarizing the main points and key points. To put it simply, in addition to the basic contents of "character structure" and its formation mechanism, the historical changes of "social system", one of its focuses is to discuss the meaning and operability of "role" as an intermediary between "people" and "systems" as individuals. The book is thick and structured, and my notes summarize the contrast between Mills and Freud Mead in particular, and outline the academic historical latitude and longitude of the study of sociological institutions, as well as the significance of the historical dimension in the book. This made me realize that Mills's later scholarship, although it always emphasized the importance of human sensibility and how to discover the social whole from the individual, did not move towards the microscopic sociological study of social psychology, which should be directly related to the Weber study he worked with his mentor in his early days, and the study of "character and social system".
Mills co-authored the cover of Character and Social Structure, a 1999 reprint with mentor Gus.
The "world around you" is about everyone
Beijing News: One of the basic contents of imagination is the ability to shuttle between people's situation and the structure of society, Immels's understanding, is to "clearly summarize what is happening in the surrounding world and what they themselves will encounter." Since the last century, the vast majority of researchers have accepted that human behavior is social, cultural, and institutional, so naturally they will understand the social structure behind it, rather than staying at the microscopic level of individual biology and psychology. Several major grand narratives such as "postmodernism" and "consumerism" have even become panaceas for explaining the "world around us." At the meso level, social investigation and research is also constantly collecting empirical data at the individual level, summarizing and analyzing middle-level concepts such as "class", "education" and "community", and paying attention to what is happening in the "surrounding world" outside the individual. In short, connecting people's situation with the "surrounding world" seems to be what people have been doing all along. So, is imagination still a problem? What is that "world around us" that we need to understand?
Chen Yingfang: Chinese sociology has experienced a period of history that was abolished, and was restored and rebuilt after the reform and opening up, at that time, whether it was a "Nankai class" (a sociology graduate class organized by sociologist Fei Xiaotong and others) or an early return from studying abroad, most of the sociological professional training they received was based on the experience of Western society in the same period, and the research paradigm was also affected by it, and our society was affected by the different periods in which it was located. In fact, what is most needed is earlier sociological studies such as classical or 1950s. As you can see, there is a misalignment of "modern" and "postmodern" here. In a sense, the society we live in is close to mills' original situation, including the logic of international relations after the beginning of the Cold War and the domestic social order in the United States, as well as the changes in the function and status of the social sciences in the context of the think tank of academic research.
The above are some of my understandings, and on this basis, I will talk about the "surrounding world" you mentioned.
Each of us will care about the "world around us". In the past, people may have been mainly concerned with groups and regional societies such as the family and traditional communities, while in the process of modernization, they were concerned with the fate of the nation-state and the affairs of the unit in the planning era. In the process of marketization in the 1980s and 1990s, individuals entered the market, but also with families. Since then, urbanization and urban development have also led to many important changes, including how we understand the development mechanism of cities, the safety of citizens' property, and of course, the fate of both homes and communities. From this, we can also pay attention to issues such as public resource allocation and social equity. These all fall under the category of "the world around you". We can't say "my place" or "my class" is good, fate has a connection, and disasters that occur far away are also our disasters. Even in the era of globalization, a catastrophe in any country can change the fate of our country and affect everyone.
"The Logic of Urban China", by Chen Yingfang, Life, Reading, Xinzhi Triptych Bookstore, May 2012.
The condition of man as a subject
Beijing News: Then you just said that "everyone", how to understand people who are both imaginative objects (when being studied) and imaginative subjects (when feeling and understanding the "surrounding world")?
Chen Yingfang: People's sociological imagination is conditional. According to Arendt, man needs to be a complete man. In the institutional framework of social investigation, the existence of professional investigation institutions and their practitioners, as well as their motivation and basic conditions for conducting investigations, are either attached to the needs of the government, the needs of businessmen, or to university research projects. That is to say, in the system of social investigation, our "society" and "social members" are actually just objects that are set up as the object of investigation and interpreted, but they themselves do not have the basic conditions for studying society and understanding themselves. The growth of citizens and the maturity of society require social members to have the corresponding basic ability to understand themselves and interpret themselves, and only in this way can they become the voices of social rights and social propositions, and become the real subjects that promote social self-change.
From the perspective of sociological understanding of "roles", our identity as human beings is also a specific social person, in other words, we live in the role cluster, playing different roles in the family, intimate relationships, professional division of labor and public life, and one of the basic roles is community membership (citizens, community residents).
We all know that roles are acquired, and caring for the "surrounding world" and imagining the individual's situation as a public problem is a basic content of character acquisition.
Of course, achieving this "self-discovery" has always been a problem, or at least a process. In our universities today, students do not lack the opportunity to participate in various professional practices, such as scientific research projects led by professional teachers, political counselors, and regimental organizations. However, independent and autonomous investigation and research based on people's understanding of their own situation and concern for the fate of society lack sufficient encouragement and support. In reality, in terms of my teaching practice over the years, encouraging students to explore their own inner concerns and guiding students to engage in social fieldwork that is truly the subject of their own research has almost become an alternative teaching practice. It is not easy for teachers to free up energy from topics or market projects; what is the significance of professional training in students who are outside the needs of performance competition? Moreover, for many students, the requirement of "problem awareness based on inner value care" also means some kind of unfamiliar path.
Beijing News: Is it a problem for scholars who have studied for many years or are committed to sociological research?
Chen Yingfang: In a sense, people's knowledge and thoughts are essentially based on the care of this world. However, people's intellectual exploration of society often focuses on the study of past history or distant worlds. For this phenomenon, one possible explanation may be that regarding the real society in which we live and the daily life we experience, it is actually more difficult for people to obtain objective cognition and universal explanation, and people's knowledge exploration is inevitably to twist and turn.
Moreover, the establishment of universal knowledge depends to a large extent on the existence of "we" as the subject of cognition. Today, for example, we can accept a general knowledge of history, while in the East we have the possibility of developing a general understanding of Western society. However, when faced with the real society in which they are located and in the face of daily life, the formation of illusions lacks the necessary distance and space, and people's different concepts and different life experiences are more likely to hinder the formation of universal knowledge or extensive theories.
The problem of sociology is that it not only mainly takes the real society as the cognitive object, but also believes that through logical collation and empirical testing, people can understand social reality and overcome the arbitrary interpretation of facts by people's concepts and ideologies with objectivity. It can be said that the exploration of objectivity is one of the basic values of sociology, but it is also a heavy burden borne by sociology, so in a general sense, what you are talking about is also a problem.