C.Wright Mills《The Sociological Imagination》米尔斯《社会学的想象力》（一）

平生 Posted on 24 十一月 2010

按：米尔斯《社会学的想象力》是一本经典，他几十年前在这本小册子里所探讨的问题时至今日依然有效，尤其在考虑到目前某些学术困境时，米尔斯所焦虑的那些问题也同样为我们所焦虑。最近打算系统精读critical theory ，首先想把米尔斯的“社会学的想象力”读了，希望建立属于自己的理论视野的和面对现实问题的想象力。核心问题一直是：个人的生活方式与时代的巨大变动究竟是什么样的关系？个人所处的位置与时代所处的历史周期究竟有着怎样的关联？我们如何解释和解决个人生活中的那些无处不在、暗流涌动的时代之精神症候？这都需要超出我们时代因持存而生产出的浮论之后，重新再生产出新的想象力才能完成的任务。

就我个人的思索而言，可以说经过了从“个人心灵世界”向“社会真实世界”的转变，不仅在思想的体验上，也在关心的问题中呈现出来。我同样把我个人的这种转变放在米尔斯所说的个人生活世界与社会之间关系的维度中。有时我会遇到此前心灵世界的纠缠，但未来可以看清的是，这种转变会给心灵世界以更深广的地平线。

下面分章节做了笔记，英文是原文，后面的中文有的是英文的翻译，有的是批注。读原著的确更可以感受作者笔下的情感。

另，最近也在重读曼海姆Mannheim的ideology and utopia《意识形态与乌托邦》，发现米尔斯的很多想法都借鉴了曼海姆的，知识社会学。这些东西读来感觉比较接近一种追求真实的历史的渴望。

1) first chapter

In what period have so many men been so totally exposed at so fast a pace to such earthquakes of
change?

在什么时代有如此多的人们被以如此快速的节奏完全暴露在这个剧变的时期？

快速剧变的时代必然带来不安全感，尤其对那些自我保护能力匮乏的人们来说，问题不在个人自己，而要从整体的社会视野和社会结构变动的角度寻找源头和解决之道。

大多数人被exposed在太阳下，必然有另外的人隐藏在太阳下的阴影里。所以并不是“太阳底下没有新鲜事”，永远新鲜的是，谁在阳光或阴影下？

The history that now affects every man is world history.

21世纪了，如还局限在民族国家的单一视野中，怎么可能真正理解our history and individual biography in his or her time。

The first fruit of this imagination—and the first lesson of the social science that embodies it—is the idea that the individual can understand his own experience and gauge his own fate only by locating himself within his period, that he can know his own chances in life only by becoming aware of those of all individuals in his circumstances.

个人无法理解自己的经历和测度自己的命运，如果可以，那其实是某种社会科学或意识形态需要个人对自己命运有理解和解释，即，只有个人才能对自己的命运负责的社会氛围恰恰是意识形态最具欺骗性的成果。

The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society. That is its task and its promise.

社会学的想象力使我们能够领会历史与个人经历及其两者之间在社会内部的关系。这是它的任务和前景。

ironic insight 反讽的洞察力。

three sorts of questions:
(1) What is the structure of this particular society as a whole? What are its essential components, and how are they related to one another? How does it differ from other varieties of social order?
Within it, what is the meaning of any particular feature for its continuance and for its change?

（1）某种特殊的社会作为整体其结构是什么？它的基本要素有哪些？这些基本要素之间如何联系？这个社会如何区别与其他各式各样的社会秩序？在它内部，维持其延续和改变的任何特定的部分其意义是什么？

(2) Where does this society stand in human history? What are the mechanics by which it is changing? What is its place within and its meaning for the development of humanity as a whole?How does any particular feature we are examining affect, and how is it affected by, the historical period in which it moves?
And this period—what are its essential features? How does it differ from other periods? What are its characteristic ways of history-making?

（2）社会发生变化的动力是什么？我们考察的某一特定部分怎样影响，以及如何被该社会进入的历史时期所影响？它创造历史的独特方式是什么？

(3) What varieties of men and women now prevail in this society and in this period? And what varieties are coming to prevail? In what ways are they selected and formed, liberated and repressed,

made sensitive and blunted? What kinds of ‘human nature’ are revealed in the conduct and character we observe in this society in this period? And what is the meaning for ’human nature’ of each and every feature of the society we are examining?

that imagination is the capacity to shift from one perspective to another.

It is the capacity to range from the most impersonal and remote transformations to the
most intimate features of the human self—and to see the relations between the two.

视点转换的能力。

minute points of the intersections of biography and history within society.

精细考察个人命运与历史的交叉之处。

They acquire a new way of thinking, they experience a transvaluation of values。

社会学的想象力可以使其获得一种新的思维方式，并且重估价值。

Perhaps the most fruitful distinction with which the sociological imagination works is between ‘the personal troubles of milieu’ and ‘the public issues of social structure。

区分个人周围环境中的困扰与社会结构中的公共议题

An issue is a public matter: some value cherished by publics is felt to be threatened

为公众所珍视的价值面临威胁，直接构成公共议题。

An issue, in fact, often involves a crisis in institutional arrangements, and often too it involves what Marxists call ‘contradictions’ or ‘antagonisms/

公共议题通常包括制度安排中的某一危机，也包括马克思主义者称之为“矛盾”或“对抗性”的东西。

In the case both of threat and of support we must ask what salient contradictions of structure may be involved。

社会结构的突出矛盾是什么？

Ours is a time of uneasiness and indifference—not yet formulated in such ways as to permit the work of reason and the play of sensibility.

我们的时代是不安和冷漠的时代——然而至今没有以明确的方式表述以使理性和感受力得以发挥作用。

For those who accept such inherited values as reason and freedom, it is the uneasiness itself
that is the trouble; it is the indifference itself that is the issue. And it is this condition, of uneasiness and indifference, that is the signal feature of our period.

不安本身就是困扰，冷漠本身即是公共议题。正是这种不安和冷漠构成了我们时代的显著特征。

Many great public issues as well as many private troubles are described in terms of ‘the psychiatric’—often, it seems, in a pathetic attempt to avoid the large issues and problems of modern society.

其实我个人也是对精神心理学或精神分析等东西不太感兴趣。

我们时代充满精神病学的专家和被精神病的男男女女，恰是我们的社会结构病态的症候。

On the contrary: ‘Man’s chief danger’ today lies in the unruly forces of contemporary society itself, with its alienating methods of production, its enveloping techniques of political domination, its international anarchy—in a word, its pervasive transformations of the very ‘nature’ of man and the conditions and aims of his life.

当代社会本身不受控制的力量是“人的主要危险”藏身之处。

In every intellectual age some one style of reflection tends to become a common denominator of cultural life.

某种知识反思的风格变成为文化生活中共通的东西。

反观我们这个时代，什么样的知识思考方式成了似乎约定俗成的？

It is a quality of mind that seems most dramatically to promise an understanding of the intimate realities of ourselves in connection with larger social realities。

把我们自己与外部巨大的社会真实世界联系在一起的思考方式。

Of course this is not all there is to ‘science‘， but it is feared that this could become all that there is to it.

Yet it is now frequently suggested that serious literature has in many ways become a minor art. If this is so, it is not merely because of the development of mass publics and mass media of communication, and all that these mean for serious literary production. It is also owing to the very quality of the history of our times and the kinds of need men of sensibility feel to grasp that quality.

严肃的文学在许多方式中变成了小众艺术，如果情况果真如此，那就不仅仅是因为大众和大众通信媒体的发展，以及对严肃文学生产的意义，同时也要归结于我们时代的特定历史品质和对种种有感受力的人要抓住那种历史品质的需要。（最后一句翻得蹩脚。。。）

What moral denunciations can measure up to the moral insensibility of men in the agonies of primary
accumulation? It is social and historical reality that men want to know, and often they do not find contemporary literature an adequate means for knowing it. They yearn for facts, they search for
their meanings, they want ‘a big picture’ in which they can believe and within which they can come to understand themselves.

这段话读得很感动，仿佛说得就是我。

They want orienting values too, and suitable ways of feeling and styles of emotion and vocabularies of motive. And they do not readily find these in the literature of today.

当代文学的衰落与堕落，使得人们不愿再在其中寻找facts、emotion and believes

to indicate some of the tasks at hand and the means available for doing the work that must now be done.

Let those who do not care for mine use their rejections of them to make their own as explicit and as
acknowledged as I am going to try to make minel

the qualities of mind that constitute it are becoming a common denominator of our general cultural life and that, however vaguely and in however a confusing variety of disguises, they are coming to be felt as a need.

The theory of man’s history can all too readily become distorted into a trans-historical strait-jacket into which the materials of human history are forced and out of which issue prophetic views
(usually gloomy ones) of the future. The works of Arnold Toynbee and of Oswald Spengler are well-known examples.

超历史的紧身衣。toynbee汤因比。spengler斯宾格勒。

the systematic theory of the nature of man and of society all too readily becomes an elaborate and
arid formalism in which the splitting of Concepts and their endless rearrangement becomes the central endeavor. Among what I shall call Grand Theorists, conceptions have indeed become
Concepts. The work of Talcott Parsons is the leading contemporary example in American sociology.

宏大理论grand theory，the splitting of Concepts and their endless rearrangement.