“Why?”: C. Wright Mills on the Spirit of the Classical Sociological Tradition and Positivist Versus Critical Sociology

ABSTRACT Despite their very diverse interests, the classical sociological thinkers were concerned with analyzing the dramatic social transformations in the wake of colonialism, slavery, and modern industrial capitalism as well as the multiple revolutions, particularly in relation to the new forms of social inequalities and power disparities. Without hesitating to connect the “is” to the “ought,” they also provided “big picture” accounts of the seamless and mutually constitutive connections among social structure, ideology, culture, and agency with the explicit goal of sketching out possible future trajectories for flourishing, relatively just societies that could support rich, meaningful lives. The project of postwar “professionalization,” initiated by dominant American sociologists, rejected and attempted to weed out what they perceived as the “ideological,” “normative,” and “amateurish” concerns of the classical thinkers. In this paper, the concerted resistance to the project of “professionalization” by C. Wright Mills and others is analyzed, and a return to the valuable legacy of the classical thinkers for making critical sense of the perilous and catastrophic state of the current world is advocated.