从图书馆国际赠书的地方发现了这个小本子，爱不释手。我是外行，只是爱好使然，终于抽空看了看这本书，果然都是名家经典，像米尔斯、伯格、默顿、戈夫曼等，还有古典作家像马克思、涂尔干、韦伯的名篇。第一篇就是选自米尔斯的经典著作《社会学的想象力》的第一章 The Promise of Sociology.
下面是这本小册子编者的导读：
C. Wright Mills(1916-1962) is one of the most familiar sociologists of the 20 century, as he has contributed greatly to the study of politics, economics, and sociaologoical theory. In his explication of the sociological imagination, Mills asserts that sociology encourages us to see individuals as shaped by larger historical forces and social structures. At the heart fo the sociological imagination is the ability to distinguish between “troubles”, which are immediate to the individual, and “issues,” which are environmental, as they are situated at the institutional level of society.
后面作一点摘录和评论：
联系社会背景的大历史，方能明白个人生活的变化，而要理解社会历史的沧海桑田，亦只有进入到个人生活之中。
Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both.
现代人面对历史的急剧变化的惶恐源于不具备这种“品质”
They do not possess the quality of mind essential to grasp the interplay of man and society, of biography and history, of self and world.
对此，Mills认为我们需要社会学的想象力
It is not lnly information that they need –in this Age of Fact, information often dominates their attention and overwhelms their capacities to assimilate it. It is not only the skills for reason that they need — although their struggles to acquire those often exhaust their limited moral energy.
What they need, and what they feel they need, is a quality of mind that will help them to use information and to develop reason in order achieve lucid within themselves. It is this quality, I am going to contend, that journalists and scholars, artists and publics, scientists and editors are coming to expect of what may be called the sociological imagination.
想起安德森在《想象的共同体》中讨论时间观念的变化，以及小说和报纸的作用。一种“空洞的”时间的形成，容易使人想象出在此时此刻一个活生生的社会实体的存在。而社会学的想象力的要求似乎更进一步，不仅可以体认到社会的存在，更可以“帮助人们利用信息增进理性，以看清在发生他们之间的事情”。
唐长孺（1911–1994 ）教授。江苏吴江人。1932年上海大同大学文科毕业。毕业后在 兰田国立师范、武汉大学等单位历任讲师、副教授、教授等职，并任武汉大学历史系主任，国家文物局古文献研究室主任，武汉大学中国三至九世纪研究所所长，中国科学院历史研究所研究员。早年从事中国辽、金、元史的研究。1944年后，专注魏晋南北朝隋唐史，并从事敦煌吐鲁番出土文书的整理和研究。
