The Sociological Imagination (1959), which is considered Mills's most influential book, describes a mindset for studying sociology, the sociological imagination, that stresses being able to connect individual experiences and societal relationships. Three components form the sociological imagination:
- History: why society is what it is and how it has been changing for a long time and how history is being made in it
- Biology: the nature of "human nature" in a society and what kinds of people inhabit a particular society
- Social Structure: how the various institutional orders in a society function, which ones are dominant, how they are kept together, how they might be changing too, etc.
Mills asserts that a critical task for social scientists is to "translate personal troubles into public issues". The distinction between troubles and issues is that troubles relate to how a single person feels about something while issues refer to a society affects groups of people. For instance, a man who cannot find employment is experiencing a trouble, while a city with a massive unemployment rate makes it not just a personal trouble but an issue.Sociologists, then, rightly connect their autobiographical, personal challenges to social institutions. Social scientists should then connect those institutions to social structures and locate them within a historical narrative.
