Defining 'Power' and Challenging 'Knowledge': Critical Analysis as Resistance in the UK

Abstract

The defining critical sociological text of the post-war decade was C. Wright Mills’ The Sociological Imagination (1959). Lucidly written and fiercely argued, it revealed a deep scepticism regarding the growth and consolidation of mainstream social science within the USA. Wright Mills (1959: 20) railed against the ‘bureaucratic techniques which inhibit sociological inquiry by ‘‘methodological’’ pretensions’, its persistent ‘obscurantist conceptions’ and, most significantly, its trivialising of ‘publicly relevant issues’ by a misconceived and overstated ‘concern with minor problems’. In particular, state-sponsored academic social research had become confined by ‘inhibitions, obscurities and trivialities’. The consequence was the decontextualisation of the lives, experiences and opportunities of people, their neighbourhoods, their communities and their associated tensions. Researching and teaching in the shadow of McCarthyism, sociology had sacrificed its reforming zeal; its ‘tendencies towards fragmentary problems and scattered causation conservatively turned to the use of the corporation, army and the state’.