5
concepts were necessary to lend facts meaning, and that social science needed to account
for the values and meanings of its human subjects. Like these sociologists, the young
Mills believed that American sociology up to that point had largely failed to study society
in a sophisticated, rigorous, and systematic manner and that attention to sociological
theory was necessary to move the discipline forward. Indeed, Mills’s methodological
writings had much in common with the most significant work of sociological theory
during this period: Parsons’s Structure of Social Action. Like Parsons, Mills rejected
positivist attempts to model sociology on the natural sciences—a charge that he levied
against John Dewey in his Masters Thesis.
7
Both Parsons and Mills were involved in a
long-term trend in twentieth-century social science to develop a distinct approach to the
understanding of society that stressed that humans could not be adequately understood
solely in terms of biological categories such as heredity and environment nor in terms of
the rational actor theory drawn from economics.
8
An exchange of letters between Mills and Robert Merton over Karl Mannheim’s
sociology of knowledge reveals the extent to which the young Mills was in dialogue with
the emerging leaders of American sociology. However, though Mills was deeply
embedded in the disciplinary discourse of sociological theory, his methodological
perspective was nevertheless distinctive and held radical implications. In 1940, Mills
sent Merton a draft of his article, “The Methodological Consequences of the Sociology of
Knowledge,” that marked Mills’s entry into a heated methodological debate among
American sociologists brought about by the 1936 translation of Karl Mannheim’s
Ideology and Utopia.
9
Mills was one of the only American sociologists to defend
Mannheim’s expansive epistemological program for the sociology of knowledge. Mills
Convention