Introduction: Bringing Imagination Back In

Abstract

This chapter outlines the topic, main objectives, and structure of the book. It identifies the pathologies distorting the traditional virtues and calling of sociology, and suggests how the sociological imagination needs to be restructured. To render sociology responsive to the ever-more complicated world, the chapter argues that it is important, first, to take seriously the share of objects and materials in the constitution of our living together; second, to liberate sociological thought from the reifying mode of thought by beginning from relations, alloys, and assemblages; and, third, to refute the micro-macro model and attend to the multiplicity of scales on which things exist.