Individual Biographical Experiences and Peace

Abstract

The problem with Mills’s terminology on the whole is not that it is given modern meaning improperly as current sociological concepts are read backwards to give Mills’s words meanings he did not intend. It is the reverse: he uses different arid more commonplace terminology to refer to modern-day sociological ideas. This is perhaps most apparent with respect to his many references to the individual biographical experiences of ordinary people in their personal milieux. It is justifiable to read this as prosaic references to what sociologists call ‘agency’ by people in their everyday life setting, a setting that Schutz and the social phenomenologists call people’s common-sense lifeworld. Agency does not simply refer to activity — riding a bicycle — but to action that is oriented to another, what Weber called social action, such as the cyclist taking action to avoid hitting real or imagined pedestrians, other cyclists or drivers. Action oriented to another involves the agent in applying their common-sense knowledge to guide the course of the interaction. Common-sense knowledge is that body of mutual knowledge, as Giddens calls it, which is shared by people and used by them to accomplish, their everyday life activities. Agency is thus social action that has meaning attached to it based upon the agent’s common-sense knowledge about all the circumstances surrounding the act, the other people involved and the common sense assumptions and mutual knowledge that bear upon the act and its setting.