At the end of the first chapter of Wishman's Confessions he tells the reader: "I sensed that my distress was not just a personal matter but revealed some of the painful moral and emotional dilemmas of my profession." [Seymour Wishman, Confessions of a Criminal Lawyer, at 18; see also 103] What moral and emotional dilemmas to you find revealed by Wishman's account of his encounter with Mrs. Lewis and the innocent defendant in the Mace-spraying case?

C. Wright Mills, a founder of humanistic sociology, has written about this linkage of private and public and his comments may help us understand Wishman's contention that his personal distress reveals something about the legal profession.

Nowadays men [and women] often feel that their private lives are a series of traps. They sense that within their everyday worlds, they cannot overcome their troubles, and in this feeling, they are often quite correct: What ordinary men [and women] are directly aware of and what they try to do are bounded by the private orbits in which they live; their visions and their powers are limited to the close-up scenes of job, family, neighborhood; in other milieux, they move vicariously and remain spectators. And the more aware they become, however vaguely, of ambitions and of threats which transcend their immediate locales, the more trapped they seem to feel.

Underlying this sense of being trapped are seemingly impersonal changes in the very structure of continent-wide societies. The facts of contemporary history are also facts about the success and the failure of individual men and women. When a society is industrialized, a peasant becomes a worker; a feudal lord is liquidated or becomes a businessman. When classes rise or fall, a man is employed or unemployed; when the rate of investment goes up or down, a man takes new heart or goes broke. When wars happen, an insurance salesman becomes a rocket launcher; a store clerk, a radar man; a wife lives alone; a child grows up without a father. Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both.

Yet men [and women] do not usually define the troubles they endure in terms of historical change and institutional contradiction. The well-being they enjoy, they do not usually impute to the big ups and downs of the societies in which they live. Seldom aware of the intricate connection between the patterns of their own lives and the course of world history, ordinary men do not usually know what this connection means for the kinds of men [and women] they are becoming and for the kinds of history-making in which they might take part. They do not possess the quality of mind essential to grasp the interplay of man and society, of biography and history, of self and world. They cannot cope with their personal troubles in such ways as to control the structural transformations that usually lie behind them.

The very shaping of history now outpaces the ability of men [and women] to orient themselves in accordance with cherished values. And which values? Even when they do not panic, men [and women] often sense that older ways of feeling and thinking have collapsed and that newer beginnings are ambiguous to the point of moral stasis. Is it any wonder that ordinary men [and women] often feel they cannot cope with the larger worlds with which they are so suddenly confronted? That they cannot understand the meaning of their epoch for their own lives? That--in defense of selfhood--they become morally insensible, trying to remain altogether private men [and women]? Is it any wonder that they come to be possessed by a sense of the trap? [C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination 3-5 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959)]

Mills argues that to make the connection between our private lives and the social and political worlds in which we live, we need a "quality of mind" to help us see "what is going on in the world" and "what may be happening." Mills calls this quality, sociological imagination.

The sociological imagination enables its possessor to understand the larger historical scene in terms of its meaning for the inner life and the external career of a variety of individuals. It enables him [or her] to take into account how individuals, in the welter of their daily experience, often become falsely conscious of their social positions. Within the welter, the framework of modern society is sought, and within that framework the psychologies of a variety of men and women are formulated. By such means the personal uneasiness of individuals is focused upon explicit troubles and the indifference of publics is transformed into involvement with public issues. [5]

Mills contends that we can fully understand our private experience only in the context of history and how a society works within a historical period. "We have come to know that every individual lives, from one generation to the next, in some society; that he lives out a biography, and that he lives it out within some historical sequence." [6] Mills, no determinist, concludes that by living the way we do we contribute to the shaping of society and history even as we are made by society and its "historical push and shove." [6]

Mills would have us investigate the moral dilemmas we personally confront as lawyers within the context of our history as lawyers. The moral character of the profession has indeed changed over time and it may be a fundamental mistake to enter a profession without knowing its history and how it has shaped and configured the moral dimension of our profession. [For a history of the legal profession that focuses on the moral transformation of the profession, see Thomas Shaffer, American Legal Ethics 59-164 (New York: Matthew Bender, 1985]

Alvin Gouldner, another sociologist, provides this commentary on "sociological imagination":

The sociologists' task today is not only to see people as they see themselves, nor to see themselves as others see them; it is also to see themselves as they see other people. What is needed is a new and heightened self-awareness among sociologists, which would lead them to ask the same kinds of questions about themselves as they do about taxicab drivers or doctors, and to answer them in the same ways. Above all, this means that we must acquire the ingrained habit of viewing our own beliefs as we would those held by others. [Alvin Gouldner, The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology 25 (1970)]

 

Web Resources: C.W. Mill's Home Page

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