Sociological Imagination, the German translation of C. Wright Mills' The Sociological Imagination first published in 1963, can rightly be considered a milestone in scientific-political debates in the United States and remains one of the most important self-critiques of sociology today. Mills proposes a third way between mere empiricism and detached theory: he advocates for a critical social science that cannot be bureaucratically instrumentalized nor self-indulgently meanders, but instead gains societal significance by illuminating the connection between personal troubles and public issues. This, he argues, is the task and promise of a sociology that all too often indulges in "a peculiar pleasure in the attitude of the detached observer.".