An idea typically associated with sociology is the sociological imagination. Sociological imagination is a person's ability to understand what is happening around them in a broad sense and then use that information to understand their own internal situation. Mills argues in his first chapter of The Sociological Imagination that it is impossible to understand the life of the individual and the history of a society without understanding both historical change and institutional contradiction. He believes that the individual and society are interrelated, but he also goes a step further by stating that one must first understand society and then understand the