Mills attacked grand theory and abstracted empiricism together in 1959, although they look like opposite sins. Why did he think one objection disposed of both?

C. That each had detached its procedure from the substantive problems of actual people in actual historical situations

Both, on his account, had let method dictate subject matter, one by building a conceptual apparatus with nothing determinate to say, the other by studying whatever the instrument could capture. His alternative was the sociological imagination: connecting a private trouble to the historical structure that produces it.