How You Became the Social Being, You Are Today

Draw on two sociological theories and related concepts to discuss how you are a social being and have become who you are today.

Identify specific instances where ‘agency’ and ‘structure’ have been influential. Consider the following statements:

• Marx: Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances but under the circumstances existing already, given, and transmitted from the past.
• Mills: Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both.
• Giddens: The sociological imagination demands that we ‘think ourselves away’ from the familiar routines of our daily life in order that we may look at them from a new point of view which may appear strange, at least at first.