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C. Wright Mills introduced his concept of the sociological imagination during the Cold War to warn against what he perceived as increasing moral and political indifference and the incapacity of people to relate their own private worlds to world history. Hence, social scientists failed to see that the welfare and peace at home, to which they contributed, were supported by wars waged somewhere far away. The post-Cold War epoch is characterised by new unprecedented challenges raised by neo-liberalism, global capitalism, biotechnology, eugenics, racial hygiene and the biologisation of social policy. The new world is ruled by political, economic and technological forces that closely cooperate with each other and determine world and local histories. The changed social structures also imply that domestic and foreign policies undergo mutations. Yet, they remain the two sides of the same coin, which has now become the neo-liberal objective of unhindered global capitalism. The 'new' or 'updated' social imagination still strives to unmask hidden powers that justify their dominion.

Calling Citizens to a Moral Way of Life: A Dutch Example of Moralized Politics
This article offers a sociological analysis of the moral revisions that accompany welfare state reforms in the Netherlands. It is argued that Dutch welfare state reforms after the Cold War rely on moral discourses in particular and moral language in general to legitimize and effectuate policy measures. The Dutch reformers have been pursuing a set of strategies of moralization designed to adjust the Dutch welfare state to the new, post-Cold War situation, in which social policies are redesigned to support the operation of global markets. This article seeks to show how this "moral revision" has been taking place by consulting data sources provided by Dutch media, policy documents, council reports, advices, speeches, and newspaper interviews. This implies that special attention is paid to the rhetoric, language, tones, symbolism, metaphors and moral images used and propagated by moral revisionists, elites and media, their definitions of the prevailing moral situation and of the desired one, their formulation of desired values and norms and the ways in which moral panics are aroused. Three recent Dutch policy innovations, namely the national debate on norms and values, the Charter Responsible Citizenship and the family policy memorandum, are interpreted as political strategies to re-engineer the new morality that can sustain a reformed state.

A rapidly changing 'society' that requires 'new units of analysis', 'new roles for sociology', and new democratic commitment to 'the publics' has implications for the identity and calling of sociology. In this so-called 'identity crisis', some sociologists have introduced the so-called 'after dialectics' thesis and argue that social conditions have now become such that the possibility of a dialectical sociology has disappeared. In this article, the argument is introduced that such a diagnosis rests on a common misunderstanding of dialectics. Particularly drawing inspiration from the works of C. Wright Mills and Alvin Gouldner, this article seeks to retrace the classical or Greek meaning and the original significance that they attributed to dialectical sociology, in its resistance to ideological thought and practice. The concluding paragraph provides an overview of some recent movements in sociology, such as the dialogical turn and public sociology, and compares them with the (reconstructed) dialectical approach.