"No problem can be adequately formulated unless the values involved and the apparent threat to them are stated.  These values and their imperilment constitute the terms of the problem itself.  The values that have been the thread of classic social analysis, I believe, are freedom and reason; the forces that imperil them today seem at times to be co-extensive with the major trends of contemporary society, if not to constitute the characterizing features of the contemporary period.  The leading problems of the social studies today have this in common:  They concern conditions and tendencies that seem to imperil these two values and the consequences of that imperilment for the nature of man and the making of history"  (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, pp. 129-130).