"Historical transformations carry meanings not only for individual ways of life, but for the very character--the limits and possibilities of the human being.  As the history-making unit, the dynamic nation-state is also the unit within which the variety of men and women are selected and formed, liberated and repressed--it is the man-making unit.  That is one reason why struggles between nations and between blocs of nations are also struggles over the types of human beings that will eventually prevail in the Middle East, in India, in China, in the United State; that is why culture and politics are now so intimately related; and that is why there is such need and such demand for the sociological imagination"  (The Sociological Imagination, 1959, p. 158).