"The role of reason I have been
outlining neither means nor requires that one hit the pavement, take the
next plane to the scene of the current crisis, run for Congress, buy a
newspaper plant, go among the poor, set up a soap box. Such actions
are often admirable, and I can readily imagine occasions when I should
personally find it impossible not to want to do them myself. But
for the social scientist to take them to be his normal activities is merely
to abdicate his role, and to display by his action a disbelief in the promise
of social science and in the role of reason in human affairs. This
role requires only that the social scientist get on with the work of social
science and that he avoid furthering the bureaucratization of reason and
of discourse" (The Sociological Imagination,
1959, p. 192).