Journal of Classical Sociology
Copyright © 2006 SAGE Publications London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi Vol 6(1): 51–74 DOI: 10.1177/1468795X06061284
www.sagepublications.com
The Foundation of Pragmatic Sociology
Charles Horton Cooley and George Herbert Mead
HANS-JOACHIM SCHUBERT University of Potsdam, Germany
ABSTRACT Charles Horton Cooley was, according to George Herbert Mead, an
idealist or mentalist for whom ‘imaginations’ and not ‘symbolic interactions’ are
the ‘solid facts of society’. Contrary to Mead’s critique, Cooley breaks through
the Cartesian body–mind dualism in disagreement with idealism and behaviorism.
His objective was to develop a theory of ‘communication’ and ‘understanding’ as
the foundation of pragmatistic sociology. Communication is the decisive starting
point of Cooley’s and Mead’s sociological theory of ‘social order’ and ‘social
change’ as stages in the process of action. In conflict with each other actors must
define the meaning of the objective, subjective, social and symbolic world. To
overcome problems of action actors create generalized perspectives such as ‘human
nature values’ (Cooley) or a ‘logical universe of discourse’ (Mead) which guarantee
‘socialization’ or ‘social order’ and ‘individualization’ at the same time.
KEYWORDS action theory, communication theory, pragmatism, symbolic inter-
actionism, theory of social order and social change
George Herbert Mead counts today – at a time of the renaissance of pragmatism
– as one of the classics of sociology. The work of Charles Horton Cooley receives
less attention, despite the fact that Cooley explicitly pursued the goal of using the
‘pragmatic method’ to construct a general sociological theory of social action, of
social order and of social change, a project he eventually accomplished with his
trilogy: Human Nature and the Social Order (1964 [1902]), Social Organization
(1963 [1909]) and Social Process (1966 [1918]). Mead came to pragmatism late
and thought of himself as a philosopher and social psychologist. In any case, he
hardly spoke about sociology. A few references to theory and the subject matter of
sociology are found in his essay ‘Cooley’s Contribution to American Social
Thought’ (Mead, 1964 [1930]). There Mead criticizes Cooley severely.
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Mead’s Critique of Cooley
To begin, I will discuss the question of whether Mead, in his critique, is able to
establish a superior position with respect to Cooley. It must be said beforehand
that Mead did not produce a didactic masterwork with his Cooley essay. His
charge is that Cooley’s conception of society is ‘mental rather than scientific’, that
society has a ‘psychical nature’ (Mead, 1964 [1930]: xxxviii). Therefore, Cooley
was not able, in Mead’s view, to adequately determine either the ‘solid facts of
society’ (1964 [1930]: xxvii) – the goal of sociology – or to explain the process of
individuation. According to Cooley, the ‘self’ would also lie in the mind, being
‘psychical selves’ and not, as in Mead’s own social psychology, ‘an objective phase
of experience’ (Mead, 1964 [1930]: xxxiv–v). How does Mead support this
mentalist or idealist charge against Cooley? The genesis of the criticism is Mead’s
assertion that Cooley adopted the ‘psychophysical parallelism’ of ‘ordinary psychology’, conventional at that time, according to which ‘consciousness is an inside
experience of the life of the external organism’ (Mead, 1964 [1930]: xxxii).
Cooley could not, therefore, show how the conscious (mind) and the meaning of
things (body) evolve in the action process. According to Mead, the structures of
‘society’ and of the ‘self’ are founded neither on the mind or conscious nor on
material environmental surroundings or biological conditions, but rather on social
action, on the process of symbolic interaction. Nevertheless, Mead raises the
mentalistic charge against Cooley – having hardly mentioned it – stating that ‘in
advance of Baldwin’s and Tarde’s and even of James’s’ doctrine, Cooley has
shown that the ‘self is not an immediate character of the mind’, the mind being,
for Cooley, ‘not first individual and then social. In the individual, the mind arises
through communication’ (Mead, 1964 [1930]: xxix). Based on a theory of
communicative action, the ‘self’ would not have resided in the mind (‘the self
lying in the mind’), and the ‘locus of society’ would not be ‘in the mind’ (Mead,
1964 [1930]: xxxvi); rather, Cooley would clearly have broken through the body–
mind parallelism of the then-prevalent psychology. The ‘self’, like ‘society’, would
not have been a prior mental characteristic of the communication process.
In spite of this, Mead reiterates his parallelism criticism of Cooley a few
pages later, maintaining that he begins from a ‘parallelism between sensations,
perceptions, emotions, volitions, and so forth, and physiological processes’, and
for him ‘selves and others lie inside of the consciousness of “ordinary psychology”’ and would not arise through the communication process. Cooley’s parallelism, according to Mead, is ‘not a parallelism between states of processes in two
different realms of metaphysical being’, as in Cartesian thinking; rather, for
Cooley, body and mind identify an ‘outside and an inside view of the same reality’,
namely of the communication process. Although Mead suspends his parallelism
charge against Cooley a second time, following this revision, he immediately
continues, saying that Cooley is ‘lodging the self and others in consciousness’ and
thus ‘he accepts the parallelism of ordinary psychology’. However, Mead con-
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tinues, Cooley succeeded in avoiding the ‘segregation of the animal organism
from social and so, moral, experience’ – typical for the dualistic philosophy of the
mind – ‘by merging the life process and the social process in a universal onward
evolution’ (Mead, 1964 [1930]: xxxii–iii). With this, we come to the heart of
Mead’s criticism of Cooley: The Cartesian body–mind dualism is dissolved
because, so says Mead, Cooley recognized an evolutionary transition from the
natural to the cultural: In the evolutionary process, the physical (i.e. outer
environmental conditions or nature) would lose determining power in favor of the
mental (understanding or nurture). The crucial point for Mead is that Cooley had
no normative theory at hand with which he could evaluate and critique the
empirical and historical change from nature to nurture. Cooley ‘had a profound
faith’ in evolution, which for him was ‘a philosophy and a faith rather than a
method’ (Mead, 1964 [1930]: xxxiii–iv).
His sociology was in a sense an account of the American community to
which he belonged, and pre-supposed its normal healthful process. This
process was that of the primary group with its face-to-face organization
and co-operation. Given the process, its healthful growth and its degenerations could be identified and described. Institutions and valuations were
implicit within it. The gospel of Jesus and democracy were of the essence
of it, and more fundamentally it was the life of the spirit.
(Mead, 1964 [1930]: xxxvi)
According to Mead, a normative theory must be founded on anthropology and
ethology. Lacking that approach, Cooley could only develop an ethnocentric
position. Because he is unable to trace and verify the reality of the gospel of Jesus
(there is no evidence in Cooley’s writings for a Christian viewpoint) and to trace
democracy back to the dim beginnings of human behavior, he cannot establish the
origins of the social patterns that are responsible not only for the structure of
society but also for the criticism of that structure’s evolution. Only anthropological and ethological research, according to Mead, can reconstruct the normative meaning and evaluative power of a ‘logical universe of discourse’ (Mead, 1964
[1930]: xxxvi–vii). Devoid of this anthropological dimension, Cooley’s sociology
cannot reach beyond a presentation of the American community.
This criticism of Cooley is in error, for two reasons. First, Cooley, contrary
to what Mead believes, represented not a mentalist and parallelist but a pragmatic
point of view, anchored in the theory of communication, socialization and
primary group. Second, this view provided the foundation of a universalistic
theory discriminating between facts and norms. Mead, on the other hand, in his
criticism of Cooley, maintained that a normative theory must be based anthropologically or ethologically (Mead, 1964 [1930]: xxxvii).
This suggestion is not convincing, given that anthropology and ethology
can only show that communication is the distinguishing factor that separates
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humans from animals and is common to all humans (therefore, universal), but not
expose the normative core of communication. From an anthropological viewpoint
it remains unclear what ‘characteristics’ or what ‘social meanings’ (Cooley, 1969a
[1894]: 61) are inherent in the process of communication, giving it its normative
power and meaning that can be used to evaluate social facts and historical
changes. Such a measure cannot in any case be determined through anthropological or ethological reasoning.
Cooley suggests another way to establish his normative point of view. He
shows (as does Mead in other places in his work) that human society (social order)
and subjectivity (the self) evolve through ‘understanding’ in the process of
communicative action. ‘Understanding and sympathy’ are for Cooley (1964
[1902]: 136–7) universal moral norms that have their factual reality in the basic
structure of the primary socialization process. On the one hand, ‘understanding’
and ‘communication’ are preconditions for the development of the self because an
autonomous self comes only from the synthesis of disparate judgments. On the
other hand, the evolving ‘self’ must be entangled in a communicatively structured
social environment that opens perspectives for the socialization process. ‘Mutual
understanding’ (Cooley, 1963 [1909]: 10) in primary groups is a prerequisite for
individuation, for successful integration into the social environment, and for the
reproduction of the general social order. The normative power and meaning of
communication are founded on the fact that, without understanding and communication in primary groups, socialization and individuation could not take place.
Cooley does not, then, define primary groups, as Mead maintains, through
particular social norms and cultural values peculiar to the American community.
Cooley realized, instead, that the basic means for creating communities is
communication in the form of dialogues.1 He is, in the first place, interested in
articulating the universal rules that simultaneously enable both socialization and
individuation. This conception of continuity between personal identity, primary
group (or community) and social organization (or society) is altogether unprecedented. Ferdinand Tönnies, whose term Gemeinschaft (community or primary
group) provided a focus of orientation for Max Weber and Émile Durkheim, for
example, differentiated in a dualistic way between Gemeinschaft (group) and
Gesellschaft (society). He defines Gemeinschaften as thick, organic unities, characterized by hierarchies, habits, moral orientations and emotions. Gesellschaft is, in
every sense, just the opposite of Gemeinschaft: Gesellschaften are controlled by
conventions, laws and public opinion. It is not possible to subsume Cooley’s ideas
within this European scheme. Tönnies’ dualism – which was motivated by a
philosophical dualism between British natural right theory and attempts to
historicize German idealist philosophy – is accompanied by a similarly dualistic
theory of action. Gemeinschaften are organized by normative action. Gesellschaften
are integrated by rationality of means and ends. However, for Cooley, – whose
concept of primary group was motivated, above all, by the new social psychological theory of William James and James Baldwin – the basic mode of action
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which underlies Gemeinschaften and Gesellschaften – or primary groups and social
organizations – is communication. The difference between Cooley’s and Tönnies’
respective conception of community leads to very different social-political
theories. Cooley analyzed the deep-rooted democratic aspects of primary groups.
In his theory, the enlargement of primary-group ideals involves by necessity the
enlargement of democracy, whereas no theory of democracy derives from
Tönnies’ conception of Gemeinschaft. Cooley’s examination of primary-group
communication reveals the intrinsically social nature of humankind and does not,
as Mead believes, model the structure of the American community.
Primary groups are only in part molded by special traditions, and, in larger
degree, express a universal nature. The religion or government of other
civilizations may seem alien to us, but the children of the family group
wear the common life, and with them we can always make ourselves at
home.
(Cooley, 1963 [1909]: 27–8)
Cooley reformulates the postulates of enlightenment, freedom, equality, solidarity
and justice not as natural rights, and not as ‘popular impressions’, but as ‘sure
and sound’ sentiments based on experiences available to every member of a
primary group.
According to Cooley, primary groups are the place where actors can
experience the ideals of enlightenment as characteristics of the action process. This
involves the postulation of ‘freedom’ because in primary groups actors constantly
face conflicts with significant others; to make a decision, they must synthesize
disparate views into their own judgment, thus developing ‘freedom’ and ‘autonomy’ from others. Actors experience the meaning of ‘solidarity’ and ‘equality’ not
only because survival can only be assured through cooperation with others, but
also because individuation can only succeed on the basis of common views; only
through ‘sympathetic introspection’ and through ‘understanding’ of others can
actors create their own perspectives. Finally the idea of ‘justice’ is based on
primary-group experiences because the generalization of subjective views is
dependent on the recognition of others, a recognition that can only be had when
communication partners accept an assertion because it is correct and fair.
If it is true that human nature is developed in primary groups which are
everywhere much the same, and that here also springs from these a
common idealism which institutions strive to express, we have a ground
for somewhat the same conclusions as come from the theory of a natural
freedom modified by contract. Natural freedom would correspond
roughly to the ideals generated and partly realized in primary association,
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the social contract to the limitations these ideals encounter in seeking a
larger expression.
(Cooley, 1964 [1902]: 47)
These communicative preconditions of the socialization process can, of
course, be concealed in particular non-communicative norms; potentially, however, they are basic to all primary groups because without understanding,
individuation and socialization cannot occur. Through non-communicative interaction, already-present attitudes and structures can be reproduced, but to create a
new perspective or identity unfamiliar meanings must be understood, tested and
synthesized. Therefore, new group and identity structures can only develop
through ‘understanding and sympathy’ and not in interactions based on delimitation. In primary groups individuals gain social competencies and experience
normative ideals that are a prerequisite for social democratization. Democracy is,
therefore, for Cooley, not a regime, but rather a form of life that is grounded in
primary-group experience. Democracy is endangered when democratic options
are hidden beneath non-democratic cultural traditions and social norms in the
primary group.
Cooley gathers his normative perspective not, as Mead believes, in a naı̈ve
belief in ‘evolution’ of the American community, but rather through the reconstruction of universal communication prerequisites and characteristics of the
socialization process (Cooley, 1963 [1909]: 27). Why Mead ignores the universalistic and normative demand of Cooley’s communication and primary-group
theory continues to be inexplicable.2
Cooley and Mead founded a pragmatic social theory; both came to it
through a disagreement with idealism and behaviorism. While Mead’s social
psychology was more strongly marked by a discussion with behaviorist positions,
the young Cooley was clearly influenced by American transcendentalism and
idealism (cf. Noble, 1958; Schubert, 1995, 1998; Schwartz, 1985). Possibly
Mead’s critical stance vis-à-vis Cooley can be explained by their different starting
points. However, in their principal writings, both Cooley and Mead share a
common trajectory: breaking through Cartesian body–mind dualism in developing a theory of communication.
I shall provide a comprehensive presentation of pragmatic communication
theory created by Mead and Cooley, their theory of social order and social change
as sequences in the process of action and communication, and the theory of
meaning and value proposed by Mead and Cooley, before, in conclusion,
returning to Mead’s criticism of Cooley. My aim is to show that Mead (‘logical
universe of discourse’) as well as Cooley (‘human nature values’) offered a
universalistic and normatively useful perspective based on a theory of symbolic
interaction. Differences between Mead and Cooley are consequently not based on
theory, but rather on a different approach to subject matter. While Mead worked
above all in the fields of social psychology, philosophy of science, ethics and
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political philosophy, Cooley moved closer to the area of sociology, investigating
the development of social micro (looking-glass self), meso (primary group and
ideals) and macro structures (public opinion, democracy, classes, institutions,
social disorganization) (see Cooley, 1998: 155–214).
Cooley and Mead on ‘Communication’ or
‘Understanding’
Mead and Cooley share an anthropology-based communication and action
theory: we are determined neither by environmental nor by biological conditions
but inherit only ‘lines of teachability’. According to Cooley; however, human
nature provides no instinctive reportoire with which to solve environmental
problems without reflection and recourse to generalized social meaning. The
attraction scheme of the animal world gives way to the ‘plasticity’ of human
nature (Cooley, 1963 [1909]: 28) and human reaction is thus based on openness
to the environment. This standpoint is extremely important: the limitation of
action inherent in it – the delayed reaction to environmental attraction – gives rise
to the objective need for permanent reconstruction and experimental solutions of
action problems as a basic characteristic of human action, as well as a condition for
the development of the mind (Cooley, 1998: 81–130; Mead, 1973: 100–40). For
Cooley, as for Mead, the mind is not a predecessor characteristic for the action
process, but rather appears only when conflicts limit habitual actions such that the
meaning of situations (subjective attitudes and objective values) must be newly
defined. New understanding is gained not, as Descartes (cogito ergo sum), the
founder of philosophy of the mind, believed, through solipsistic introspection or
contemplation, but rather through ‘sympathetic introspection’ in the process of
symbolically mediated interaction. According to Cooley, Descartes should have
said ‘cogitamus’ rather than ‘cogito’. On the other hand Mead’s reproach of
‘mentalism’ is not unfounded; it refers to such statements by Cooley as ‘society is
mental’, ‘imaginations are the solid facts of society’, or ‘we know persons as
imaginative ideas in the mind’. However, Cooley was not a mentalist; he describes
in detail, in Human Nature and the Social Order, his understanding of ‘mind’ and
‘imagination’. Imagination is not a force isolated from the empirical world, but
rather an intersubjective ‘communication’. Mind is not a solipsistic capacity, but
an ‘inner experience’, created in conjunction with the ‘outside world’. The mind,
according to Cooley, ‘lives in perpetual conversation’, and the ‘life of the mind is
essentially a life of intercourse’. Cooley insists that ‘society is mental’ because ‘the
human mind is social’ (Cooley, 1964 [1902]: 97, 81).
If human action is determined neither by the mind nor by nature, the
question arises as to how social order is possible, that is, how individual actions
can be coordinated. The answer that Cooley and Mead give is: actors can define,
generalize and communicate meanings of the subjective, social and objective
world with help of ‘significant’ or ‘standard symbols’ such that they can adjust
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their actions to the virtual reactions of the other. ‘Communication’ and ‘speech’ is
for Mead (1912) and Cooley (1963 [1909]: 64; 1969a [1894]: 61)3 the deciding
‘instrument of social organization’. The path to an interactionist sociology led
Cooley to reject introspective methods and the philosophy of mind, on the one
hand, and biologistic and behavioristic approaches such as eugenics, criminology,
mass psychology, the theory of imitation and the psychology of instinct, on the
other. To establish itself on a firm theoretical foundation, Cooley’s sociology
needed to determine the ‘mechanism’ of social integration. Cooley was not able
to proceed beyond the futile alternatives of ‘heredity and environment’, ‘imitation
and innovation’ and ‘suggestion and choice’ – key terms in his early thinking –
until he discovered the basic elements of his envisioned theory: communication
and understanding. The basic medium of social integration, according to Cooley,
is not the mental mechanism described by mass psychology (Gustave Le Bon), nor
imitation (Gabriel Tarde), nor instincts (William McDougall), nor social control
in the form of habits (Edward A. Ross), and neither is it a consciousness of kind
(Franklin H. Giddings) but, rather, communication based on ‘standardized
symbols’. Human beings have to ‘understand’ each other to create both a
manifest social order and autonomous selves. Only if symbols are available which
can be understood independently of single situations by all interacting participants
in the same way can a common orientation toward a generally valid pattern of
behaviour be achieved. Nevertheless, symbolic meanings offer no generally failsafe
security of action; the meanings must be permanently defined, if only because
meanings neither are objectively inherent in things nor do they give a universal
presentation of the mind.
Cooley and Mead on ‘Social Order’ and ‘Social
Change’ as Stages in the Act
For Cooley and Mead, ‘communication’ is the basic term with which to describe
the phenomena of social order and social change. Social order cannot be inferred
either empirically from the social or natural environment or nominally from the
transcendental mind. Social change is neither the result of an unconsidered
adaptation to the environment nor the development of an autonomous mind.
Forms of social change and social order are, on the contrary, the other side of the
communicative process. Thus, Mead’s and Cooley’s interactive theory of social
order and social change lies in the tradition of American pragmatism, as established by Charles Sanders Peirce.
Peirce arranges the action process in four phases. The starting point for
action is the habits of action and beliefs: according to Peirce, we cannot begin
‘with complete doubt’, but rather only with ‘all the prejudices which we actually
have’, ‘for they are things which it does not occur to us can be questioned’. Our
‘prejudices’ can be dealt with not through a ‘maxim’, as, according to Peirce, in
Descartes’s ‘initial scepticism’, but rather only through ‘living doubt’, when our
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beliefs are confronted with an ‘outward clash’. Only then do meanings, such as
social rules and individual goal-setting, lose their validity and clarity (Peirce,
1996c: 156, para. 5.264). Only in this second phase of limitation of action or
crisis is it, according to Peirce, realistic to criticize the sense of meanings; only
then will meanings be recognized at all. ‘The doubt stimulates the mind to an
activity’ (Peirce, 1996d: 253, para. 5.394), so that the phase of the limitation of
action is followed by the reconstruction phase, creative experimentation, in which,
by resorting to old values, new ideas and hypotheses are invented. In a fourth
phase, those ideas that have proven worthwhile will be incorporated in the form of
new rules and habits. At the center of pragmatism lies the phase of reconstruction,
the abductive development of new hypotheses. In his pragmatism lectures of
1903, Peirce declared that ‘the question of pragmatism’ is nothing other than the
question about the ‘logic of abduction’ (1996b: 121, para. 5.196). The logical
order of the world, for Peirce, derives not from the deductive of generalized
norms and not from the inductive of single cases, but rather from the abductive in
the ‘context of discovery’ as a construction process of hypotheses.
Mead developed his theory of a circular connection between order and
change in the communicative process with John Dewey. ‘The Deweyian statement’, according to Anselm Strauss,
. . . here somewhat simplified, points to a sequence of action: ongoing,
blocked, deliberating about alternative possibilities of action, and then
continued action. Mead of course elaborated this action scheme in more
explicitly sociological directions. These include his formulation of stages in
the act, his radical conception of the temporal and complex and potential
flexibility of any act, his elaboration of social interaction, his detailing of
self as process, his greater emphasis on the body in action, his elaboration
of mind as mental activity, and his development of crucially important
perspectival view of temporality and interaction. It has seemed to me that
some version of this general theoretical stance underlies virtually all
Chicago interactionist research and conceptualization.
(1994: 4)
Also for Cooley, habitual forms of social order are a starting point for the
four-stage action process: ‘So long as an idea is not contradicted, not felt to be in
any way inconsistent with others, we take it as a matter of course’ (1964 [1902]:
67). Actors must first begin from generalized meanings when they enter into
social relationships with others; only under these prior conditions can A offer a
sensible connective action for B. ‘Habits’ and ‘suggestions’, ‘the stream of
thought’, provide the material for the communicative process and for the
development of individual goal orientation. ‘Any choice that I can make is a
synthesis of suggestions derived in one way or another from life in general; and it
also reacts upon that life, so that my will is social as being both effect and cause
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with reference to it’ (Cooley, 1964 [1902]: 54). Nevertheless, second, limitation
of actions occurs regularly in the action process because actors do not immediately
react to generalized meanings, and have different experiences in the flow of life
that lead to conflicts. ‘Precisely as the conditions become intricate, are we forced
to think, to choose, to define the useful and the right, and in general, to work out
the higher intellectual life’ (Cooley, 1964 [1902]: 53). The destabilization of
values follows, third, a phase of reconstruction and experiments in which new
hypotheses are discovered that provide a view to overcoming conflicts. ‘We get
on by forming intelligent ideals of right, which are imaginative reconstructions
and anticipations of life, based upon experience. And in trying to realize these
ideals we initiate a new phase of the social process, which goes on through the
usual interactions to a fresh synthesis’ (Cooley, 1966 [1918]: 358). For Cooley,
social order is a process whose starting point lies in habitualized actions that
– confronted with action problems – must be reconstructed in experiments
and phases of search so that – fourth – new action customs and social rules can
be established.
Indeed it would seem that the struggles of the age have given us at least
one principle, namely, that life itself is a process rather than a state; so that
we no longer expect anything final, but look to discover in the movement
itself sufficient matter for reason and faith.
(Cooley, 1966 [1918]: 377)
Most significant for Cooley is the ‘tentative process’, the phase of ‘imaginative reconstruction’. In the modeling of utopias and ideals through a ‘creative
synthesis’ (Cooley, 1966 [1918]: 353) of experiences lies, for him, the option of
‘reason’ of human action, thus the construction of new individual goals and new
social norms and cultural ‘faith’. ‘Cooley habitually resorts to the hallmarks of
originality or creativeness as a frame of reference’ (Levin, 1941: 216–29). The
deciding point is that social order is not guaranteed either through the inner drive
or outer nature (behaviorism and empiricism) or through the internalizing of
social norms (normativism), nor is it reflected in a transcendental mind (idealism)
or in rational individual action (utilitarianism); rather it derives from constant
interpretations and reconstruction of generalized meanings (pragmatism). Social
order is, for Cooley, not a ‘state’, but a ‘process’ of creative and experimental
action.
For Cooley and Mead, social action is created not as the rational result of
clear goals and not in the execution of social norms. The pragmatic social theory
underlies ‘homo oeconomicus’ and ‘homo sociologicus’ because it shows how individual goal-setting and generalized behavioral expectations are constituted and
stabilized through creative action. Thus, in the view of Cooley and Mead, the
basic motive for action is not, as in utilitarianism, given goals that the actors want
to maximally realize, nor social norms that channel the actions of the actors, but
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rather problems of action and conflicts that must be overcome through experimental action. Accordingly, Cooley labels the dynamic of conflict between
individuals as ‘hostile sympathy’ (1966 [1918]: 266), since deceptions, animosities and conflicts do not simply threaten social certainties; they are also the
condition for the reaction of new patterns of behavior and of the individual mind.
Actors consequently coordinate their actions to overcome uncertainty of action or
conflicts and not because of sanctions or a means–ends calculation. Social order is
not a consistent condition of the balance of individual interests and not an
autonomous normative structure determining the range of individual action, but
a process of permanent ‘imaginative reconstruction’ of social, subjective and
objective meanings.
Cooley and Mead represent neither a nominalist (mind) nor an empiricist
(body) dual theory of meaning; rather they assume that meanings are defined in a
tripolar situation of interaction. It is decisive that Cooley’s approach is based not
on a theory of the mind or knowledge but on a theory of symbolically mediated
interaction, showing how social knowledge derives from the communicative
process. Therefore Cooley’s work belongs to pragmatism and not to the sociology
of knowledge.4
Cooley and Mead on ‘Meaning’ and ‘Valuation’
A central sign of pragmatism as it was developed by Charles Sanders Peirce is, in
contrast to all the varieties of idealism, nominalism or mentalism, on the one side,
and of empiricism, realism, behaviorism and materialism, on the other side, a
genuine theory of value and meaning. From a pragmatic view, the value of objects
and ideas cannot be separated either from the ‘realm of the mind’ (res cogitans) or
from the ‘world of things’ (res extensa). The objective, social and subjective worlds
gain meaning in the communicative process or in usage situations. The truth of
statements comes consequently not from structures of the mind and not from
empirical qualities, but rather is constructed tentatively in discourses. Thus,
pragmatism does not assume either the human mind or the worth of objects;
rather it examines how the mind and meaning come to be in the process of
symbolic interaction. The tripolar, or ‘tri-relative’, meaning theory first developed
by Peirce offers a theoretical background for Mead as well as for Cooley.
Therefore, I will reconstruct briefly the position of Peirce in contrast to the
empiricism of David Hume, on the one hand, and to the idealism of Immanuel
Kant, on the other, to show in conclusion that Mead and Cooley directly
represent Peirce’s position, and to make clearer the common, basic structure of
sociological pragmatism.
According to Peirce, values and meanings result from semiotic mediation
of signs, interpretations and objects. Semiosis, for Peirce, means ‘an action, or
influence, which is, or involves, a cooperation of three subjects, such as a sign, its
object, and its interpretant, this tri-relative influence not being in any way
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resolvable into actions between pairs’ (1996e: 332, para. 5.484). Meaning results
from the tripolar relationship among sign, object and interpretant. Generalized
meanings (M) are defined by interpretants (I) based on the use of objects (O)
with help of signs (S) (see Figure 1).
FIGURE 1.
Charles Sanders Peirce
Sign (S)
Interpretant (I)
Meaning
(M)
Object (O)
The meaning-critical realism of Peirce sets itself against David Hume’s
image of bipolar realism (in general against empiricism and materialism), which
merges the constituent meaning levels of interpretation and believes that objects
of the external, social or subjective world can be represented by signs (theories) or
at least correspond to these. According to Hume, the human mind is like a
container that is filled, in that the outer world is taken into the inner world
through psychological mechanisms of ‘association’. Even abstract terms or ‘complex ideas’ such as ‘government, church, negotiation, conquest’, can, according to
Hume, be traced to ‘simple ideas’ that are images of empirical objects, even
though ‘we seldom spread out in our minds all the simple ideas, of which these
complex ones are compos’d’. Despite that, empirical experience is the only
method of recognition for Hume (Hume, 1985 [1739–40]: 70; see Figure 2).
FIGURE 2.
David Hume:
Category of understanding
Subject
Recognition of outer world
Object
For Peirce also, objects are provided outside our thinking. In contrast to
empiricism, the pragmatic view of the outer world is not modeled through the
psychological mechanism of association; rather, objects (O) gain meaning (M) for
subjects when they are defined and interpreted in practical situations of action (I)
and are declared with the help of sign carriers (S).
On the other side, Peirce disagrees with Immanuel Kant’s nominalistic
theory of meaning (and with all varieties of idealism and mentalism). In idealism
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transcendental categories of the mind are the only prerequisites of meaning,
without considering the interpretive mediation of experience through signs as a
constitutive for a theory of cognition (Figure 3).
FIGURE 3.
Immanuel Kant:
Category of understanding
Subject
Recognition of outer world
Object
Naturally, Kant also sees that reason (thoughts or interpretations) and the
empirical world (objects) are related to each other in the recognition process:
‘Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind’
(Kant, 1787: 93). Nevertheless, for Kant, generalized meanings are not the
product of experience. Pure reason takes precedence; only it can reduce the
‘manifold of our representations’ and empirical perceptions to a general and
uniform notion signifying heterogeneous objects. With Kant, we can therefore
only speak of an object, because the logic of reason – as conditio sine qua non of
recognition and all truth – guarantees the unity of objects.
The concept of an object . . . has to be distinct from all our representations. The unity which the object makes necessary can be nothing else
than the formal unity of consciousness in the synthesis of the manifold of
representations. It is only when we have thus produced synthetic unity in
the manifold of intuition that we are in a position to say that we know
the object.
(Kant, 1929 [1787]: 135)
With this quotation the difference between idealism (or mentalism) and pragmatism is clear. With Peirce, in place of Kant’s postulated a priori structures of the
mind, interpretation processes (I) are set in motion through action problems, in
whose wake signs (S) are defined, and which establish the meaning (M) of objects
(O). According to Peirce,
. . . a sign has, as such, three references: first, it is a sign to some thought
which interprets it; second, it is a sign for some object to which in that
thought it is equivalent; third it is a sign, in some respect or quality, which
brings it into connection with its object.
(1996c: 169, para. 5.283)
Mead, as well, derived his theory of meaning and value in opposing
Immanuel Kant. Above all, he differentiated his theory of communication from
the dualistic attraction–reaction model of behaviorism. The meaning of social
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objects comes neither from understanding nor human nature, but rather is a result
of a three-sided social action process.
Meaning is thus a development of something objectively there as a relation
between certain phases of the social act; it is not a physical addition to that
act and it is not an ‘idea’ as traditionally conceived. A gesture by one
organism, the resultant of the social act in which the gesture is an early
phase, and the response of another organism to the gesture, are the relata in
a triple or threefold relationship of gesture to first organism, of gesture to
second organism, and of gesture to subsequent phases of the given social
act; and this threefold relationship constitutes the matrix within which
meaning arises, or which develops into the field of meaning. The gesture
stands for a certain result of the social act, a result to which there is a
definite response on the part of the individuals involved therein; so that
meaning is given or stated in terms of response. Meaning is implicit – if
not always explicit – in the relationship among the various phases of
the social act to which it refers, and out of which it develops. And its
development takes place in terms of symbolization at the human
evolutionary level.
(Mead, 1973: 76; see Figure 4)
FIGURE 4.
George Herbert Mead
Gesture
subjective world
Response
social world
Meaning
symbolic
world
Resultant
objective world
In the end, Cooley created his theory of meaning and value above all in an
explanation of economic theory (1912, 1913a, 1913b; see Jacobs, 1979). He
separates himself on one side from the historical school of national economics
(Gustav Schmoller); their methods are, for him, ‘too empirical to hold out much
prospect of an adequate doctrine of process’ (Cooley, 1966 [1918]: 367). His
chief opponent is nevertheless the rational model of the aspiring marginal utility
theory (Alfred Marshall and Carl Menger). The neoclassics abandoned the
question of the origin of values, reducing the subject matter of economics to
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examining the relation between given values or ends and alternative means. ‘The
economic theorist appears’, says Cooley, ‘like a man who should observe only the
second hand of a watch: He counts the seconds with care, but is hardly in a
position to tell what time it is’ (1966 [1918]: 367). Unlike the historical school of
national economy, which attributed subjective value orientation to objective,
social and cultural structures, and, unlike neoclassical marginal utility theory, for
which individuals randomly create objective values, Cooley developed not a dual
but a tripolar theory of value:
It would seem that the essential things in the conception of value are
three: an organism, a situation, and an object. The organism is necessary to
give meaning to the idea; there must be worth to something. It need not
be a person; a group, an institution, a doctrine, any organized form of life
will do; and that it be conscious of the values that motivate it is not at all
essential. . . . The situation is the immediate occasion for action, in view of
which the organism integrates the various values working within it and
meets the situation by an act of selection, which is a step in its own
growth, leading on to new values and new situations. Valuation is only
another name for tentative organic process.
(Cooley, 1966 [1918]: 284–5; see Figure 5)
FIGURE 5.
Charles Horton Cooley
Organism
subjective world
Situation
social world
Value
symbolic
world
Objects
objective world
According to Mead and Cooley, generalized values or meaning are defined
in a three-part interaction situation. When an actor or organism indicates with a
gesture (subjective world) (1) an object or the resultant of the social act (the
objective world), (2) and when in a social situation a response or interpretation
(social world) (3) is answering that claim, step by step values and meanings get
generalized and finally expressed in significant or standardized symbols (symbolic
world) (4). Communication is the mechanism creating the autonomy, as well as
the heteronomy, of the four entangled worlds:
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(1) Meanings of the objective world are traceable neither to empirical structures of
the outer world nor to nominal structures of the mind. The meaning of objectives
is generalized in contextual use, in the process of coordination of action. Objects
of action or the ‘resultant of the social act’ (Mead) gain generalized meaning
when actor A indicates an object with a gesture and actor B through his or her
reaction or interpretation of the gesture signals agreement or expresses disagreement, so that A can again react to B’s gesture, modifying his or her position until
a general agreement is reached. According to Cooley, a ‘hammer-value’, a ‘grainvalue’, but also a ‘stock value’ or a ‘value of books, of pictures, of doctrines’
occurs when interpreters, through the use of these objects or stocks of knowledge,
define their meaning in practical situations. The value of objects is institutionalized and habitualized through their ‘workability’ in ‘standard situations’
(Cooley, 1966 [1918]: 284–5; see Cooley, 1912).
(2) In practical situations of interaction, meanings of the social world develop
simultaneously in the form of social roles, norms and structures. The social status
of actors is defined in a struggle for recognition of economic, political, social and
cultural capital and competencies important for creating and reproducing problems of social order. Different from the meanings of the objective world (‘spatial
knowledge’), social norms (‘social knowledge’, see Cooley, 1998: 110–30) did
not have a valid basis outside of the communication process. Actors can anticipate
the reaction of the social world to their subjective demands against a background
of symbolically generalized expectations of behavior; they must, however, count
on the contingent reactions of others. The social process of ‘taking into account
of taking into account’ is a phenomenon of immersion and cannot be reduced
either to the combining of subjective intentions or psychic objects (individual
level) or to the influence of the objective world or social facts (structural level).
(3) In the process of communication between A and B, not only do social orders
and social structures develop, but also meanings of the subjective world of the
actors. Because the value of an object and the social position of actors to each
other are not determined, action problems continuously arise in practical interaction situations; actors must therefore develop their own perspective on the
social and objective world to be at all able to make a decision and to coordinate
actions. The ‘self’ (Mead) or ‘looking-glass self’ (Cooley) arise in reaction to
action problems through the abductive integration of social, cultural and subjective demands or perspectives.5
(4) Generalized meanings of the subjective, objective and social world can be
expressed through the use of significant or standardized symbols. Because symbols
arise from concrete action situations, a symbolic reference structure, a symbolic
world, develops that gains autonomy from subjective intentions, social rules and
objective validity and can exercise its own influence on the meanings of this world,
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even when the effect and meaning of symbols remain dependent on the interaction process and cases of problems of understanding must be newly defined.
In that the word usually goes before, leading and kindling the idea – we
should not have the latter if we did not have the word first. ‘This way’ says
the word, ‘is an interesting thought: come and find it.’ And so we are led
on to rediscover old knowledge. Such words, for instance, as good, right,
love, home, justice, beauty, freedom are powerful makers of what they
stand for.
(Cooley, 1963 [1909]: 69)
The Theory of Perspective Change
Combined with the theory of meaning and value, pragmatism gains a genuine
theory of validity. With this, I return to my consideration of Mead’s criticism of
Cooley. Cooley had not, according to Mead, developed a universalistic, normative
perspective that is necessary to critique empirical facts of social order. In response
to this accusation, I will show that Cooley within the tradition of American
pragmatism created a universalistic perspective subsequently to his theory of
communication and socialization.
According to Peirce, the truth or validity of a claim about the objective,
social or subjective world will be tentatively established in an open-ended
interpretation process. The idea of an ‘indefinite community of communication’
regulates the claim for objective truth, according to Peirce.
The real, then, is that which, sooner or later, information and reasoning
would finally result in, and which is therefore independent of the vagaries
of me and you. Thus, the very origin of the conception of reality shows
that this conception essentially involves the notion of a COMMUNITY,
without definite limits, and capable of an indefinite increase of
knowledge.
(Peirce, 1996a: 398, para. 2.654)
The prerequisite for objective knowledge lies, for Peirce, in the potential agreement of an ‘indefinite’ or ‘logical community of communication’, a counterfactual supposition that nevertheless makes an objective judgment thinkable and
which can also be used as regulative idea or moral norm to evaluate social facts,
actions and structures. The logic is founded, according to Peirce, on a ‘social
principle’ (1996f: 135–55, para. 5.225–37). The logical conclusion is a semiotically brokered, social process; thus the validity of a logical close is dependent on
the agreement of the discursive community.
Cooley and Mead created the normative perspective of the ‘logical universe of discourse’ (Mead) or ‘human nature values’ (Cooley) reconstructively
from the circular relationship of individuation and socialization (see Figure 6). In
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FIGURE 6.
Human Nature Values
Universal solidarity
Charles Horton
Cooley
Institutionalized
Values
B
Primary
Ideals
Self
D
George Herbert
Mead
C
Playmate Great Man Ideal Person
Significant
Others
Play
Game
Discourse
E
Generalized
Others
Logical Universe of Discourse
the socialization process, children at play (1) acquire the ‘perspective of others’
(Mead), of the members of the primary group or of ‘imaginary playmates’
(Cooley); thereby differences between the judgments of significant others arise
(A, B, C, D), such that those being socialized (2) are motivated to break through
the perspective of the ‘significant other’ in favor of the ‘generalized other’ (Mead,
1925), of ‘institutional values’ or of ‘great and famous men as symbols’ (Cooley,
1966 [1918]: 285; 1964 [1902]: 341). Therefore, they learn to understand rules
that coordinate individual actions, enabling children through games to take
different and even opposing positions. In the continuation of the socialization
process, actors experience that general rules and social norms of different spheres
of action, societies or historical periods contradict each other such that ideas of the
‘logical universe of discourse’ (Mead) or of ‘human nature values’ or an ‘ethical
self’ (Cooley) can break through in favour of group conventions.6
Finally, the ‘self’ (4) for Mead and Cooley, as for Peirce (1996f: 135–55,
para. 5.225–37), is the result of an abductive or synthetic conclusion that is driven
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by the process of socialization. When contradictions occur in the social world of
the actors, they realize the power to define the situation and to gain freedom and
autonomy from social constraints. On the other side, not only freedom of action
but also the social order is generalized through the inclusion and integration of
differentiated perspectives.7
Autonomous action results, for Cooley and Mead, not in the rational selflimitation in favor of social necessity, as with Weber and Durkheim, but rather in
communication with others, where new perspectives can be designed in the
objective, social and subjective world. For Cooley and Mead, the differentiation of
societal structures and rules, on the one side, makes possible new forms of
individuation because it increases the chance (or the demand) to take new
perspectives and to integrate conflicting expectations, so that, on the other side,
individuals are motivated toward generalized and synechistic accomplishments,
provoking participants in the process of action to differentiate structures of action,
therefore leading to the establishment of new social norms and institutions. In
this communicative process of interaction between the person and society,
individuals find autonomy from social rules and expectation through the increasing broadening of perspectives, and social structures are generalized through the
definition of standardized symbols signifying institutionalized values and situations of actions.
Notes
1.
The following definition of a social group or community is found in Cooley’s private notes:
Although ‘group,’ in ordinary usage, often denotes a mere assemblage of persons or
things it is commonly understood in sociology to mean a social group, that is a number
of persons among whom is some degree of communication and interaction. Moreover
this must be reciprocal and not in one direction only. . . . Evidently the conception is a
very general one, and groups may vary indefinitely in size and character. Any two
persons conversing make a group, and, on the other hand the word might be applied in
some connections to the whole population of the earth, since there can be few persons,
if any, who do not directly or indirectly receive and give influence. Some groups are
intimate, lasting and separate, like a family on an ancestral farm, others so . . . as to be
hardly observable. The conception of the group is complementary to that of the person.
Every normal person has his being in a complex of groups, and even those who are
apparently isolated are hardly an exception, since they usually continue the social habit in
imaginary intercourse (conversations). Without groups there would be no persons, just
as without persons there would be no groups: they are aspects of the same human
complex.
(Charles Horton Cooley Collection, index card, Bentley Historical Library,
Ann Arbor, Miscellaneous Papers, Box No. 3)
2.
Mead’s objection has been adopted by many critics. Philip Rieff maintains:
Cooley represented a limited constituency, with a limited history. His small-town doctrine
of human nature may appear as archaic now as that of the philosopher-aristocrats of
Greek culture, in the context of Greek political theory and institutional practice. The
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intelligent and gentlemanly Cooleyan symbolic of human nature – White, Anglo-Saxon,
Protestant and Liberal – may no longer serve to build up that controlling consensus
which once constituted the specific genius of American culture. It is not yet clear what
the new symbolic is, nor whether, in a technologically advanced and bureaucratically
organized mass society, a controlling consensus, in the classical mode, is required for
social order.
(1964: xvii)
Lewis Coser repeated this criticism: ‘Cooley’s benign optimism, his somewhat romantic idealism,
are likely to appear antiquated to modern observers who view the world through lenses ground
by harsh historical experiences from which the sage from Ann Arbor was spared’ (1977: 309).
According to Roscoe C. Hinkle, Cooley is ‘an exponent of one form of sociological romanticism or
romantic idealism’ (1966: xii). Extremely critical of Cooley is C. Wright Mills:
Cooley took the idealists’ absolute and gave it the characteristics of an organic village; all
the world should be an enlarged, Christian-democratic version of a rural village. He
practically assimilated ‘society’ to this primary-group community, and he blessed it
emotionally and conceptually.
(1943–4: 175)
In contradiction to that critique is John W. Petras’s more positive interpretation of Cooley:
Cooley did not believe that the traditional primary groups of family and neighborhood
would remain the most influential controls upon the individual’s behavior. This mistaken
conception has, in turn, contributed to the belief that his theory was implicitly antiprogress. But, progress and the ability to adapt oneself to a changing and complex social
order are the defining characteristics of human nature. In actuality, it appears that the
emphasis Cooley placed upon the role of the primary group in the life of the individual
was in large measure due to his recognition of the passing of the folk culture mystique
in modern American society. In short, the stabilization process which many critics see as
the essential characteristics of the primary group takes the form of adaptability to
change. It is upon this foundation that the moral systems of both the individual and
society are to be based in modern society. The ‘horrors’ of civilization result from a lack
of fulfilment of human nature, and human nature is plasticity.
(1968: 20)
3.
‘Communication’, according to Cooley in his autobiographical retrospective of 1928,’was thus my
first real conquest, and the thesis a forecast of the organic view of society I have been working out
ever since’ (Cooley, 1969b [1928]: 8).
4.
Harvey A. Farberman (1970, 1985) and Ellsworth R. Fuhrman (1980) place Cooley in the sociology
of knowledge in a line from Alfred Schütz and Karl Mannheim, whereas R.S. Perinbanayagam
(1975) separates Schütz from Cooley and Mead.
5.
David Franks and Viktor Gecas show that Cooley’s term ‘looking-glass self’ is marked by four
qualifications:
The first is that reflected appraisals of others are actively interpreted by the actor. The
second qualification is that actors, to a large extent, select whose appraisals will affect
them. Third, Cooley discussed the importance of a relatively stable, traditional sense of
values that allow the person autonomy from the immediate appraisals of others. Fourth,
in his writings on ‘appropriative behavior’, Cooley argued for a relatively autonomous,
yet social dimension of self-formation based on feelings of efficacy.
(Franks and Gecas, 1992: 50; see also Gecas and Schwalbe, 1983)
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6.
Cooley uses the term ‘ideal person’ or the ‘ethical self’, similar to Mead’s ‘generalized other’. This
was not noted in the literature on Cooley. Shrauger and Schoeneman maintain: ‘Mead’s lookingglass self is reflective not only of significant others, as Cooley suggested, but of a generalized
other, that is, one’s whole sociocultural environment’ (1979: 550).
7.
Harvey A. Farberman believes that Cooley only reconstructed the relationship between persons
and society mentalistically, whereas Mead did it interactively:
James first conceived the self as emanating from an indwelling structure of interests that
carried a priori dispositions and was resolutely subjectivistic. Cooley then inserted this
notion of self into the social process via the crucible of highly charged primary group
relations but left in the realm of mental imagination. Finally, Mead revolutionized this
entire line of theoretical development by reconceptualizing the origins, nature, and
consequences of self. Self did not emanate from innate biological endowments and
migrate to the outside world; it developed from primitive gestures and symbols in the
outside world of already on-going joint functional action. Self is not psychical; it is
functional and behavioral, and located in an objective phase of experience.
(1985: 27)
David D. Franks und Viktor Gecas have, on the other hand, concluded that based on Cooley’s term
‘understanding’ or ‘sympathetic introspection’, the appearance of the ‘self’ is interactivistic and
not mentalistically explained:
There is no reason to think that Cooley considered reflected appraisals to be the only
source of self-knowledge or self-regard. As attribution theory stressed . . . important
information about the self is recorded from the consequences of the actions we
ourselves bring forth onto the world, i.e. we come to know ourselves from the products
and effects of our actions.
(1992: 57–8)
Donald C. Reitzes also rejects the accusation of mentalism against Cooley:
Cooley presents a picture of an active individual influencing the perceptions of others in
the process of being influenced by their perceptions. The reciprocal relation between
individual and others is vital to an understanding of Cooley’s social self, and this
reciprocity has not received attention commensurate with its significance.
(1980: 637)
The ‘self’ arises, according to Cooley, through the creative synthesizing of the social environment,
not, as Talcott Parsons (1968) attempted to show, through the internalization of normative
structures.
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Dr habil. Hans-Joachim Schubert, Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of
Potsdam, is the editor of Charles Horton Cooley: On Self and Social Organization (University of Chicago
Press, 1998).
Address: PD Dr. Hans-Joachim Schubert, University of Potsdam, Allgemeine Soziologie, August-Bebel
Str. 89, 14439 Potsdam, Germany. [email: [email protected]]
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