Charles Cooley

4 Key excerpts on "Charles Cooley"

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  Human Behavior and the Social Environment

  A Perspective for Social Work Practice

  • Grace Ganter, Margaret Yeakel(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Columbia University Press

    (Publisher)

  Cooley is remembered for his concept of the looking-glass self. Following James's notion, he believed that a person's idea of self always involved, in varying degrees of clarity and specificity, a reference to other persons. There is no sense of Social Influences on the Self-Concept 13 I . . . without its correlative sense of you, or he, or they. 3 Further, he thought. In a very large class of cases, the social reference takes the form of a somewhat definite imagination of how one's self—that is any idea one appropriates—appears in a particular mind, and the kind of self-feeling one has is determined by the attitude toward this attributed to that other mind. A social self of this sort might be called the reflected or looking-glass self. . . . in imagination we perceive in another's mind some thought of our appearance, manners, aims, deeds, character, friends, and so on, and are variously affected by it. 4 Cooley did not advance any other explanation of the self-con-cept, which to him had its origins in a self-feeling which he postulated as an instinctive given. The person, then, is a reflective image of what that person sees in other's eyes; one sees oneself in the eye of the beholder. Both theorists viewed the self as involving a focusing of attention and energy, and both viewed the source of the self as the people in one's environment. James did not deal with the issue of how the individual comes to care about the opinion of others; Cooley did not deal with the issue of how the individual comes to develop any basis for forming the imputed judgments which were a crucial element in the looking-glass self. If, as Cooley proposes, people are dependent on what they see as other people's views of the self, then they would be somewhat overdetermined, overdependent on others. Without more knowledge of how this might come about, the reader is left to speculate whether the beheld and the beholder interact in any way to test the reality of their views of each other.

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  Classical Theorists in the Social Scienc

  From Western Ideas to African Realities

  • Dejo Abdulrahman(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Malthouse Press

    (Publisher)

  Essentially, Charles Horton Cooley (1864-1929) represents an iconic figure and symbol of symbolic interactionism. He became prominent in the early 1900s (Gutman, 1958; Schafer, 1989). In his analytical focus on individual human actors, Cooley differed from many of his predecessors whose sociology was conceived in social structural terms (Schaefer, 1989). Cooley shared the desire of classical sociologists, such as August Comte, Max Weber and Karl Max, to learn more about society. But unlike many of these previous thinkers, Cooley preferred to use sociological perspective to look at smaller units-intimate, face-to-face groups such as families, gangs, and friendship networks. These groups, according to Cooley, represent “the seedbeds of society in the sense that they shape people’s ideals, beliefs, values and social nature’ (Schaefer, 1989: 16). These conceptions were contained in his contributions to the theory of Symbolic Interactionism. This chapter focuses on the sociological perspective of Charles Horton Cooley to provide an assessment of his contributions to the development of symbolic interactionism in particular and sociology in general. Brief Background of Charles Horton Cooley Charles Horton Cooley (1864-1929) was an American Sociologist. He was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1864 and spent almost his entire life there (Coser, 1977). His father, Thomas Melntyre Cooley, was a Professor of Law at the University of Michigan. Also, he was a Justice of the Michigan Supreme Court and first chairman of the Interstate Commerce Commission. He, senior Cooley, authored several legal treaties. This is a testimony to the fact that Charles Horton Cooley, indeed, came from a very educated family. His family background shaped his intellectual career in many ways. Cooley was not originally a sociologist. He graduated in Engineering. However, while studying Engineering at the University of Michigan he took several courses in History, Philosophy and Economics.

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  Freud and American Sociology

  • Philip Manning(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Polity

    (Publisher)

  2

  From Sumnerology to Cooley’s Social Self: Proto-Symbolic Interactionism

  Introduction

  The ideas of both William Graham Sumner (1840–1910) and Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929) continue to exist for us today, but they do so for the most part only as echoes. It is not easy to establish the moment when they ceased to be the authors of books and became the owners of key concepts, but it has certainly occurred. Perhaps Sumner was still read until World War II. Writing in 1968, Philip Rieff noted that Cooley had been lost to his generation, whose faith in its own “radical contemporaneity” made Cooley appear hopelessly “out of date.” He was in danger of becoming the latest recruit in the army of the “distinguished but ignored” – along with Albion Small and others (in Rieff, 1990: 310–11). Sumner is now remembered as the sociologist who distinguished folkways, mores, and taboos; Cooley is the person who coined the terms “primary group” and “looking glass self.” The downward mobility implied by this transformation makes it hard for us to recognize now the excitement once generated by their books. In fact, there is a double problem: to recognize their importance then and to realize that they can still speak to us now.

  I want to propose that despite their many differences – political and temperamental, among others – at least aspects of the work of Sumner and Cooley outlined a viable sociological social psychology. Thus, although Sumner and Cooley were antithetical political figures, they were nevertheless convergent sociological theorists. However, it was a strange convergence. To use part of Sumner’s own vocabulary, although Cooley was an absentee in-group member of Chicago sociology, Sumner was definitely part of the out-group, an outcast, a pariah whose perceived pro-business, laissez-faire politics was completely out of step with the Progressivism favored by Cooley, Ward, Ross, Small, and most of the sociologists in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century. Dorothy Ross has characterized this political impasse very well:

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  The Emotions in the Classics of Sociology

  A Study in Social Theory

  • Massimo Cerulo, Adrian Scribano, Massimo Cerulo, Adrian Scribano(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Bierstedt, 1981 : 52). Yet emotions and sentiment are not understood by Ward as a positive social force, as they are potentially anti-social. As compared to the gloomy representation proposed by Ward, sociologists such as Cooley, Park, Burgess and Znaniecki analyse the relations between emotions, sentiments and society from a more optimistic point of view. Although they give great relevance to the emotional component of the social actor, they all conceive of emotions as a socialized component of the individual, and in so far as they are socialized, they represent a relevant factor of social stability and integration of the individual in society.

  What I propose in this chapter is an analysis of Charley Cooley’s approach to emotions. Cooley proposes a strong interconnection between the individual and the social and his sociology of emotions must be understood as a part of his overall theoretical achievements.

  8.2 Self and society

  Although strongly influential within the so-called Chicago School, Cooley never taught in Chicago and his original, somewhat unsystematic thought, is difficult to locate within a specific sociological tradition. His style is impressionistic, often driven by ethical rather than argumentative intent (Mead, 1930 , Lewis and Smith, 1980 : 163), which makes his works unusual to the modern reader. In a timely and somewhat ungenerous obituary review of Cooley’s thought, George Herbert Mead (1930 ) stressed the relevance of Cooley’s conception of the self. The self, although located in a physical body, is made up chiefly of cultural (hence social) elements (Willey, 2011 : 170). Mead stresses the innovation of Cooley’s approach as compared to the old Western tradition which substantialized the Ego (a sort of substratum independent of sociality and communication). The self has no substance: it is the output of a relational process. As Mead puts it, according to Cooley, the self “arises through the imagination of the idea that others entertain of the individual” (Mead, 1930 : 696) hence, through a process of internalization of what one thinks others think about oneself. As a counterpart, society is conceived of as a “relation among personal ideas” (Cooley, (1902 ) 1922 : 19), or the organization of the ideas social actors have about each other. The self is social, as it emerges as a reflex of social relationships and social communication, and, at the same time, the solid facts of society are mental, as both the idea one constructs of oneself (the self) and the personal ideas one conceives of other individuals and the relations they may have (society) are mental. Cooley aims to show the strong interconnection between the individual and society, the self and societal organizations, as emerge in his famous and icastic sentence “Self and society are twin-born, we know one as immediately as we know the other, and the notion of a separate and independent ego is an illusion” (Cooley, 1909 : 5). What the above quoted lines point to, is that self and society are two sides of the same reality, which entails that “society is mental”, because “the human mind is social” (Cooley, (1902

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