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The Foundation of Pragmatic SociologyCharles Horton Cooley and George Herbert Mead

HANS-JOACHIM SCHUBERT University of Potsdam, Germany

ABSTRACT Charles Horton Cooley was, according to George Herbert Mead, anidealist or mentalist for whom ‘imaginations’ and not ‘symbolic interactions’ arethe ‘solid facts of society’. Contrary to Mead’s critique, Cooley breaks throughthe Cartesian body–mind dualism in disagreement with idealism and behaviorism.His objective was to develop a theory of ‘communication’ and ‘understanding’ asthe foundation of pragmatistic sociology. Communication is the decisive startingpoint of Cooley’s and Mead’s sociological theory of ‘social order’ and ‘socialchange’ as stages in the process of action. In conflict with each other actors mustdefine the meaning of the objective, subjective, social and symbolic world. Toovercome problems of action actors create generalized perspectives such as ‘humannature 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 receivesless attention, despite the fact that Cooley explicitly pursued the goal of using the‘pragmatic method’ to construct a general sociological theory of social action, ofsocial order and of social change, a project he eventually accomplished with histrilogy: Human Nature and the Social Order (1964 [1902]), Social Organization(1963 [1909]) and Social Process (1966 [1918]). Mead came to pragmatism lateand thought of himself as a philosopher and social psychologist. In any case, hehardly spoke about sociology. A few references to theory and the subject matter ofsociology are found in his essay ‘Cooley’s Contribution to American SocialThought’ (Mead, 1964 [1930]). There Mead criticizes Cooley severely.

Journal of Classical SociologyCopyright © 2006 SAGE Publications London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi Vol 6(1): 51–74 DOI: 10.1177/1468795X06061284www.sagepublications.com

Mead’s Critique of CooleyTo begin, I will discuss the question of whether Mead, in his critique, is able toestablish a superior position with respect to Cooley. It must be said beforehandthat Mead did not produce a didactic masterwork with his Cooley essay. Hischarge is that Cooley’s conception of society is ‘mental rather than scientific’, thatsociety has a ‘psychical nature’ (Mead, 1964 [1930]: xxxviii). Therefore, Cooleywas not able, in Mead’s view, to adequately determine either the ‘solid facts ofsociety’ (1964 [1930]: xxvii) – the goal of sociology – or to explain the process ofindividuation. 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 phaseof experience’ (Mead, 1964 [1930]: xxxiv–v). How does Mead support thismentalist or idealist charge against Cooley? The genesis of the criticism is Mead’sassertion that Cooley adopted the ‘psychophysical parallelism’ of ‘ordinary psy-chology’, conventional at that time, according to which ‘consciousness is an insideexperience of the life of the external organism’ (Mead, 1964 [1930]: xxxii).Cooley could not, therefore, show how the conscious (mind) and the meaning ofthings (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 onmaterial environmental surroundings or biological conditions, but rather on socialaction, on the process of symbolic interaction. Nevertheless, Mead raises thementalistic charge against Cooley – having hardly mentioned it – stating that ‘inadvance of Baldwin’s and Tarde’s and even of James’s’ doctrine, Cooley hasshown 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 arisesthrough communication’ (Mead, 1964 [1930]: xxix). Based on a theory ofcommunicative action, the ‘self ’ would not have resided in the mind (‘the selflying 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’, wouldnot have been a prior mental characteristic of the communication process.

In spite of this, Mead reiterates his parallelism criticism of Cooley a fewpages later, maintaining that he begins from a ‘parallelism between sensations,perceptions, emotions, volitions, and so forth, and physiological processes’, andfor him ‘selves and others lie inside of the consciousness of “ordinary psychol-ogy”’ and would not arise through the communication process. Cooley’s parallel-ism, according to Mead, is ‘not a parallelism between states of processes in twodifferent realms of metaphysical being’, as in Cartesian thinking; rather, forCooley, body and mind identify an ‘outside and an inside view of the same reality’,namely of the communication process. Although Mead suspends his parallelismcharge against Cooley a second time, following this revision, he immediatelycontinues, saying that Cooley is ‘lodging the self and others in consciousness’ andthus ‘he accepts the parallelism of ordinary psychology’. However, Mead con-

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tinues, Cooley succeeded in avoiding the ‘segregation of the animal organismfrom social and so, moral, experience’ – typical for the dualistic philosophy of themind – ‘by merging the life process and the social process in a universal onwardevolution’ (Mead, 1964 [1930]: xxxii–iii). With this, we come to the heart ofMead’s criticism of Cooley: The Cartesian body–mind dualism is dissolvedbecause, so says Mead, Cooley recognized an evolutionary transition from thenatural to the cultural: In the evolutionary process, the physical (i.e. outerenvironmental conditions or nature) would lose determining power in favor of themental (understanding or nurture). The crucial point for Mead is that Cooley hadno normative theory at hand with which he could evaluate and critique theempirical and historical change from nature to nurture. Cooley ‘had a profoundfaith’ in evolution, which for him was ‘a philosophy and a faith rather than amethod’ (Mead, 1964 [1930]: xxxiii–iv).

His sociology was in a sense an account of the American community towhich he belonged, and pre-supposed its normal healthful process. Thisprocess was that of the primary group with its face-to-face organizationand co-operation. Given the process, its healthful growth and its degenera-tions could be identified and described. Institutions and valuations wereimplicit within it. The gospel of Jesus and democracy were of the essenceof 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 andethology. Lacking that approach, Cooley could only develop an ethnocentricposition. 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 tracedemocracy back to the dim beginnings of human behavior, he cannot establish theorigins of the social patterns that are responsible not only for the structure ofsociety but also for the criticism of that structure’s evolution. Only anthropo-logical and ethological research, according to Mead, can reconstruct the normat-ive meaning and evaluative power of a ‘logical universe of discourse’ (Mead, 1964[1930]: xxxvi–vii). Devoid of this anthropological dimension, Cooley’s sociologycannot reach beyond a presentation of the American community.

This criticism of Cooley is in error, for two reasons. First, Cooley, contraryto what Mead believes, represented not a mentalist and parallelist but a pragmaticpoint of view, anchored in the theory of communication, socialization andprimary group. Second, this view provided the foundation of a universalistictheory discriminating between facts and norms. Mead, on the other hand, in hiscriticism of Cooley, maintained that a normative theory must be based anthropo-logically or ethologically (Mead, 1964 [1930]: xxxvii).

This suggestion is not convincing, given that anthropology and ethologycan 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 notexpose the normative core of communication. From an anthropological viewpointit remains unclear what ‘characteristics’ or what ‘social meanings’ (Cooley, 1969a[1894]: 61) are inherent in the process of communication, giving it its normativepower and meaning that can be used to evaluate social facts and historicalchanges. Such a measure cannot in any case be determined through anthropo-logical or ethological reasoning.

Cooley suggests another way to establish his normative point of view. Heshows (as does Mead in other places in his work) that human society (social order)and subjectivity (the self) evolve through ‘understanding’ in the process ofcommunicative action. ‘Understanding and sympathy’ are for Cooley (1964[1902]: 136–7) universal moral norms that have their factual reality in the basicstructure of the primary socialization process. On the one hand, ‘understanding’and ‘communication’ are preconditions for the development of the self because anautonomous self comes only from the synthesis of disparate judgments. On theother hand, the evolving ‘self ’ must be entangled in a communicatively structuredsocial environment that opens perspectives for the socialization process. ‘Mutualunderstanding’ (Cooley, 1963 [1909]: 10) in primary groups is a prerequisite forindividuation, for successful integration into the social environment, and for thereproduction of the general social order. The normative power and meaning ofcommunication are founded on the fact that, without understanding and commun-ication in primary groups, socialization and individuation could not take place.

Cooley does not, then, define primary groups, as Mead maintains, throughparticular social norms and cultural values peculiar to the American community.Cooley realized, instead, that the basic means for creating communities iscommunication in the form of dialogues.1 He is, in the first place, interested inarticulating the universal rules that simultaneously enable both socialization andindividuation. This conception of continuity between personal identity, primarygroup (or community) and social organization (or society) is altogether unprece-dented. Ferdinand Tonnies, whose term Gemeinschaft (community or primarygroup) provided a focus of orientation for Max Weber and Emile Durkheim, forexample, differentiated in a dualistic way between Gemeinschaft (group) andGesellschaft (society). He defines Gemeinschaften as thick, organic unities, charac-terized by hierarchies, habits, moral orientations and emotions. Gesellschaft is, inevery sense, just the opposite of Gemeinschaft: Gesellschaften are controlled byconventions, laws and public opinion. It is not possible to subsume Cooley’s ideaswithin this European scheme. Tonnies’ dualism – which was motivated by aphilosophical dualism between British natural right theory and attempts tohistoricize German idealist philosophy – is accompanied by a similarly dualistictheory of action. Gemeinschaften are organized by normative action. Gesellschaftenare integrated by rationality of means and ends. However, for Cooley, – whoseconcept of primary group was motivated, above all, by the new social psycho-logical theory of William James and James Baldwin – the basic mode of action


which underlies Gemeinschaften and Gesellschaften – or primary groups and socialorganizations – is communication. The difference between Cooley’s and Tonnies’respective conception of community leads to very different social-politicaltheories. Cooley analyzed the deep-rooted democratic aspects of primary groups.In his theory, the enlargement of primary-group ideals involves by necessity theenlargement of democracy, whereas no theory of democracy derives fromTonnies’ conception of Gemeinschaft. Cooley’s examination of primary-groupcommunication 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 largerdegree, express a universal nature. The religion or government of othercivilizations may seem alien to us, but the children of the family groupwear the common life, and with them we can always make ourselves athome.

(Cooley, 1963 [1909]: 27–8)

Cooley reformulates the postulates of enlightenment, freedom, equality, solidarityand justice not as natural rights, and not as ‘popular impressions’, but as ‘sureand sound’ sentiments based on experiences available to every member of aprimary group.

According to Cooley, primary groups are the place where actors canexperience the ideals of enlightenment as characteristics of the action process. Thisinvolves the postulation of ‘freedom’ because in primary groups actors constantlyface conflicts with significant others; to make a decision, they must synthesizedisparate views into their own judgment, thus developing ‘freedom’ and ‘auton-omy’ from others. Actors experience the meaning of ‘solidarity’ and ‘equality’ notonly because survival can only be assured through cooperation with others, butalso because individuation can only succeed on the basis of common views; onlythrough ‘sympathetic introspection’ and through ‘understanding’ of others canactors create their own perspectives. Finally the idea of ‘justice’ is based onprimary-group experiences because the generalization of subjective views isdependent on the recognition of others, a recognition that can only be had whencommunication partners accept an assertion because it is correct and fair.

If it is true that human nature is developed in primary groups which areeverywhere much the same, and that here also springs from these acommon idealism which institutions strive to express, we have a groundfor somewhat the same conclusions as come from the theory of a naturalfreedom modified by contract. Natural freedom would correspondroughly to the ideals generated and partly realized in primary association,


the social contract to the limitations these ideals encounter in seeking alarger expression.

(Cooley, 1964 [1902]: 47)

These communicative preconditions of the socialization process can, ofcourse, be concealed in particular non-communicative norms; potentially, how-ever, they are basic to all primary groups because without understanding,individuation and socialization cannot occur. Through non-communicative inter-action, already-present attitudes and structures can be reproduced, but to create anew perspective or identity unfamiliar meanings must be understood, tested andsynthesized. Therefore, new group and identity structures can only developthrough ‘understanding and sympathy’ and not in interactions based on delimita-tion. In primary groups individuals gain social competencies and experiencenormative 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 inprimary-group experience. Democracy is endangered when democratic optionsare hidden beneath non-democratic cultural traditions and social norms in theprimary group.

Cooley gathers his normative perspective not, as Mead believes, in a naıvebelief in ‘evolution’ of the American community, but rather through the recon-struction of universal communication prerequisites and characteristics of thesocialization process (Cooley, 1963 [1909]: 27). Why Mead ignores the universal-istic and normative demand of Cooley’s communication and primary-grouptheory continues to be inexplicable.2

Cooley and Mead founded a pragmatic social theory; both came to itthrough a disagreement with idealism and behaviorism. While Mead’s socialpsychology was more strongly marked by a discussion with behaviorist positions,the young Cooley was clearly influenced by American transcendentalism andidealism (cf. Noble, 1958; Schubert, 1995, 1998; Schwartz, 1985). PossiblyMead’s critical stance vis-a-vis Cooley can be explained by their different startingpoints. However, in their principal writings, both Cooley and Mead share acommon trajectory: breaking through Cartesian body–mind dualism in develop-ing a theory of communication.

I shall provide a comprehensive presentation of pragmatic communicationtheory created by Mead and Cooley, their theory of social order and social changeas sequences in the process of action and communication, and the theory ofmeaning and value proposed by Mead and Cooley, before, in conclusion,returning to Mead’s criticism of Cooley. My aim is to show that Mead (‘logicaluniverse of discourse’) as well as Cooley (‘human nature values’) offered auniversalistic and normatively useful perspective based on a theory of symbolicinteraction. Differences between Mead and Cooley are consequently not based ontheory, but rather on a different approach to subject matter. While Mead workedabove all in the fields of social psychology, philosophy of science, ethics and


political philosophy, Cooley moved closer to the area of sociology, investigatingthe development of social micro (looking-glass self), meso (primary group andideals) 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 actiontheory: we are determined neither by environmental nor by biological conditionsbut inherit only ‘lines of teachability’. According to Cooley; however, humannature provides no instinctive reportoire with which to solve environmentalproblems without reflection and recourse to generalized social meaning. Theattraction scheme of the animal world gives way to the ‘plasticity’ of humannature (Cooley, 1963 [1909]: 28) and human reaction is thus based on opennessto the environment. This standpoint is extremely important: the limitation ofaction inherent in it – the delayed reaction to environmental attraction – gives riseto the objective need for permanent reconstruction and experimental solutions ofaction problems as a basic characteristic of human action, as well as a condition forthe development of the mind (Cooley, 1998: 81–130; Mead, 1973: 100–40). ForCooley, as for Mead, the mind is not a predecessor characteristic for the actionprocess, but rather appears only when conflicts limit habitual actions such that themeaning of situations (subjective attitudes and objective values) must be newlydefined. New understanding is gained not, as Descartes (cogito ergo sum), thefounder of philosophy of the mind, believed, through solipsistic introspection orcontemplation, but rather through ‘sympathetic introspection’ in the process ofsymbolically mediated interaction. According to Cooley, Descartes should havesaid ‘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 ismental’, ‘imaginations are the solid facts of society’, or ‘we know persons asimaginative ideas in the mind’. However, Cooley was not a mentalist; he describesin detail, in Human Nature and the Social Order, his understanding of ‘mind’ and‘imagination’. Imagination is not a force isolated from the empirical world, butrather an intersubjective ‘communication’. Mind is not a solipsistic capacity, butan ‘inner experience’, created in conjunction with the ‘outside world’. The mind,according to Cooley, ‘lives in perpetual conversation’, and the ‘life of the mind isessentially a life of intercourse’. Cooley insists that ‘society is mental’ because ‘thehuman mind is social’ (Cooley, 1964 [1902]: 97, 81).

If human action is determined neither by the mind nor by nature, thequestion arises as to how social order is possible, that is, how individual actionscan be coordinated. The answer that Cooley and Mead give is: actors can define,generalize and communicate meanings of the subjective, social and objectiveworld with help of ‘significant’ or ‘standard symbols’ such that they can adjust


their actions to the virtual reactions of the other. ‘Communication’ and ‘speech’ isfor Mead (1912) and Cooley (1963 [1909]: 64; 1969a [1894]: 61)3 the deciding‘instrument of social organization’. The path to an interactionist sociology ledCooley to reject introspective methods and the philosophy of mind, on the onehand, and biologistic and behavioristic approaches such as eugenics, criminology,mass psychology, the theory of imitation and the psychology of instinct, on theother. To establish itself on a firm theoretical foundation, Cooley’s sociologyneeded to determine the ‘mechanism’ of social integration. Cooley was not ableto proceed beyond the futile alternatives of ‘heredity and environment’, ‘imitationand innovation’ and ‘suggestion and choice’ – key terms in his early thinking –until he discovered the basic elements of his envisioned theory: communicationand understanding. The basic medium of social integration, according to Cooley,is not the mental mechanism described by mass psychology (Gustave Le Bon), norimitation (Gabriel Tarde), nor instincts (William McDougall), nor social controlin the form of habits (Edward A. Ross), and neither is it a consciousness of kind(Franklin H. Giddings) but, rather, communication based on ‘standardizedsymbols’. Human beings have to ‘understand’ each other to create both amanifest social order and autonomous selves. Only if symbols are available whichcan be understood independently of single situations by all interacting participantsin the same way can a common orientation toward a generally valid pattern ofbehaviour be achieved. Nevertheless, symbolic meanings offer no generally failsafesecurity of action; the meanings must be permanently defined, if only becausemeanings neither are objectively inherent in things nor do they give a universalpresentation of the mind.

Cooley and Mead on ‘Social Order’ and ‘SocialChange’ as Stages in the ActFor Cooley and Mead, ‘communication’ is the basic term with which to describethe phenomena of social order and social change. Social order cannot be inferredeither empirically from the social or natural environment or nominally from thetranscendental mind. Social change is neither the result of an unconsideredadaptation 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 thecommunicative process. Thus, Mead’s and Cooley’s interactive theory of socialorder and social change lies in the tradition of American pragmatism, as estab-lished by Charles Sanders Peirce.

Peirce arranges the action process in four phases. The starting point foraction 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 actuallyhave’, ‘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, inDescartes’s ‘initial scepticism’, but rather only through ‘living doubt’, when our


beliefs are confronted with an ‘outward clash’. Only then do meanings, such associal 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 orcrisis is it, according to Peirce, realistic to criticize the sense of meanings; onlythen will meanings be recognized at all. ‘The doubt stimulates the mind to anactivity’ (Peirce, 1996d: 253, para. 5.394), so that the phase of the limitation ofaction is followed by the reconstruction phase, creative experimentation, in which,by resorting to old values, new ideas and hypotheses are invented. In a fourthphase, those ideas that have proven worthwhile will be incorporated in the form ofnew rules and habits. At the center of pragmatism lies the phase of reconstruction,the abductive development of new hypotheses. In his pragmatism lectures of1903, Peirce declared that ‘the question of pragmatism’ is nothing other than thequestion about the ‘logic of abduction’ (1996b: 121, para. 5.196). The logicalorder of the world, for Peirce, derives not from the deductive of generalizednorms and not from the inductive of single cases, but rather from the abductive inthe ‘context of discovery’ as a construction process of hypotheses.

Mead developed his theory of a circular connection between order andchange in the communicative process with John Dewey. ‘The Deweyian state-ment’, according to Anselm Strauss,

. . . here somewhat simplified, points to a sequence of action: ongoing,blocked, deliberating about alternative possibilities of action, and thencontinued action. Mead of course elaborated this action scheme in moreexplicitly sociological directions. These include his formulation of stages inthe act, his radical conception of the temporal and complex and potentialflexibility of any act, his elaboration of social interaction, his detailing ofself as process, his greater emphasis on the body in action, his elaborationof mind as mental activity, and his development of crucially importantperspectival view of temporality and interaction. It has seemed to me thatsome version of this general theoretical stance underlies virtually allChicago interactionist research and conceptualization.

(1994: 4)

Also for Cooley, habitual forms of social order are a starting point for thefour-stage action process: ‘So long as an idea is not contradicted, not felt to be inany 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 intosocial relationships with others; only under these prior conditions can A offer asensible connective action for B. ‘Habits’ and ‘suggestions’, ‘the stream ofthought’, provide the material for the communicative process and for thedevelopment of individual goal orientation. ‘Any choice that I can make is asynthesis of suggestions derived in one way or another from life in general; and italso reacts upon that life, so that my will is social as being both effect and cause


with reference to it’ (Cooley, 1964 [1902]: 54). Nevertheless, second, limitationof actions occurs regularly in the action process because actors do not immediatelyreact to generalized meanings, and have different experiences in the flow of lifethat lead to conflicts. ‘Precisely as the conditions become intricate, are we forcedto think, to choose, to define the useful and the right, and in general, to work outthe higher intellectual life’ (Cooley, 1964 [1902]: 53). The destabilization ofvalues follows, third, a phase of reconstruction and experiments in which newhypotheses are discovered that provide a view to overcoming conflicts. ‘We geton by forming intelligent ideals of right, which are imaginative reconstructionsand anticipations of life, based upon experience. And in trying to realize theseideals we initiate a new phase of the social process, which goes on through theusual 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 experimentsand phases of search so that – fourth – new action customs and social rules canbe established.

Indeed it would seem that the struggles of the age have given us at leastone principle, namely, that life itself is a process rather than a state; so thatwe no longer expect anything final, but look to discover in the movementitself sufficient matter for reason and faith.

(Cooley, 1966 [1918]: 377)

Most significant for Cooley is the ‘tentative process’, the phase of ‘imag-inative reconstruction’. In the modeling of utopias and ideals through a ‘creativesynthesis’ (Cooley, 1966 [1918]: 353) of experiences lies, for him, the option of‘reason’ of human action, thus the construction of new individual goals and newsocial norms and cultural ‘faith’. ‘Cooley habitually resorts to the hallmarks oforiginality or creativeness as a frame of reference’ (Levin, 1941: 216–29). Thedeciding point is that social order is not guaranteed either through the inner driveor outer nature (behaviorism and empiricism) or through the internalizing ofsocial norms (normativism), nor is it reflected in a transcendental mind (idealism)or in rational individual action (utilitarianism); rather it derives from constantinterpretations and reconstruction of generalized meanings (pragmatism). Socialorder is, for Cooley, not a ‘state’, but a ‘process’ of creative and experimentalaction.

For Cooley and Mead, social action is created not as the rational result ofclear goals and not in the execution of social norms. The pragmatic social theoryunderlies ‘homo oeconomicus’ and ‘homo sociologicus’ because it shows how individ-ual goal-setting and generalized behavioral expectations are constituted andstabilized through creative action. Thus, in the view of Cooley and Mead, thebasic motive for action is not, as in utilitarianism, given goals that the actors wantto maximally realize, nor social norms that channel the actions of the actors, but


rather problems of action and conflicts that must be overcome through experi-mental action. Accordingly, Cooley labels the dynamic of conflict betweenindividuals as ‘hostile sympathy’ (1966 [1918]: 266), since deceptions, animos-ities and conflicts do not simply threaten social certainties; they are also thecondition for the reaction of new patterns of behavior and of the individual mind.Actors consequently coordinate their actions to overcome uncertainty of action orconflicts and not because of sanctions or a means–ends calculation. Social order isnot a consistent condition of the balance of individual interests and not anautonomous normative structure determining the range of individual action, buta process of permanent ‘imaginative reconstruction’ of social, subjective andobjective 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 atripolar situation of interaction. It is decisive that Cooley’s approach is based noton a theory of the mind or knowledge but on a theory of symbolically mediatedinteraction, showing how social knowledge derives from the communicativeprocess. Therefore Cooley’s work belongs to pragmatism and not to the sociologyof knowledge.4

Cooley and Mead on ‘Meaning’ and ‘Valuation’A central sign of pragmatism as it was developed by Charles Sanders Peirce is, incontrast to all the varieties of idealism, nominalism or mentalism, on the one side,and of empiricism, realism, behaviorism and materialism, on the other side, agenuine theory of value and meaning. From a pragmatic view, the value of objectsand ideas cannot be separated either from the ‘realm of the mind’ (res cogitans) orfrom the ‘world of things’ (res extensa). The objective, social and subjective worldsgain meaning in the communicative process or in usage situations. The truth ofstatements comes consequently not from structures of the mind and not fromempirical 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 ofsymbolic interaction. The tripolar, or ‘tri-relative’, meaning theory first developedby Peirce offers a theoretical background for Mead as well as for Cooley.Therefore, I will reconstruct briefly the position of Peirce in contrast to theempiricism of David Hume, on the one hand, and to the idealism of ImmanuelKant, on the other, to show in conclusion that Mead and Cooley directlyrepresent Peirce’s position, and to make clearer the common, basic structure ofsociological pragmatism.

According to Peirce, values and meanings result from semiotic mediationof signs, interpretations and objects. Semiosis, for Peirce, means ‘an action, orinfluence, which is, or involves, a cooperation of three subjects, such as a sign, itsobject, and its interpretant, this tri-relative influence not being in any way


resolvable into actions between pairs’ (1996e: 332, para. 5.484). Meaning resultsfrom the tripolar relationship among sign, object and interpretant. Generalizedmeanings (M) are defined by interpretants (I) based on the use of objects (O)with help of signs (S) (see Figure 1).

The meaning-critical realism of Peirce sets itself against David Hume’simage of bipolar realism (in general against empiricism and materialism), whichmerges the constituent meaning levels of interpretation and believes that objectsof the external, social or subjective world can be represented by signs (theories) orat least correspond to these. According to Hume, the human mind is like acontainer that is filled, in that the outer world is taken into the inner worldthrough psychological mechanisms of ‘association’. Even abstract terms or ‘com-plex ideas’ such as ‘government, church, negotiation, conquest’, can, according toHume, be traced to ‘simple ideas’ that are images of empirical objects, eventhough ‘we seldom spread out in our minds all the simple ideas, of which thesecomplex ones are compos’d’. Despite that, empirical experience is the onlymethod of recognition for Hume (Hume, 1985 [1739–40]: 70; see Figure 2).

For Peirce also, objects are provided outside our thinking. In contrast toempiricism, the pragmatic view of the outer world is not modeled through thepsychological mechanism of association; rather, objects (O) gain meaning (M) forsubjects 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 nominalistictheory of meaning (and with all varieties of idealism and mentalism). In idealism

FIGURE 1.

Object (O)

Interpretant (I)Sign (S)

Charles Sanders Peirce

Meaning(M)

FIGURE 2.

Recognition of outer world

David Hume:

Category of understandingSubject Object


transcendental categories of the mind are the only prerequisites of meaning,without considering the interpretive mediation of experience through signs as aconstitutive for a theory of cognition (Figure 3).

Naturally, Kant also sees that reason (thoughts or interpretations) and theempirical 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 theproduct of experience. Pure reason takes precedence; only it can reduce the‘manifold of our representations’ and empirical perceptions to a general anduniform notion signifying heterogeneous objects. With Kant, we can thereforeonly speak of an object, because the logic of reason – as conditio sine qua non ofrecognition and all truth – guarantees the unity of objects.

The concept of an object . . . has to be distinct from all our representa-tions. The unity which the object makes necessary can be nothing elsethan the formal unity of consciousness in the synthesis of the manifold ofrepresentations. It is only when we have thus produced synthetic unity inthe manifold of intuition that we are in a position to say that we knowthe object.

(Kant, 1929 [1787]: 135)

With this quotation the difference between idealism (or mentalism) and pragma-tism is clear. With Peirce, in place of Kant’s postulated a priori structures of themind, interpretation processes (I) are set in motion through action problems, inwhose 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 thoughtwhich interprets it; second, it is a sign for some object to which in thatthought it is equivalent; third it is a sign, in some respect or quality, whichbrings it into connection with its object.

(1996c: 169, para. 5.283)

Mead, as well, derived his theory of meaning and value in opposingImmanuel Kant. Above all, he differentiated his theory of communication fromthe dualistic attraction–reaction model of behaviorism. The meaning of social

FIGURE 3.

Recognition of outer world

Immanuel Kant:

Category of understandingSubject Object


objects comes neither from understanding nor human nature, but rather is a resultof a three-sided social action process.

Meaning is thus a development of something objectively there as a relationbetween certain phases of the social act; it is not a physical addition to thatact and it is not an ‘idea’ as traditionally conceived. A gesture by oneorganism, the resultant of the social act in which the gesture is an earlyphase, and the response of another organism to the gesture, are the relata ina triple or threefold relationship of gesture to first organism, of gesture tosecond organism, and of gesture to subsequent phases of the given socialact; and this threefold relationship constitutes the matrix within whichmeaning arises, or which develops into the field of meaning. The gesturestands for a certain result of the social act, a result to which there is adefinite response on the part of the individuals involved therein; so thatmeaning is given or stated in terms of response. Meaning is implicit – ifnot always explicit – in the relationship among the various phases ofthe social act to which it refers, and out of which it develops. And itsdevelopment takes place in terms of symbolization at the humanevolutionary level.

(Mead, 1973: 76; see Figure 4)

In the end, Cooley created his theory of meaning and value above all in anexplanation of economic theory (1912, 1913a, 1913b; see Jacobs, 1979). Heseparates himself on one side from the historical school of national economics(Gustav Schmoller); their methods are, for him, ‘too empirical to hold out muchprospect of an adequate doctrine of process’ (Cooley, 1966 [1918]: 367). Hischief opponent is nevertheless the rational model of the aspiring marginal utilitytheory (Alfred Marshall and Carl Menger). The neoclassics abandoned thequestion of the origin of values, reducing the subject matter of economics to

FIGURE 4.

Resultantobjective world

Responsesocial world

Gesturesubjective world

George Herbert Mead

Meaning

symbolicworld


examining the relation between given values or ends and alternative means. ‘Theeconomic theorist appears’, says Cooley, ‘like a man who should observe only thesecond hand of a watch: He counts the seconds with care, but is hardly in aposition to tell what time it is’ (1966 [1918]: 367). Unlike the historical school ofnational economy, which attributed subjective value orientation to objective,social and cultural structures, and, unlike neoclassical marginal utility theory, forwhich individuals randomly create objective values, Cooley developed not a dualbut a tripolar theory of value:

It would seem that the essential things in the conception of value arethree: an organism, a situation, and an object. The organism is necessary togive meaning to the idea; there must be worth to something. It need notbe a person; a group, an institution, a doctrine, any organized form of lifewill do; and that it be conscious of the values that motivate it is not at allessential. . . . The situation is the immediate occasion for action, in view ofwhich the organism integrates the various values working within it andmeets the situation by an act of selection, which is a step in its owngrowth, leading on to new values and new situations. Valuation is onlyanother name for tentative organic process.

(Cooley, 1966 [1918]: 284–5; see Figure 5)

According to Mead and Cooley, generalized values or meaning are definedin a three-part interaction situation. When an actor or organism indicates with agesture (subjective world) (1) an object or the resultant of the social act (theobjective 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 getgeneralized and finally expressed in significant or standardized symbols (symbolicworld) (4). Communication is the mechanism creating the autonomy, as well asthe heteronomy, of the four entangled worlds:

FIGURE 5.

Objectsobjective world

Situationsocial world

Organismsubjective world

Charles Horton Cooley

Value

symbolicworld


(1) Meanings of the objective world are traceable neither to empirical structures ofthe outer world nor to nominal structures of the mind. The meaning of objectivesis generalized in contextual use, in the process of coordination of action. Objectsof action or the ‘resultant of the social act’ (Mead) gain generalized meaningwhen actor A indicates an object with a gesture and actor B through his or herreaction or interpretation of the gesture signals agreement or expresses disagree-ment, so that A can again react to B’s gesture, modifying his or her position untila general agreement is reached. According to Cooley, a ‘hammer-value’, a ‘grain-value’, 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 institution-alized 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 developsimultaneously in the form of social roles, norms and structures. The social statusof actors is defined in a struggle for recognition of economic, political, social andcultural capital and competencies important for creating and reproducing prob-lems of social order. Different from the meanings of the objective world (‘spatialknowledge’), social norms (‘social knowledge’, see Cooley, 1998: 110–30) didnot have a valid basis outside of the communication process. Actors can anticipatethe reaction of the social world to their subjective demands against a backgroundof symbolically generalized expectations of behavior; they must, however, counton the contingent reactions of others. The social process of ‘taking into accountof taking into account’ is a phenomenon of immersion and cannot be reducedeither to the combining of subjective intentions or psychic objects (individuallevel) 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 ordersand social structures develop, but also meanings of the subjective world of theactors. Because the value of an object and the social position of actors to eachother are not determined, action problems continuously arise in practical inter-action situations; actors must therefore develop their own perspective on thesocial and objective world to be at all able to make a decision and to coordinateactions. The ‘self ’ (Mead) or ‘looking-glass self ’ (Cooley) arise in reaction toaction problems through the abductive integration of social, cultural and sub-jective demands or perspectives.5

(4) Generalized meanings of the subjective, objective and social world can beexpressed through the use of significant or standardized symbols. Because symbolsarise from concrete action situations, a symbolic reference structure, a symbolicworld, develops that gains autonomy from subjective intentions, social rules andobjective validity and can exercise its own influence on the meanings of this world,


even when the effect and meaning of symbols remain dependent on the inter-action process and cases of problems of understanding must be newly defined.

In that the word usually goes before, leading and kindling the idea – weshould not have the latter if we did not have the word first. ‘This way’ saysthe word, ‘is an interesting thought: come and find it.’ And so we are ledon to rediscover old knowledge. Such words, for instance, as good, right,love, home, justice, beauty, freedom are powerful makers of what theystand for.

(Cooley, 1963 [1909]: 69)

The Theory of Perspective ChangeCombined with the theory of meaning and value, pragmatism gains a genuinetheory of validity. With this, I return to my consideration of Mead’s criticism ofCooley. Cooley had not, according to Mead, developed a universalistic, normativeperspective that is necessary to critique empirical facts of social order. In responseto this accusation, I will show that Cooley within the tradition of Americanpragmatism created a universalistic perspective subsequently to his theory ofcommunication 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-endedinterpretation 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 reasoningwould finally result in, and which is therefore independent of the vagariesof me and you. Thus, the very origin of the conception of reality showsthat this conception essentially involves the notion of a COMMUNITY,without definite limits, and capable of an indefinite increase ofknowledge.

(Peirce, 1996a: 398, para. 2.654)

The prerequisite for objective knowledge lies, for Peirce, in the potential agree-ment of an ‘indefinite’ or ‘logical community of communication’, a counter-factual supposition that nevertheless makes an objective judgment thinkable andwhich 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 ‘socialprinciple’ (1996f: 135–55, para. 5.225–37). The logical conclusion is a semi-otically brokered, social process; thus the validity of a logical close is dependent onthe agreement of the discursive community.

Cooley and Mead created the normative perspective of the ‘logical uni-verse of discourse’ (Mead) or ‘human nature values’ (Cooley) reconstructivelyfrom the circular relationship of individuation and socialization (see Figure 6). In


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 throughthe 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 rulesthat coordinate individual actions, enabling children through games to takedifferent and even opposing positions. In the continuation of the socializationprocess, actors experience that general rules and social norms of different spheresof 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 ‘ethicalself ’ (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

FIGURE 6.

Playmate

Play

Charles HortonCooley

George HerbertMead

Logical Universe of Discourse

Human Nature ValuesUniversal solidarity

Self

InstitutionalizedValues

GeneralizedOthers

SignificantOthers

PrimaryIdeals

Great Man

Game

Ideal Person

Discourse

B C

D E


by the process of socialization. When contradictions occur in the social world ofthe actors, they realize the power to define the situation and to gain freedom andautonomy from social constraints. On the other side, not only freedom of actionbut also the social order is generalized through the inclusion and integration ofdifferentiated perspectives.7

Autonomous action results, for Cooley and Mead, not in the rational self-limitation in favor of social necessity, as with Weber and Durkheim, but rather incommunication with others, where new perspectives can be designed in theobjective, social and subjective world. For Cooley and Mead, the differentiation ofsocietal structures and rules, on the one side, makes possible new forms ofindividuation because it increases the chance (or the demand) to take newperspectives 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. Inthis communicative process of interaction between the person and society,individuals find autonomy from social rules and expectation through the increas-ing broadening of perspectives, and social structures are generalized through thedefinition of standardized symbols signifying institutionalized values and situ-ations of actions.

Notes1. 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 orthings it is commonly understood in sociology to mean a social group, that is a numberof persons among whom is some degree of communication and interaction. Moreoverthis must be reciprocal and not in one direction only. . . . Evidently the conception is avery general one, and groups may vary indefinitely in size and character. Any twopersons conversing make a group, and, on the other hand the word might be applied insome 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 areintimate, lasting and separate, like a family on an ancestral farm, others so . . . as to behardly 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 areapparently isolated are hardly an exception, since they usually continue the social habit inimaginary intercourse (conversations). Without groups there would be no persons, justas without persons there would be no groups: they are aspects of the same humancomplex.

(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 doctrineof human nature may appear as archaic now as that of the philosopher-aristocrats ofGreek culture, in the context of Greek political theory and institutional practice. The


intelligent and gentlemanly Cooleyan symbolic of human nature – White, Anglo-Saxon,Protestant and Liberal – may no longer serve to build up that controlling consensuswhich once constituted the specific genius of American culture. It is not yet clear whatthe new symbolic is, nor whether, in a technologically advanced and bureaucraticallyorganized mass society, a controlling consensus, in the classical mode, is required forsocial 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 groundby 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 orromantic 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; allthe world should be an enlarged, Christian-democratic version of a rural village. Hepractically assimilated ‘society’ to this primary-group community, and he blessed itemotionally 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 neighborhoodwould remain the most influential controls upon the individual’s behavior. This mistakenconception has, in turn, contributed to the belief that his theory was implicitly anti-progress. But, progress and the ability to adapt oneself to a changing and complex socialorder are the defining characteristics of human nature. In actuality, it appears that theemphasis Cooley placed upon the role of the primary group in the life of the individualwas in large measure due to his recognition of the passing of the folk culture mystiquein modern American society. In short, the stabilization process which many critics see asthe essential characteristics of the primary group takes the form of adaptability tochange. It is upon this foundation that the moral systems of both the individual andsociety are to be based in modern society. The ‘horrors’ of civilization result from a lackof fulfilment of human nature, and human nature is plasticity.

(1968: 20)

3. ‘Communication’, according to Cooley in his autobiographical retrospective of 1928,’was thus myfirst real conquest, and the thesis a forecast of the organic view of society I have been working outever since’ (Cooley, 1969b [1928]: 8).

4. Harvey A. Farberman (1970, 1985) and Ellsworth R. Fuhrman (1980) place Cooley in the sociologyof knowledge in a line from Alfred Schutz and Karl Mannheim, whereas R.S. Perinbanayagam(1975) separates Schutz from Cooley and Mead.

5. David Franks and Viktor Gecas show that Cooley’s term ‘looking-glass self’ is marked by fourqualifications:

The first is that reflected appraisals of others are actively interpreted by the actor. Thesecond qualification is that actors, to a large extent, select whose appraisals will affectthem. Third, Cooley discussed the importance of a relatively stable, traditional sense ofvalues 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)


6. Cooley uses the term ‘ideal person’ or the ‘ethical self’, similar to Mead’s ‘generalized other’. Thiswas not noted in the literature on Cooley. Shrauger and Schoeneman maintain: ‘Mead’s looking-glass self is reflective not only of significant others, as Cooley suggested, but of a generalizedother, that is, one’s whole sociocultural environment’ (1979: 550).

7. Harvey A. Farberman believes that Cooley only reconstructed the relationship between personsand society mentalistically, whereas Mead did it interactively:

James first conceived the self as emanating from an indwelling structure of interests thatcarried a priori dispositions and was resolutely subjectivistic. Cooley then inserted thisnotion of self into the social process via the crucible of highly charged primary grouprelations but left in the realm of mental imagination. Finally, Mead revolutionized thisentire line of theoretical development by reconceptualizing the origins, nature, andconsequences of self. Self did not emanate from innate biological endowments andmigrate to the outside world; it developed from primitive gestures and symbols in theoutside world of already on-going joint functional action. Self is not psychical; it isfunctional 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 andnot mentalistically explained:

There is no reason to think that Cooley considered reflected appraisals to be the onlysource of self-knowledge or self-regard. As attribution theory stressed . . . importantinformation about the self is recorded from the consequences of the actions weourselves bring forth onto the world, i.e. we come to know ourselves from the productsand 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 inthe process of being influenced by their perceptions. The reciprocal relation betweenindividual and others is vital to an understanding of Cooley’s social self, and thisreciprocity 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 normativestructures.

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Dr habil. Hans-Joachim Schubert, Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University ofPotsdam, is the editor of Charles Horton Cooley: On Self and Social Organization (University of ChicagoPress, 1998).

Address: PD Dr. Hans-Joachim Schubert, University of Potsdam, Allgemeine Soziologie, August-BebelStr. 89, 14439 Potsdam, Germany. [email: [email protected]]


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