Updating Charles H. Cooley

Contemporary Perspectives on a Sociological Classic

Natalia Ruiz-Junco, Baptiste Brossard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351598323
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Soziologie

This book explores the contemporary relevance of Charles H. Cooley's thought, bringing together scholars from the US, Europe and Australia to reflect on Cooley's theory and legacy. Offering an up-to-date analysis of Cooley's reception in the history of the social sciences, an examination of epistemological and methodological advances on his work, critical assessments and novel articulations of his major ideas, and a consideration of new directions in scholarship that draws on Cooley's thought, Updating Charles H. Cooley will appeal to sociologists with interests in social theory, interactionism, the history of sociology, social psychology, and the sociology of emotions.

1 Cooley and the sociological canon

An enigmatic case

Natalia Ruiz-Junco¹

AUBURN UNIVERSITY

and
Baptiste Brossard

AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY

Throughout the years, sociologists have considered Cooley an anomalous figure. This idea appears early in the commentary about Cooley. In his review of Human Nature and the Social Order, George E. Vincent (1903) introduced this theme: “The volume is something of an anomaly in sociological literature, but it is none the less welcome for its very non-conformity.” Vincent’s words seemed to have conjured up a spell of repetition. The same idea reappears half a century later in a crucial piece of commentary about Cooley by Robert Gutman (1958). And it has recently re-emerged, in the words of Glenn Jacobs (2004:143): “As a sociologist Charles Horton Cooley was and is something of an anomaly.”

Indeed, it is extraordinary that these commentators, with dissimilar social positions, sociological sensibilities, and contexts, have nonetheless thought of Cooley in the same terms: as someone anomalous. Though they used prescriptive language to frame the issue, their reflections, spanning more than a century, point to the fact that Cooley somehow integrated the sociological canon as an enigma.

Why this enigma? First, Cooley’s texts departed from the conventional academic style that was becoming prevalent in American academia during sociology’s institutionalization. Second, Cooley’s social theory has often been presented as disconnected, and sometimes inferior to (or less rigorous than) the works of other key thinkers, such as Emile Durkheim, George H. Mead, Max Weber, Talcott Parsons, and Erving Goffman. But, more important, and compounded with the above, is the fact that Cooley faced, as well as created, serious challenges in building his academic reputation and consolidating his place in the sociological canon.

In this chapter, we explore Cooley’s “enigma” in two steps. We begin with an introduction to Cooley, focused on his contributions to sociology. We show that Cooley offered us unprecedented theoretical insights in early twentieth century sociology, comparable in quality to famous concepts by other major social theorists. We then focus on the reasons why these insights have not received as much attention as we think they deserve.

Our main argument is that, whereas Cooley is a classic who has received recognition as an important figure in American sociology, he has not benefitted from the proper theoretical involvement—through the meaningful commentary and application—expected to accompany this status. To be sure, Cooley has maintained the position of classic of sociology, his recognition has increased in related disciplines, and his major ideas continue to be cited. However, we argue, Cooley’s classic status is ambiguous, for the following reasons: his unique theoretical writing; the reputational dynamics affecting his work; and the academic recognition logics involved in citations.

Cooley’s contributions to sociology

Cooley’s impact in the history of sociology is undeniable. He is famous for having coined key concepts in sociology, such as the looking-glass self and the primary group.² Hereby, we discuss his intellectual achievements, beginning with his epistemological and methodological insights.

Epistemology and methodology

Cooley’s contributions to epistemology and methodology are foundational, even now, in relation to current debates in sociology. In particular, his method of sympathetic introspection represents an original formulation of the centrality of the researcher’s involvement in the lifeworld of participants. It is credited with being the genesis of participant observation (Shalin 1986:19). The history of the concept, however, is not well known.

Cooley developed this notion on the basis of his concept of sympathy, which is related to Adam Smith’s ([1759] 2009) ideas (Shott 1976; see also Ruiz-Junco 2017).³ Cooley advances that sympathy is the means by which social scientists acquire valid knowledge to gain an understanding of others. He defined this knowledge as the pursuit of social science and described it as:

developed from contact with the minds of other men, through communication, which sets going a process of thought and sentiment similar to theirs and enables us to understand them by sharing their states of mind. This I call personal or social knowledge. It might also be described as sympathetic, or, in its more active forms, as dramatic, since it is apt to consist of a visualization of behavior accompanied by imagination of corresponding mental processes.

(Cooley 1926:60)

Sadly, this method has been downplayed in contemporary sociology. Many commentators associate sympathetic introspection with mentalism, and speculating in imagination, disregarding its crucial epistemological component. Not only has the originality of his method been relatively neglected, but also the notion of sympathetic introspection has been misunderstood. More importantly, the same criticisms that have been applied to Cooley for embracing the idea of sympathy in epistemological reflection have not been directed against other eminent theorists advancing the same type of idea, for instance Blumer (1936) who asserts that, to know the inner dynamics of a group, sociologists have to embrace the worldview of this group. Some of Cooley’s contemporaries also engaged the concept of sympathy, and connected it to sociological knowledge (e.g., Addams 1910).

In fact, none other than the sociological epistemologist par excellence, Max Weber, developed a resembling idea. In Economy and Society, Weber stressed the importance of sympathetic participation in the mechanics of interpretive sociology. He (Weber 1978:5) stated: “Empathic or appreciative accuracy is attained when, through sympathetic participation, we can adequately grasp the emotional context in which the action took place.” Weber’s use of sympathy in his epistemological considerations raises the issue of differential treatment. While Cooley has been a target of criticism for sympathetic introspection, Weber’s use of sympathy has not faced such reproach. One of the reasons may be that Cooley followed Peirce in his refusal to distinguish common sense from scientific knowledge in nature. This was incompatible with the widespread belief of the major distinction between what the “scientist” “knows” and what the “layperson” “believes.” Weber also promoted the understanding of the layperson’s point of view—and visited the United States partly to know more about pragmatist philosophy—but insisted on the inscription of this point of view into social, political and economic structures, in the vein of the post-Marxian German tradition of thinking. Thus, comparing Cooley to Weber leads to the realization that his way of presenting the notion of sympathetic introspection may have been a brilliant idea wrapped in a strategic mistake.

Despite this, the core achievement of sympathetic introspection has not been lost on contemporary sociologists. Many among the epistemologically minded consider the ability to “put oneself in the place” of one’s participants as a key feature of sociological understanding. We find this idea in the writings of famous sociologists, from Herbert Blumer and Pierre Bourdieu, to Elias (1956), who considers “involvement and detachment” as a core process in sociological analysis.

Furthermore, this way of conceiving fieldwork research, or qualitative methods more generally, has not progressed much since Cooley; with some exceptions, especially conceptualizations of fieldwork through field theory (Green 2008) and relational ethnography (Desmond 2014). While the process of gathering data has been refined, and the operations to analyze these data have been developed and dramatically formalized, there has not been much contemporary reflection on the mental processes through which the researcher acquires knowledge about a given social group, and makes sense of the actions of its members. Notably, auto-ethnographers advance that using their method to analyze these processes as they appear in their own consciousness yields significant results.

Such lack of engagement with this topic in the current literature suggests that Cooley stands at the crossroads of a fertile conversation in qualitative methodology. On the one hand, he has contributed to laying the foundations of a missing link in qualitative methods (between data collection and analysis); on the other, his positivist detractors are now forced to contemplate the mental processes by which researchers produce knowledge (especially as the progress made in cognitive psychology and neuroscience finally convinced the most positivist ones that they were, like any human, subjected to their own mental constraints). These mental (in a non-exclusive sense from social) processes need to be accounted for, especially when researchers operate under the premise that knowledge production is the technical application of a method reasonably designed beforehand.

In synthesis, while Cooley’s method has been, and continues to be, the object of critique, several sociologists have recognized its strength and contemporary character. Sympathetic introspection inspires new epistemological and methodological approaches in sociology and other disciplines. As an example, it has given rise to innovative qualitative methodologies in several fields, such as auto-ethnographic projects in sociology, anthropology, and other related areas of knowledge (Manning 2005; see also Ruiz-Junco and Vidal-Ortiz 2011).

Theory of self

Cooley is one of the major social theorists of the self in classical sociology. To avoid falling into a reification trap, it is important to note that he made an analytic, not substantive, distinction between self and society. The core of his theory centers on the notion of the “social self.” The main premise of the social self is that the self “results from” social processes, since people develop their selves in intimate connection with others, and cannot conceive of themselves without referring to the social world in which they have a position; thus, self is intimately connected to society, if not indistinguishable.

The most well known aspect of Cooley’s theory of self lies in his concept of looking-glass self. The theory of the looking-glass self has been poorly commented on, mostly cited to argue that selves are social to some extent, or to make the even vaguer point that people are influenced by others. In the same fashion as sympathetic introspection, this notion has progressively lost part of its original strength. The notion of looking-glass self not only implies that we are influenced by how others see us (the majority interpretation), but that we cannot perceive ourselves without this looking-glass composed of the more or less explicit feedback of others, a feedback that is imagined, replayed, and distorted through the internal conversation. In short, the looking-glass self, in addition to being a matter of “reflected appraisals,” as some have labelled Cooley’s theory, primarily contains an ontological statement on the human mind as a non-exclusively individual unit.

In a sense, the success of the looking-glass self theory has grandly contributed to a widespread understanding of the social self—students inundate YouTube with videos on this topic, for instance to show that we do not dress only for ourselves but to convey a certain image to others—but also to Cooley’s overall reputation. Contrary to the abovementioned reception of the sympathetic introspection concept, the notion of looking-glass self was a brilliant idea presented in an overwhelmingly attractive package, which made this notion quite popular while dropping some of its interest along the way.

Social feeling and child development

One of Cooley’s unnoticed gifts to sociologists is the notion of social feeling. While it is often noted that William James influenced Cooley in his conception of the emotional (e.g., Wiley 1994), Cooley’s notion of social feeling is original. Cooley discussed social feeling early in his career. In his classic book, Human Nature and the Social Order, he pointed out that social feeling is ontogenetically acquired during a child’s development:

By the time a child is a year old the social feeling that at first is indistinguishable from sensuous pleasure has become much specialized upon persons, and from that time onward to call it forth by reciprocation is a chief aim of his life.

(Cooley [1902] 1992:85)

Being “a chief aim” of the child, social feeling stands as a basic need for children’s self-development. As children mature and construct their identities, they engage in different types of bonds with others through the generation and reciprocation of social feeling. In this conception, social feeling becomes a necessary feature for the maintenance of social bonds. Thus, it may be tempting to think of social feeling only as the positive emotion of being with others, a form of joy found in being connected, which compels children and older people to create and preserve social bonds. However, Cooley mentions that social feeling cannot be identified with any single emotion: “It is not so much any particular personal emotion or sentiment as the undifferentiated material of many . . .” (Cooley [1902] 1992:86). Accordingly, it makes sense to think of this idea in terms of the experience of emotional bonds with others, regardless of the nature of the bond and the emotions involved, and, at the same time, as the condition for this experience.

In addition to resonating with later concepts in the Durkheimian sociology of rituals, Thomas Scheff’s (1990) microsociology and Randall Collins’ (2004) interaction ritual theory, this notion complements the most recent developments on the relations between emotions, social position and networks. Indeed, one can see in social feeling an intuitive but possibly operationalizable way of considering the vague feeling of connectedness through which people develop their selves, or even a “relation to the world” dear to phenomenology.

Theory of social organization

Cooley theorized society using several concepts: central among these is the notion of social organization. In Cooley’s theory, the main feature of social organization consists in the coming together of different parts of a given whole.

This attempt to promote a global perspective on the social may have been taken, anachronistically, as a form of functionalism; but, far from a mechanistic and dry functional analysis, Cooley formulated the concept of social organization in dynamic terms. He defined social organization with these words: “This differentiated unity of mental or social life, present in the simplest intercourse but capable of infinite growth and adaptation, is what I mean in this work by social organization” (Cooley [1909] 1962:4). He illustrated this concept with the example of an orchestra: while the music coming from the orchestra may not be predetermined in advance, the result ca...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Updating Charles H. Cooley
• Classical and contemporary social theory
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on the Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Cooley and the Sociological Canon: An Enigmatic Case
• 2 Lost in Vicissitudes of Greatness and Decline: Charles Horton Cooley’s Unique Contribution to Sociology
• 3 Cooley in Philip Rieff’s Theory of Culture
• 4 Cooley’s Social Theory of Reading and Writing
• 5 Looking Glass Selves: The Cooley–Goffman Conjecture
• 6 Bringing Self-Values Back In: From Reflected Appraisal to Appraised Appraisal
• 7 Cooley and the Human Consciousness: A Contemporary Understanding
• 8 The Dilemmas of Social Representation Theory: How Cooley’s Sociology Provides a Game Plan for their Resolution
• 9 Conclusion: Contemporary Perspectives on a Sociological Classic
• Postscript: Charles Horton Cooley and the Choice of Predecessor Selection
• Index