A Revival of Interest in Cooley

Professor Cooley's conception of social relations is based upon a different theory of personality from that hithero prevailing in social philosophy. The current sociological doctrine, he thinks, is a veiled materialism, seeing that it regards society as an association of human organisms, rather than as an association of persons. As these organisms are plainly separate, the only way of cementing them into a social aggregate is to assume some special trait - sociability, altruism, or the like. (Ross 1903: 647)

Cooley's unique contribution is his emphasis on imagination.

Professor Cooley, on the other hand, insists that social order is a matter of conduct, conduct is a matter of motive, and motive springs from "personal ideas," i.e., ideas of persons. The problem of social order can be nothing else than a psychical problem, how to harmonize organisms. "My association with you consists in the relationship between my idea of you and the rest of my mind." "The immediate social reality is the personal idea." Society itself "is a relation among personal ideas." (Ross 1903: 647)

An explanation of Cooley's "personal ideas".

Taking this strictly psychical view of human relations, Professor Cooley proceeds to discuss in a delightful way such special cases as communion, conformity and nonconformity, rivalry, hero-worship, leadership, confession, personal degeneracy, freedom, etc. Throughout he avoids the jargon of the schools and utters his thought in pure and graceful English sown with polished phrases and pointed epigrams. The skeleton of psychological analysis is overlaid with a wealth of illustrative material drawn from literature and autobiography. The book, moreover, has the ozone of independent and unacademic thinking, and will not age rapidly. (Ross 1903: 648)

For me, the aspect of personal idas did appear in most chapters but more as a passing perspective - the strands left in various chapters did not form a single string.

Surely this ethereal psychology goes with three meals a day and a bank account. The mirroring of the selves of all in the mind of each may keep in order sated, comfortable people, but hardly persons with unsatisfied wants yapping at their heels. One wonders if the study of moral psychology in the confessions of Montaigne, Rousseau, Emerson, Goethe, and other geniuses, may not mislead one as to the forces that hold commonplace persons in orderly relations. (Ross 1903: 649)

Could just as well be an epigraph to a discussion of Stapledon's sexual telepathy groups.

Kelsey, Carl 1903. Review of Human Nature and the Social Order by C. H. Cooley. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 8(4): 105-106. [JSTOR]

"Individuality is neither prior in time nor lower in rank than sociality - the line of progress is from a lower to a higher type of both, not from one to the other." Society "in its immediate aspect is a relation among personal ideas." "The imaginations which people have of one another are the solid facts of society, and - to observe and interpret these must be the chief aim of sociology." (Kelsey 1903: 106)

Simpler societies create simpler individuals; more complex societies create more complex individuals.

"Society is rather a phase of life than a thing by itself; it is life regarded from the point of view of personal intercourse. And personal intercourse may be considered either in its primary aspects, such as are treated in this book, or in secondary aspects, such as groups, institutions or processes. Sociology, I suppose, is the science of these things." (Kelsey 1903: 106)

Pretty concise.

There will be many to object to his classification of sociology as a purely subjective science. In his desire to set forth the psychological elements the author seems to lose touch with the material basis both of individual and social existence. (Kelsey 1903: 106)

I didn't notice this in the second edition but that may be because I read the second edition, which made a point to emphasize the sociable aspect of the material base.

Vincent, George E. 1903. Review of Human Nature and the Social Order by C. H. Cooley. American Journal of Sociology 8(4): 559-563. [JSTOR]

In terms of his own thesis Dr. Cooley has transformed the social materials of his times into a personal product; his mind has reorganized and reproduced the suggested material in accordance with its own structure and tendency. (Vincent 1903: 559)

That does sound like him.

All will agree that the result is a "new and fruitful employment of the common material." This common material has been accumulating rapidly during the last two decades. James's notable chapter on "The Consciousness of Self;" Royce's papers on social consciousness; Dewey's insistence on the essentially abstract nature of both the individual and socity conceived as separate ideas; Tarde's system with its trinity of imitation, invention, and opposition; Baldwin's dialectic of personal and social growth; Ross's vivid presentation of the ways in which society cleverly cozens its members; Giddings's consciousness of kind and analysis of the social mind - these and many others are the current ideas upon which Dr. Cooley has freely drawn. The result is not, however, an "imitation," but an "invention." (Vincent 1903: 559)

Noted.

Although the work has a distinct unity, the reader often gets the impression of clever and discriminating essays covering a wide range of human experience. The volume is something of an anomaly in sociological literature, but it is none the less welcome for its very nonconformity. A number of illustrations are drawn from a study of the author's children, but the doting parent is successfully subordinated to the scientific observer. (Vincent 1903: 559)

Why so few reviews then?

Coming to closer quarters with the person, the author traces the process by which intercourse builds up personal ideals. All persons are declared to be imaginary or constructed in the mind out of the materials received through intercourse and interpretated by experience. Society is defined as "a relation among personal ideas." The vagueness and ambiguity of this phrase are guarded by the warning that the unquestioned independent reality of a person is not to be confused with the ideas entertained about him; these ideas, however, constitute the immediate social reality. (Vincent 1903: 560)

Cooley's "personal ideas" seems to be the most remarkable takeaway for his contemporaries.

Sympathy or communion is next discussed, not as a form of pity, but as an imaginative extension of one's life by the interpretation of other persons. A man's range of sympathy thus becomes a measure of his personality. Society, on the other hand, is the totality of the acts of communion by which the person is related to others. (Vincent 1903: 560)

Views very closely akin to those of my source material.

Self-assertion is declared to be respectable, unless it is inconsistent with personal or social moral standards, when it is stigmatized as egotistic. To be selfish, then, is to fail to appreciate the social situation as it is generally conceived. The proper antithesis of selfishness is not altruism, but rather right, justice, or magnanimity. A person may act out a narrower or a wider self; there lies the distinction, rather than in a setting off against each other the really interpenetrating self and other. (Vincent 1903: 560)

Reading the room.

Hostility is described as a personally protective activity which at [|] the same time performs the useful social function of preserving type and eliminating degenerate variation. It is conceived of as developing from an instinctive to a rational, ethical form. Emulation is treated consistently from the personal point of view and is subdivided into conformity, rivalry, and hero-worship. In the case of so-called non-conformity there is not so much a personal protest against all social control as a conformity with some social group or set of ideas other than those immediately, physically present. Hero-worship is an imaginative construction of personal ideals which become true and effective social forces. (Vincent 1903: 560-561)

I take it that "preserving type" is a term borrowed from Giddings. The issue of nonconformity summarized.

Leadership is characterized, not as the creation of original ideas, but as vivid definition and organization of vague tendencies already existent. The leader must have the power to construct in imagination by sympathy the personal lives of his followers. The leader is a true social cause, as independent as a cause can be which is a part of a living whole; "impersonal tendency" is a mere abstraction, and while the phrase may be used, the examination of such tendencies will always disclose personal nuclei. (Vincent 1903: 561)

Again, eerily similar to La Barre's take on the cult of the leader.

Freedom is "opportunity for right development." Restraint is narrowing or contraction of personality. The person is seldom in conscious conflict with his social milieu because he realizes his higher personal ideals by means of it. Growth of freedom involves certain stress and strain with incidental degeneracy which can never be wholly eliminated, but may be indefinitely reduced. (Vincent 1903: 561)

I didn't get that at all.

As a destructive criticism alike of the artificial individualism which we have inherited from the last two centuries and of the sociological concepts which Mr. Spencer and the "social forces and tendencies" school have popularized, this book renders effective service. The old hard-and-fast distinctions, the clean-cut logical counters "individual" and "society" are badly blurred and fused. Under this concrete, detailed study of the person new complexities emerge and the old, simple labels seem pitifully inadequate. (Vincent 1903: 562)

If that was Spencer's deal then Cooley didn't get away from Spencer enough.

House, Floyd N. 1956. Review of The Two Major Works of Charles H. Cooley. American Journal of Sociology 62(2): 227-228. [JSTOR]

Scarcely a textbook prepared in recent years for the "general introductory course" in sociology lacks allusions to - and usually quotations from - what Cooley wrote on the primary group and the looking-glass self. Indeed, these concepts, modified somewhat in the brilliant writings of George Mead and Ellsworth Faris, are today features of the generally accepted sociological frame of reference. (House 1956: 227)

Ellsworth Faris "was an influential sociologist of the Chicago school".

I suspect, however, that many of the younger sociologists of today and promising graduate students, facing today's massive sociological literature, have never paid much attention to Cooley's original texts. That the original editions of Social Organization and Social Process and the 1922 revision of Human Nature and the Social Order have been allowed to go out [|] of print is evidence that they have not been in very great demand in recent years. (House 1956: 227-228)

Seems likely, yeah, given the scarce amount of secondary literature.

Eliasberg, W. G. 1956. Review of Social Organization and Human Nature and the Social Order by C. H. Cooley. The Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology, and Police Science 4794): 474. DOI: 10.2307/1140436 [JSTOR]

Cooley's interests and readings, as is well known, were as much outside the pale of academic psychology as inside. Goethe, Thoreau, James, De Tocqueville, Brice were among the wellsprings of his sociology. (Eliasberg 1956: 474)

True.

Titiev, Mischa 1957. Review of The Two Major Works of Charles H. Cooley and Borgatta; Meyer (eds)., Sociological Theory. American Anthropologist 59(2): 388-389. [JSTOR]

There is something to be gained by reading the works of a great man in the form in which he originally issued them; bu tin one sense Cooley has suffered the fate of all pioneers whose penetrating ideas, original in their own day, have become part of the stock-in-trade of modern practitioners. Today, even the most pedantic and routine sociologists are likely to have incorporated into their thinking, writings, and lectures, much that was fresh and original when first presented by Cooley. (Titiev 1957: 388)

Cooley's ideas have become some commonplace that it may be difficult to grasp their original uniqueness.

Cooley, whose books appeared in the first decade of this century, made several outstanding contributions to social sciences. He was the first to recognize the importance of the face-to-face primary group; he was quick to realize the difference between inherited biological behavior and learned cultural conditioning; and he was one of the leaders in stressing the value of studying objectively the behavior of infants as they became socialized. It may even be argued that he anticipated the field of psychosomatics, since he recognized that such things of the mind as ideas and emotions may influence the workings of the physical body. (Titiev 1957: 388)

The "primary group" must have been in another work (here it was only hinted at, was my impression); the psychosomatics I didn't notice at all.

Despite his personal failings and the paucity of world-wide sociological data available in his day, Cooley still holds a commanding position in some fields of sociology. This is made evident by the number of times he is represented in Sociological Theory. [|] Ten passages from Cooley's writings are included in the volume edited by Borgatta and Meyer, and all but one first appeared in the works reprinted by The Free Press. By contrast, there are only six extracts from Durkheim, five from Linton, and four from Simmel. The editors have been eclectic rather than unitary in their approach, and there are excerpts from sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists and philosophers. (Titiev 1957: 388-389)

Borgatta, Edgar F.; Meyer, Henry J. (eds.), 1956. Sociological Theory: Present-day Sociology from the Past. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Vincent, George E. 1909. Review of Social Organization, a Study of the Larger Mind by C. H. Cooley. American Journal of Sociology 15(3): 414-418. [JSTOR]

Designed from the standpoint of method to place in a larger setting the social person treated in the author's Human Nature and the Social Order, this second volume is even more striking as a survey of modern society in Western Europe and the United States. In a way the book is a series of lucid and discriminating essays upon the chief social problems of the day. But it is more, for running through the whole is a theory which gives unity to a wide range of topics. The thesis worked out in the earlier volume that individual and society are both abstractions from a single life process, is reiterated and amplified in the later. To this theory is added the leading idea that organization is the clue to social evolution and the hope of future progress. (Vincent 1909: 414)

Isn't one of his books titled literally Social Process?

Thirty-seven chapters, grouped into five parts, deal consecutively with face-to-face groups which are described as the source of primary ideals, e.g., loyalty, truth, sorvice, lawfulness, etc.; show how by communication these groups are unified over vast areas and how public opinion is co-operatively created by leaders and the masses; then analyze castes and classes with discussions of capitalistic ascendency, organization of workers, the problem of poverty and the character of class hostility; next define institutions in relation to individuals, to progress, and to disorganization with special reference to the family, the church, business, education, and art; and finally treat the public will as a slowly emerging force, finding only partial expression in government, and groping toward a more rational guidance of social evolution. (Vincent 1909: 414)

Some themes did carry over. I'm especially interested in "capitalist ascendency". Ascendency was treated a little in this one but could definitely go further. His take on public opinion is no doubt awfully naive.

Professor Cooley is emphatic about the nature of the public mind and of public opinion. "Descartes might have said we think, cogitamus, on as good grounds as he said cogito" (p. 9). One should not be disturbed by differences, dissensions, and conflicts in social groups, or look for identity, like-mindedness, constant consensus. "The unity of the social mind consists not in agreement but in organization" (p. 4), although in order that minds may influence each other and so co-operate there must of course be an underlying likeness of nature. "That all minds are different is a condition, not an obstacle to the unity that consists in a differentiated and co-operative life" (p. 11). This is a frank way of meeting the common objection that the social mind never achieves more than a partial unanimity, is often a majority lording it over a minority. (Vincent 1909: 415)

Totality is the unity of manifold type deal. Cooley probably made the same point with his treatment of rivalry, and merely expanded it here.

Consciousness is said to have three phases: self-consciousness or what I think of myself; social consciousness (in its individual aspect) or what I think of other people; and public consciousness, or a collective view of the foregoing as organized in a communicating group" (p. 12). It is hard to see where this third form would have its seat. There seems to be danger of objectifying such a concept until it becomes a thing abstract and lifeless. It reminds one of the Zeitgeist and other elusive notions of the early Völkerpsychologie. If Professor Cooley regards this "collective view" as a phase of personal consciousness the terms are not happy and are open to the charge of vagueness. (Vincent 1909: 415)

Triadism to my liking.

As to the relative susceptibility of rural and urban populations to the crowd influence, Professor Cooley takes issue squarely with Ross. The former regards country-folk as more easily swept away by the mob spirit. Ross declares the city crowd is less likely to keep its head. (Vincent 1909: 415)

A familiar debate.

Professor Cooley combats the "dead-level" theory which DeTocqueville associated with democracy, and which modern communication, by the rapid diffusion of uniform suggestions, is supposed to create. There are said to be "two kinds of individuality, one of isolation and one of choice - modern conditions foster the latter while they efface the former" (p. 93). That is, provincialism is doomed while the swift diffusion of countless ideas increases the chance of discovering and developing special aptitudes and latent variations. (Vincent 1909: 416)

Voluntary isolation would be individuality of choice.

It is not easy to sum up in a paragraph the purpose and value of a book like Social Organization. It is not primarily a textbook, although it will prove valuable as collateral reading in courses on social theory. It lacks on the one hand the technical arrangement and apparatus for the work of the classroom, and on the other the "source" material now so much in demand to supplement library facilities. Nor can the volume be regarded as research in social psychology or psychological sociology. This statement should perhaps be qualified to this extent. As an illuminating organization of material generally familiar it does constitute a contribution. The chief service of the book will be to present to reflective readers who are likely to be repelled by technical sociology a clear and convincing interpretation of modern life in terms of the new psycholoy, personal and social. (Vincent 1909: 418)

Somewhere between science and philosophy.

Kelsey, Carl 1909. Review of Social Organization by C. H. Cooley. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social science 34(2): 212-213. [JSTOR]

I do not know when I have read a book marked by such even quality. The author's thought is on a high plain. His insight clear, his attitude very fair and unprejudiced. There is no striving for bizarre effects in language or style. It is not brilliant. It is a serious and thought provoking study which escapes being heavy or monotonous. The author is to be complimented. (Kelsey 1909: 212)

Somewhat backhanded.

I recall that in criticizing Professor Cooley's earlier volume, "Human Nature and the Social Organism," I objected to his seeming elimination of the physical. Such criticism Dr. Cooley now forestalls by saying that he supposes each person may discuss those aspects of society he feels he understands. (Kelsey 1909: 212)

Not bad. There is indeed a myriad of avenues to study society.

Self and society are twin born, they are different aspects of the same thing. Human nature is essentially the same in all ages and places. "The ideal of moral unity I take to be the mother, as it were, of all social ideals." So we have our great primary groups such as the family which is permanent no matter what froms it may assume or what changes it undergoes. We are coming now to see that "in general the wrongs of the social system come much more from inadequacy than from ill intention." In other words, social machinery must be changed. (Kelsey 1909: 213)

This is not a direct quote so I'm hoping that Kelsey paraphrases a lot away.

This leads to the consideration in Part III of the Democratic Mind. "The central part in history, from a psychological point of view, may be said to be the gradual enlargement of social consciousness and rational co-operation." Democracy does not mean as many have feared, the rule of the mob. Routine activities are caused by specialists. The people can choose personalities wisely, but will not pass intelligent judgment on technical questions. Hence even the referendum has limited application. Specialists must immediately abide by the verdict of their associates - only indirectly controlled by the body at large. The masses contribute sentiment. Crowds may be right as well as wrong. Ideals of brotherhood and service are growing. (Kelsey 1909: 213)

The first point is on par with Stapledon's outlook. On the second point I already got a bit heated over his treatment of the role of specialists in rivalry, which may be viewed as an overt blueprint of Cooley's more covert thinking on other matters.

Loos, Isaac A. 1909. Review of Social Organization: A Study of the Larger Mind by C. H. Cooley. The Economic Bulletin 2(2): 171-172. [JSTOR]

Under Primary Aspects of Organization are considered social and individual aspects of mind; primary groups, such as the family, play-ground, and neighborhood; and primary ideals in their origin, embracing a consideration of concepts of loyalty, truth, service, kindness, lawfulness, freedom, and an extension of these primary ideals as they underlie democracy and Christianity. Communication our author regards as a fundamental characteristic of human nature. Its growth is traced, from pre-verbal communication through the rise of speech to the invention of printing, by bold sketches of the succeeding stages in human intercourse. In the author's opinion individuality does not tend to be sacrificed to dead-level uniformity in the progress of the human mind. (Loos 1909: 171)

Some context for Spencer's "dead-level".

Probably the best portion of the book is the third which is devoted to a discussion of The Democratic Mind. He breaks bravely with the often expressed view that group opinion is [|] inferior to individual opinion. "A little common sense and observation will show that the expression of a group is nearly always superior for the purpose in hand to the average capacity of its members" (p. 124). (Loos 1909: 171-172)

Likely the main point in contemporary polemics.

In devoting a separate part to Public Will as distinguished from the Democratic Mind, he aims to direct attention to public will as the deliberate self-direction of any social group as distinguished from the conscious and unconscious processes which blend in any treatment of the social mind. Social wrongs, as he points out, are not commonly willed at all. Government is conspicuously the expression of public will, but it is not its only agent. (Loos 1909: 172)

Looks interesting. And this is the second reviewer who doesn't mention whas those other expressions of public will are.

Ellwood, Charles A. 1910. Review of Social Organization: A Study of the Larger Mind by C. H. Cooley. International Journal of Ethics 20(2): 228-230. [JSTOR]

Those whose estimate of sociology has been formed largely through their knowledge of Herbert Spencer and other writers of his school, will find a pleasant surprise in this book. The older sociology was physical and even materialistic. The new sociology is frankly dependent upon psychology. It is, indeed, frequently not to be distinguished from psychology except in its point of view, which is not that of individual consciousness, but that of the collective life. (Ellwood 1910: 228)

Cooley opposed to Spencer.

In spite of the fact that many other forms of association exist in the complex social life of the present, "the fact that the family and neighborhood groups are ascendant in the open and plastic time of childhood makes them even now incomparably more influential than all the rest." These groups, then, are the springs of life, not only for the individual, but for social institutions. They especially give rise to our social ideals, which become the motive and test of social progress. Our notions of love, freedom, justice and the like are goffet very largely from life in these primary groups. (Ellwood 1910: 229)

Context for "primary groups".

In Part II Professor Cooley gives, for the first time in sociological literature, strange as it may seem, full an adequate recognition of "communication" as a fundamental fact in the social life. Through communication, or all forms of interstimulation and response by means of symbols, the moral and spychical unity of society is made possible. "By means of this structure (the social communicating apparatus), the individual is a member not only of a family and a class and a state, but of a larger whole reaching back to prehistoric men whose thought has gone to build it up. In this whole he lives as an element drawing from it the materials of his growth, and adding to it whatever constructive thought he may possess." From this point of view Professor Cooley discusses the enlargement and perfection of means of communication in modern life and the resulting effect upon government, religion, and culture. (Ellwood 1910: 230)

Ah, so there's his unique contribution!

Monroe, Will S. 1910. Review of Social Organization: A Study of the Larger Mind by C. H. Cooley. The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods 7(2): 50-51. DOI: 10.2307/2010904 [JSTOR]

In a previous book on "Human Nature and Social Order" Professor Cooley presented society as it exists in the social nature of man; in the present volume, on the other hand, he conceives life as one human whole, and approaches it from the mental rather than from the material side. "If we cut it up," he says in his preface, "it dies in the process; and so I conceive that the various branches of research that deal with this whole are properly distinguished by chance in the point of sight rather than by any division in the thing seen." Hence, the view-point of the author in the book before us is focused on the enlargement and the diversification of intercourse. (Monroe 1910: 50)

Again, congenial to Stapledon, on both counts (wholeness of life, point of view)

Professor Cooley's method of approach is what he calls sympathetic introspection, in which the student puts himself into intimate contact with various sorts of persons and allows them to awake in himself a life similar to their own, "which he afterwards, to the best of his ability, recalls and describes." (Monroe 1910: 51)

Okay. Somewhat woo.

Sellars, Roy Wood 1943. Review of Charles Horton Cooley: His Life and His Social Theory by E. C. Jandy. American Journal of Sociology 49(1): 81-83. [JSTOR]

The continuing influence of Goethe, Emerson, Thoreau, Bryce, and Darwin upon Cooley's way of thinking is substantiated in detail; and yet the originality of the man in his chosen field is not thereby diminished. One sees ever more clearly how he brooded upon and felt the complex matrix of social relations and how he quickly moved beyond biological analogies to the empirical realities of social psychology. Jandy brings out clearly the fact that it was this man's artistic sensitiveness which made him aware of facts which more obtuse people could hardly glimpse. It is sometimes forgotten that the artist is an acute observer of compositions and values whose existence can surely not be denied, since they constitute the very nature of a work of art, but which are not readily apprehended by unprepared and unattuned minds. (Sellars 1943: 82)

Strong aesthetics woo.

Cooley's well-kept diary is a mine of information on the early years. It took him long to find himself and his life-work. He was not pressed by his father to make up his mind, and so he tried one thing after another until the right subject appeared. It is clear that he had unusual opportunities, in many ways like those of William James, to travel and make social contacts. But, to use his own later terminology, his was an endogeneous personality, extremely sensitive and introspective and yet withal perspicaciously interested in the social scene. This introspective quality he counterbalanced in some measure by his training as an engineer and as a statitician. (Sellars 1943: 82)

As if probing for the metaphorical "looking-glass theory of self" in Cooley's biography.

The part devoted to theory is at once expository and controversial. Here Jandy moves with competence, as both his handling of such topics as the growth of the self, and the self-idea, primary groups and social classes, and his excellent Bibliography show. Always, the journal is used to throw additional light. A good instance of this use is to be found in his discussion of the term "primary group." I found illuminating his treatment of the genesis of the self-idea, beginning with James and Baldwin and proceeding through Cooley to Mead. (Sellars 1943: 82)

Jandy, Edward Clarence 1942. Charles Horton Cooley: His Life and His Social Theory. New York: Dryden Press. [$45.00]

My impression is that Cooley reflected the philosophical climate of the time and of his favorite sources of suggestion but that he was not an overt idealist in any technical sense, let alone a solipsist. It must be remembered that the organic, or objective, idealism of the time was not strong in epistemology. There was much of the so-called objective mind about it and little clarity as to how one passed back and forth between objective mind and private mind. And it is probable that Cooley long felt that the social mind could be known by individuals only as they creatively reproduced this social mind in terms of the ideas of other selves. Do we not know through ideas? For a very long time Cooley rather avoided epistemological distinctions and the methodological problems tied up with them. (Sellars 1943: 83)

Was Cooley at fault with his use of "idea" similar to Locke? I.e. his own use might have been congruent but gave off misunderstandings?

Slice, Austin Van der 1970. Review of Cooley and Sociological Analysis by A. J. Reiss. American Sociological Review 35(1): 127-128. DOI: 10.2307/2093866 [JSTOR]

Professor Angell adds some fresh notes to the biography of his uncle and graduate mentor. In Cooley's writings he sees three major aspects: the emphasis on the mental faculty as the essence of society, the organic view, and the dynamic theme of tentative growth. (Slice 1970: 127)

The first one is most clear to me. The organic view is obtuse but understandable. The dynamic theme I'm not sure yet what that is in Cooley's work specifically.

He tells us that Cooley wrote down his ideas each day on 4" by 6" slips of paper. He would brood over some problem and organize his jottings, which required only a few transitional sentences to complete a volume. The idea of the primary group was developed to fill a hiatus between the paragraphs on human nature and those on the growth of communication in his Human Nature and the Social Order. (Slice 1970: 127)

What a weird man.

In "Cooley and the Problem of Internalization," Talcott Parsons shows that Freud, Weber, and Durkheim - each starting with the Cartesian dichotomy of the knowing, thinking subject and the external world of objects - arrived at a position which saw the necessity of bringing the personality and the social and cultural systems into a unified whole. In the United States William James was independently arriving at the same point by another route. James came to regard not only the external world but also the "self" as objects. He also developed the conception of the pluralism of the self. Cooley and Mead brought this line of thought into American sociology and built a bridge to Durkheim and Weber. (Slice 1970: 127)

The "organic view" of self and society, or heredity and culture, etc.

Gecas, Viktor 1980. Review of Symbolic Interactionism: Genesis, Varieties, and Criticism by Meltzer, Petras & Reynolds. American Journal of Sociology 85(6): 1458-1459. [JSTOR]

Symbolic Interactionism, by Bernard Meltzer, John Petras, and Larry Reynolds, is a useful little book, especially for sociology students trying to make sense of the symbolic interactionist tradition. As a theoretical perspective, symbolic interactionism is not known for homogeneity, parsimony, or consensus among its practitioners. This concise book brings clarity and comprehension to symbolic interactionism by reviewing its philosophical and historical origins, examining its major varieties, and considering the criticisms which have been directed toward the perspective. (Gecas 1980: 1458)

Same could be said of ethnomethodology and various types of semiotics.

The book is divided into three parts. The first deals with the origin and development of such basic interactionist ideas as the social origins of the self and human nature, self-reflection as the basis for symbolic interaction, and the view that action is a construction rather than simply a response. These are traced through the writings of W. James, C. H. Cooley, J. Dewey, W. I. Thomas, and G. H. Mead and grounded in the pragmatic philosophy of Peirce, James, and Dewey. (Gecas 1980: 1458)

Meltzer, Bernard N.; Petras, John W.; Reynolds, Larry T. 1975. Symbolic Interactionism: Genesis, varieties and criticism. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. [Internet Archive]

Part 2 deals with contemporary varieties of symbolic interactionism, especially four of the most prominent: the Chicago school, the Iowa school, the dramaturgical approach, and ethnomethodology. These four orientations, diverse as they are, all share the view that human beings construct their realities in a process of social interaction. Each orientation also accepts, to some degree, the methodological consequence of this position, that is, the necessity of "getting inside" the reality of the actor in order to understand what is going on. (Gecas 1980: 1458)

The "sympathetic introspection" is palpable.

The main outsider criticism is the astructural bias in symbolic interactionism - the justifiable claim that the perspective is largely ahistorical, noneconomic, and has a limited view of social power and social organization. (Gecas 1980: 1459)

Which is odd, because Cooley deals with both.

Bruce, Steve 1988. Review of Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method by Herbert Blumer. The British Journal of Sociology 39(2): 292-295. DOI: 10.2307/590791 [JSTOR]

There is a lot to be said for the proposition that value and fecundity are inversely related in social theory. One of the best examples is Herbert Blumer, a superb teacher and supervisor who had something worthwhile to say and said it briefly. When he retired he promised to write a book elaborating and refining W. I. Thomas' 'definition of the situation' dictum; ten years later we are still waiting. For twenty years this slip collection of essays, available in hardback, represented almost all of Blumer's published work. (Bruce 1988: 292)

This famous dictum apparently being that "if men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences", which is just a single step removed from Cooley's take on the collective "social".

The second premise is important because it distinguishes SI from philosophical realism and psychological reductionism. SI does not regard 'meaning as emanating from the intrinsic make-up of the thing that has meaning, nor does it see meaning as arising through a coalescence of psychological elements in the person' (p. 4). 'The meaning of everything and anything has to be formed, learned and transmitted through a process of indication - a process that is necessarily a social process' (p. 12). Although meaning is imputed, it is not an idiosyncratic creation. Unless one is to be confined to the madness of one's own world, meaning is a social production. Reality, even physical reality, is constructed but it is a social construction. (Bruce 1988: 293)

This does certainly sound like Blumer.

SI was never a theory or even a school. It is a series of linked premises about the nature of social action and identity which gives rise to a particular apporach to explanation (what reasons do people have for their actions?) and a particular research style (get close to the people you study, understand their world). (Bruce 1988: 295)

These do seem to proceed from Cooley.

Joas, Hanz; Miller, Gale; DingWall, Robert 2005. Review of Handbook of Symbolic Interactionism by Reynolds & Herman-Kinney. Symbolic Interaction 28(4): 597-604. DOI: 10.1525/si.2005.28.4.597 [JSTOR]

I find Larry Reynolds' decision completely reasonable - that is, to follow an older proposal by Jerome Manis and Bernard Meltzer and identify five main precursors: evolutionism, German idealism, Scottish moralism, pragmatism, and functional psychology. Cooley, Mead, and Thomas are presented as the most important early representatives. The entire handbook demonstrates a revival of interest in Cooley, who has often been unfairly marginalized in other reconstructions of the hestory of "social" or "sociological pragmatism." (Joas, Miller & Dingwall 2005: 597)

Familiar suspects. How distinct are Scottish moralism and functional psychology?

An unusual and original contribution in this part comes from Robert Prus. His interest is in the long philosophical "pre-history" of the fundamental motifs in symbolic interactionist thought, and he is right that it makes sense to relate, for example, the pragmatist venture to Aristotle's philosophy. But I would have preferred a more thorough discussion of one such connection over a necessarily hasty glance at a great number of philosophical figures. (Joas, Miller & Dingwall 2005: 597)

Prus's "Ancient Forerunners" sounds very interesting, though it cannot be read in full.

I am a bit unhappy, however, to see that he has considerably increased his emphasis on "choice" - a concept crucial for a different school, the rational choice approach, and to me frequently implausible with regard to the phenomenology of human experience (for example, the emergence of our value commitments). But part four goes beyond the three main concepts and includes interesting studies about symbols, objects, and meanings by John Hewitt and chapters about "motives" by Cheryl and Daniel Albas, to name just a few. (Joas, Miller & Dingwall 2005: 598)

Uh, Cooley had a pretty healthy discussion of choice, will, and habit.

It may be a linguistic problem that caused the editors to take almost nothing from this work into consideration - aside from a very few references to English-language publications of non-American authors. But this leads to serious distortions regarding the state of the art. I could give many examples. There is no doubt in my mind that the most innovative and comprehensive study on Charles Cooley is in German (by Hans-Joachim Schubert). It is not even mentioned here. Florian Znaniecki appears as W. I. Thomas's collaborator, but after their collaboration he seems to disappear from the screen, although his work gave rise to important traditions of Polish sociology. Lothar Krappmann's work on self and identity, one of the best ever written, is as neglected as the writings of Louis Quéré in France. Given the enormous importance of Mead for Jürgen Habermas, one would have liked to find references to his contribution to the developmental conception of self-formation here. Theoretical work based on symbolic interactionism and pragmatism in Europe is mostly ignored. (Joas, Miller & Dingwall 2005: 599)

The Americans being schooled.

Schubert, Hans-Joachim 2007. Review of Charles Horton Cooley: Imagining Social Reality by Glenn Jacobs. American Journal of Sociology 113(2): 600-602. DOI: 10.1086/522412 [JSTOR]

Cooley was a prominent member of the founding generation of American sociologists. He created a general sociological theory of social action, social order, and social change, a project he eventually accomplished with his trilogy Human Nature and the Social Order ([1902] Shocken 1964), Social Organization ([1909] Shocken 1963), and Social Process ([1918] Southern Illinois University Press 1966). Cooley's exceptional position in early American and European sociology lies in his point of origin - communication theory. Cooley's theoretical "concept of the social," according to Jacobs, is "based on the properties of communication (p. 12). Men must - due to the plasticity of their nature - communicate with the help of standardized or significant symbols to coordinate actions and to develop a self. "The social organism," according to Cooley, "coheres by communicating" (p. 107). (Schubert 2007: 600)

A little misnomer: there was no "communication theory" in 1901.

Jacobs clarifies that Cooley, in the term communication, means not only the rational resolution of validity claims (context [|] of justification), but also a creative act of bringing forth new ideas (context of discovery). For Cooley, social order consists of a constant "imaginative reconstruction" of meaning. "Cooley embeds creatively in society, and society in creativity" (p. 4). "Creativeness is the integument of all of Cooley's thought and of the influences upon it. [...] His exaltation of creativeness sets him apart from his predecessors, his contemporaries, even his successors" (p. 3). It is for this reason that Jacob's question is so interesting: "If not Spencer, Ward, Giddings, and company, then who? From what does Cooley's framing of the social derive? The short answer is belles lettres and pragmatism" (p. 52). In the main chapter of his book, Jacobs attempts to lay open these two "sources of inspiration" of Cooley's work. (Schubert 2007: 600-601)

Creativity and imagination not exactly the same.

While Cooley, in his sociological work, cites principally American and German idealists, Jacobs sees - supported by Cooley's diaries - a clear influence on the part of Montaigne and Pater. Has Cooley developed an analytical concept of creativity out of the literary writings and critiques on aesthetics of Montaigne and Pater? According to Jacobs, Cooley was influenced by the "fragmentary format" of Montaigne's writings and by his method of "autobiographical discursiveness" (p. 138). Cooley's sociological work does not, however, consist of fragments. His sociology books are systematically constructed and in their entirety form a coherent sociological theory. (Schubert 2007: 602)

There was just a passage here about Cooley inventing the concept of "primary groups" to fill the space between two fragments.

Wolfe, A. B. 1920. Review of Social Process by C. H. Cooley. The American Economic Review 10(3): 576-571. [JSTOR]

The main interest of the economist in this work will naturally attach to Professor Cooley's treatment of valuation and to his continued pointed attack upon the economic interpretation of history. (Wolfe 1920: 567)

Another complaint of ahistoricism.

But it has always been difficult to decide, however, whether his work is sociology or ethics, and it is just at this point that "hard-boiled" critics might assail him; for this book, like the entire theoretical part of Social Organization is shot through and through with an idealism which some methodologists would hold incompatible with a scientific treatment. (Wolfe 1920: 256)

Understandable.

Craig, Wallace 1919. Review of Social Process by C. H. Cooley. The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods 16(17): 473-474. DOI: 10.2307/2939958 [JSTOR]

The unifying theme which gives the book its title, and which is most explicitly treated in the first and the last (seventh) parts, is the same that ran through the author's two previous books. All the facts of human life are parts of a process which is organic, social, living and growing. In order to understand a living process the investigator needs to participate in it; when not an actual participant he should imagine himself in it, with the sympathetic insight of the artist, the dramatist. (Craig 1919: 473)

A growing process.

The ideal market would be an institution for the measurement and exchange of values of every sort. Why is it that our actual market falls so far short of the ideal, that it so often measures values falsely, and that it fails in great degree to measure the higher values at all? The answer is that the imperfections of the market, like the imperfections of any other institution, are due largely to historical origins, to lack of flexibility, and to administration by a special class of persons. Pecuniary valuation can be improved, not by taking the higher values out of the market, but by putting them into it. And conversely, the higher values, such as those of scholarship, can be more justly appraised and more adequately paid for only by getting them into the market. (Craig 1919: 474)

The ideal market would consider more factors than pecuniary value. (Including labor value?)

Young, Kimball 1925. Review of The Basis of Social Theory by Balz & Pott. The Journal of Social Forces 3(2): 359-361. DOI: 10.2307/3005311 [JSTOR]

In the opening chapter Professor Balz maintains, following the lead of Dewey and others, that the fundamental datum of psychology is really the social situation which includes the individuals and the necessary physical objects in differential juxtapositions. Psychology must constantly recognize the fact of group life if it is to contribute to the social sciences. The older "strict" psychology which borrowed its standpoint [|] and technique from physics and from physiology of a half-century ago must give way to the more thorough recognition of the close interrelation of person to person in the origin and function of consciousness and behavior. Society is not an aggregation of individuals coming together from their peculiar separateness to form groups. The individual, in fact, as Cooley long ago showed is the highest product of group life. (Young 1925: 359-360)

The individual is a product of their society, etc.

So too, the author well indicates the falso separation of the environment into "physical" and "psychic" or social. For the new-born infant there is no such distinction. In fact, it is just here that one sees the strength of the contention that the data of psychology are not strictly segregable into that which concerns the individual in his group life, on the one side, and in his relations with the objective, physical world, on the other. Even our responses to the physical world are socially determined in very large measure, and certainly all the higher features of the human mind are the product of the inter-play of mind on mind in groups. (Young 1925: 360)

Same overall point in other words.

Through the socialization of the instinctive tendencies, through the recognition of the "crucial importance of intellience" we may hope to evolve a society where the group life will be of such a nature that the highest form of individualization is made possible. This is what the author seems to mean by his hope in "an increasingly rational and enlightened control of social processes." (Young 1925: 361)

And the same movement towards complex societies with complex personalities.

Barnes, Harry Elmer 1925. Review of The Basis of Social Theory by Balz & Pott. Political Science Quarterly 40(1): 132-134. DOI: 10.2307/2142412 [JSTOR]

This is an eminently sane, well balanced and useful book, reminding one in tone and attitude of such earlier works as Baldwin's The individual and Society, and Cooley's Human Nature and the Social Order. The purpose of the work is twofold: to prove that the "basis of social theory" is a sound and comprehensive social psychology, and that any valid psychology must likewise be social psychology. In the opinion of the reviewer both of these contentions are adequately substantiated. (Barnes 1925: 132)

Baldwin, James 1911. The Individual and Society: or Psychology and Sociology. London: Rebman Limited. [Internet Archive]

But this conception of fixity in human nature most be viewed in a genetic and relativistic manner. "The notion of the fixity of human nature must be taken with sufficient plasticity to be accommodated to the fact. Man has evolved; so it may be said that the 'constant' traits are not constant at all. Fixity then does not mean ultimate immutable minds." This human nature gives us three phases of our equipment with progressively greater power of diversification and adaptation - reflexes, instinctive tendencies and innate capacities. (Barnes 1925: 133)

Man has evolved, is evolving, and keeps on evolving.

House, Floyd N. 1933. Review of Introductory Sociology by Cooley, Angell & Juilliard. American Journal of Sociology 39(2): 250-251. [JSTOR]

The result is very much what anyone who is familiar with the writings of Cooley might expect - a textbook strong on the psychological side, frankly using a subjective or introspective approach to sociological problems, and handling topics which lend themselves well to that approach in an extremely illuminating manner. (House 1933: 250)

Introspective sympathy.

Brooks, Lee M. 1935. For Beginners in Sociology. Social Forces 13(1): 152-154. DOI: 10.2307/2570236 [JSTOR]

As for the appoarance lately of so many texts, it might be suspected that in addition to the coöperative process so manifest in joint authorship, other elaborated social processes like competition have played their part. Not to be outrun, authors and publishers alike want to give and get their share. New ideas and systems, or newly dressed old ones, mean new books. Yet, whether or not we are as guilty as the automotive industry, we are in fact pushing new models onto the market. At any rate some exceedingly good ones are coming out. (Brooks 1935: 152)

Cooley, Charles Horton; Angell, Robert Cooley; Carr, Lowell Juilliard 1933. Introductory Sociology. London: Charles Scribner's Sons. [Internet Archive]

Reuter, Edward Byron; Hart, Clyde William 1933. Introduction to Sociology. New York: McGraw-Hill. [Internet Archive]

Osborn, Loran David; Neumeyer, Martin Henry 1933. The Community and Society. Cincinatti: American Book Company. [Internet Archive]

Bogardus, Emory Stephen 1917. Introduction to Sociology. Los Angeles: University of Southern California Press. [Internet Archive]

With the beginning student in mind, Professor Reuter and Hart have stressed social interaction. Their approach and conceptual order show the Chicago influence. The first three chapters deal with human nature and personality, and the next four with social forces and groups. Then follows a discussion of isolation, contact, interaction, competition, conflict, etc. The authors make no cleam for originality, but seek to explain rather than merely to describe; so emphasize general processes rather than to present factual details. (Brooks 1935: 153)

Sounds interesting.

Young, Kimball 1941. Review of Human Nature and the Social Order by E. L. Thorndike. The American Journal of Psychology 54(3): 448-449. DOI: 10.2307/1417702 [JSTOR]

Nearly forty years ago Charles Horton Cooley, the social psychologist, published a volume by the same title as the present one. I doubt that Professor Thorndike ever read Cooley. At any rate the two books differ considerably. Cooley's is full of insight into the subtleties of human nature, full of knowledge of society and culture, and full of faith in the democratic world which he envisaged. Thorndike's reveals a distinctly quantitative standpoint, discusses highly specific traits and motives with only a modicum of appreciation of social-cultural factors, and exposes a projection of wishful thinking as to the future society in terms of biologically determined differences among individuals. (Young 1941: 448)

Sad.

In 1902, when Cooley's work was printed, there was scarcely an academic psychologist, except G. Stanley Hall, John Dewey, and William James, who designed to consider everyday human and social affairs as the proper topic of professional concern. Today psychologists, including the experimentalists, are blossoming out with discussions of societal problems on all fronts. Everyone, of course, takes up his new interest in terms of his own apperceptive mass, and one of the most recent converts to this 'new love' is the author of the work under review. (Young 1941: 488)

Everyday Life Studies.

Thorndike attempts to set up certain criteria in order to measure the adequacy or inadequacy of the civic, political, and economic behavior of individuals in our western society. (Young 1941: 448)

(1) economic, (2) political, and (3) civic.

Terman, Lewis M. 1941. Review of Human Nature and the Social Order by E. L. Thorndike. Science 94(2436): 236-238. [JSTOR]

Part I and Part II are essentially quite different. Part I is psychological throughout and is concerned almost exclusively with fields in which the author himself has made research contributions of high merit. Part II (600 pgaes) is not to any great degree psychological but gives the author's personal reactions on a vast miscellanea of problems in economics, political science and social welfare. The discussion of these problems, which lie so largely outside the realm of present-day psychological science, is rightly intended to emphasize the extent to which their solutions must take account of psychological phenomena. On a good many of the issues discussed in Part II the psychologist, as psychologist, can at present make little or no contribution. Some of the discussions could as well have been written by a mathematician, chemist, biologist or lawyer. What Thorndike has to say is nearly always thought-provoking, whether he speaks primarily as psychologists or not, but it is probably these excursions into alien territory that will draw the most criticism. (Terman 1941: 237)

Sounds a bit like a know-it-all who considers themself an expert in everything.

It may well be, however, that a vigorous presentation of this point of view will serve as a useful antidote to the sentimental political and social philosophies that ignore or deny heredity differences and attribute magic influences to factors of environment. (Terman 1941: 238)

To me it comes across like Thorndike borrowed the title from Cooley to emphasize their differences.

Parsons, Talcott 1941. Review of Human Nature and the Social Order by E. L. Thorndike. American Sociological Review 6(2): 277-282. DOI: 10.2307/2085558 [JSTOR]

Professor Thorndike's new book is a very bulky one. It might be said to be the kind of book which is the privilege of an elder statesman of his subject to publish. It is not a research monograph, nor a textbook, nor even a system of theory. It contains rather his mature comments on the nature and general bearings of his field, and on a whole range of its possible application to social welfare. (Parsons 1941: 277)

400 pages of theory + 600 pages of stream of consciousness.

On a different level somewhat the same is true of anthropology. He quotes such writers as Boas, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead on occasion, but seems to have little awareness of the emergence of a distinctive way of approaching and analyzing human behavior in a social system from the anthropological work of about a generation ago. Somewhat the same is true of his use of sociological writers. To take two of the most notable theorists: Durkheim is not mentioned at all, and although there are four references to Pareto's work, they are all to particular empirical points; none refer to his systematic conceptual scheme. (Parsons 1941: 279)

What was that distinctive way? Participant observation?

Undoubtedly the most highly developed conceptual scheme in this field has been that of psychoanalysis. In its earlier phases this was not well articulated with theory on the social level, but recent work has made great progress in developing fruitful interrelations, notably in the recent works of Karen Horney and Kardiner. (Parsons 1941: 280)

Abram Kardiner mention.

Moreover, its perspective has been comparative in that it tries to understand why one human individual, usually a "pathological case," behaves differently from others, rather than "why we behave like human beings." The genesis on the social level has been similar. Theory has started more from an attempt to diagnose leading features of the concrete social situation - Durkheim's use of suicide as a symptomatic index of the state of an "individualistic" society is an excellent example. (Parsons 1941: 281)

Before perusing JSTOR reviews of social psychology I had no idea so much of it was dedicated to criminality and degeneracy, whatever that is.

Young, Kimball 1937. Review of Social Psychology by Freeman and Elements of Social Psychology by Gurnee. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 192: 245-246. [JSTOR]

Freeman's volume has three outstanding features. First, it shows, as do one or two other recent books in the same field, that the academic psychologist has at last discovered society and culture. (Young 1937: 245)

They were bound to, eventually.

The discussion opens with a defense of "individual psychology" as "the frame of reference for social psychology," for while the author recognizes the place of culture, he wishes to avoid any implication that the group or human association is anything but the fiction of fuzzy minds. The discussion of mechanisms follows traditional psychology, and the nexus between individual and culture is made through language. However, the treatment of language is inadequate, because the author is so obsessed with his antagonism to the group-mind concept that he fails to see that the processes of interaction and communication as discussed by George H. Mead and John dewey rest upon a sound basis which reckons with individuals interstimulating each other. And once this fact is grasped, most of the "worry" about "group mind" can be avoided. (Young 1937: 245)

Cool-ey.

Instead of describing and analyzing the manner in which current practices in our modern industrial world were built up, or their functional interrelationship as they influence the individual, he falls into the habit of expressing regret that exploitation exists, that the profit system keeps men in economic dependence, and that art has any other than a moral - that is, for him, a social - purpose. Therefore, whether the use of cultural and societal concepts by social psychologists recruited from the laboratory will lead, as it does here and elsewhere, to a general practice of interpreting material in terms of some particular political and economic philosophy remains to be seen. Within the next few years I should not be surprised to see a social psychology text which interprets the data from a fascist view. In other words, writers like Brown and Freeman are living examples of men whose dealing with social phenomena is colored by a particular social theory of our time. (Young 1937: 245)

Sociologist with an ideology.

The chapter on language is filled with psychologizing of the kind which a cultural anthropologist would avoid, such as the statement about the inferior quality of non-inflectional languages. This chapter would be considerably improved by reference to the work of E. B. Holt, I. Latif, J. F. Markey, E. Sapir, D. McCarthy, J. J. Piaget, and F. Lorimer, to note but a few important contributors. (Young 1937: 246)

Linguistics of the 1930s.

Swanson, G. E. 1953. Review of Social Psychology by Solomon E. Asch. American Sociological Review 18(4): 439-440. DOI: 10.2307/2087562 [JSTOR]

It is rare when the author of a recent text in social psychology returns again to a serious discussion of the plasticity of human biology, of the seeking, exploring character of human action, of the conditions of volition in behavior, or of the nature of self control. Such topics do, in truth, find their way into the pages of most texts. What is distinctive about Asch is his treatment of them as controversial centers for the organization of his work. (Swanson 1953: 439)

Asch, Solomon Elliott 1952. Social Psychology. Now York: Prentice-Hall, Inc. [Internet Archive]

Then follow consideration of the development of a personal identity in the individual and of a distinctive culture in the group, and the conditions which the predispositions of the individual are modified in interaction. The major focus is that of the psychologist using the fact of social experience to help explain the dynamics of the individual, rather than of the sociologist [|] forced to state certain assumptions about individual behavior in order to explain some pattern of interaction. There are exceptions to this judgment, but it represents the central tendency. (Swanson 1953: 439-440)

As opposed to the contrary route evidently taken by the likes of Thorndike.

Does the fact of cultural relativism preclude the development of validated universal principles of social behavior? Are current reinforcement theories of behavior adequate for the explanation of what he calls the experience of "obligation" and what Cooley would have phrased as the "sentiments?" Is the ego fundamentally ego-centered? Are variations in the strength of the social bond explained by variations in the "private profit" gained by the individuals involved? Is it the scientist or his subjects who really perceive the world through highly simplified stereotypes? (Swanson 1953: 440)

Probably not.

Odum, Howard W. 1948. Review of An Introduction to the History of Sociology by H. E. Barnes. Political Science Quarterly 63(3): 444-446. DOI: 10.2307/2144791 [JSTOR]

More specifically Professor Barnes's volume is presented as the history and status of systematic sociology, in contrast to the study of later sociology which approximates more nearly specialization in restricted field of description and analysis. Its 960 pages comprise "the most comprehensive summary of systematic sociological writing in any language." (Odum 1948: 444)

Barnes, Harry Elmer 1917. An Introduction to the History of Sociology. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. [Internet Archive]

Professor Barnes gives a brief introductory note on French sociology preceding chapters on Fouillée, Tarde, Le Bon, Durkheim and De Greef. Part five treats the English sociologists since Spencer. Although Barnes asserts that there were only two outstanding sociologists in this group, namely, Hobhouse and Geddes, he has additional chapters on Kidd, Westermarck, Briffault, Graham Wallas, and Toynbee. In Part six on "Sociological Theory in America", he has chapters on Giddings, Small, Thomas, Stuckenberg, Ross, Cooley, Elwood, Hayes, Sorokin, and a final chapter on Mariano H. Cornejo written by L. L. Bernard who has specialized for many years in South American sociology. (Odum 1948: 445)

The last ~150 pages of the book are about Giddings, Thomas, Ross, etc.

Myres, John L. 1951. Review of An Introduction to the History of Sociology by H. E. Barnes. Man 51: 9. [JSTOR]

'English Sociology since Spencer' has also some omissions. It begins with Benjamin Kidd and ends with Arnold Toynhee; Leonard Hobhouse stands in a class by himself, well supported however by Patrick Geddes (with his loyal colleague Branford) and Graham Wallas; Briffault and Westermarck plough their lonely furrows, and th elatter is unlucky in his spokesman. Smuts is not even in the index, but occurs once in the text. It is characteristic of the amateurish Englishmen outside the older universities, which have taught sociology under other names, that so many who have contributed to our outlook in these matters rank as historians, economists, or anthropologists. In London, on the other hand, there was not room for both Hobhouse and Geddes. (Myres 1951: 9)

As if a counter to the previous reviewer who complained of this.

Finally, 'Sociological Theory in America' is represented by Giddings, who might almost rank as a 'pioneer'; Small, W. I. Thomas, Stuckenberg, Ross, Cooley, Ellwood, and Hayes; Sorokin took refuge in Minnesota, and was called to Harvard, but 'even Spengler excels him in historical judgment' - which is poor praise, and Spengler is below the line - and his vast Social and Cultural Dynamics 'combines the faults of European and American social science.' (Myres 1951: 9)

Judgments on Giddings and Sorokin.

Davis, Arthur K. 1959. Review of The Paradox of Progressive Thought by David. W. Noble. Science & Society 23(2): 179-183. [JSTOR]

The book by a young midwestern historian deals with the formation of the climate of opinion of American liberalism around the turn of the [|] century. Among the key contributors to this body of thought, according to the author, were Croly, Lloyd, Patten, Cooley, Johnson, Ely, Rauschenbusch, Baldwin, and Veblen. A chapter is devoted to each of these men. (Davis 1959: 179-180)

Noble, David W. 1958. The Paradox of Progressive Thought. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. [Google Books]

The theme of the school of thought which Noble traces in his nine writers is a religious belief in progress and social regeneration. He sees this intellectual movement, which matured between 1890 and 1910, as a healthy contribution of the post-Civil War industrial revolution. The author thus challenges a widespread view that science and industrialism have had negative effects on American values by fostering relativism and even chaos. (Davis 1959: 180)

As with the internet in the 1990s, there was a brief period of optimism.

What is meant by the "paradox of progressive thought?" Briefly stated, the unique New World democracy which stems from industrialism eventually tends to turn into an obsession for conformity and a self-righteous drive for world leadership and an American empire of manifest destiny. This theory, which leans heavily on Turner's famous frontier thesis, has been developed by L. Hartz and H. N. Smith. (Davis 1959: 180)

More or less where we are now.

Yet there is unquestionably a deep, though still unfocused, uneasiness among many sections of the American people. Something at the heart of things is terribly wrong - that much is dimly sensed. Perhaps that is the most hopeful feature of American affairs. (Davis 1959: 182)

Reminds me of Stapledon's various sleepwalpers, the automatons who know somewhere in the back of their heads that something is missing.

After all, most of those tendencies, in some form or other, are inherent in industrialism. They were cut off, or counteracted - temporarily, at least - by such influences as two easy and profitable world wars, imperialist successes, the decline of rival capitalist powers, the immense productivity of the American industrial system, the hothouse unity of the cold war. (Davis 1959: 183)

Something phatic: the in-group feeling of being on a (preferred) side of the iron curtain.

Homan, Paul T. 1959. Review of The Paradox of Progressive Thought by David W. Noble. Journal of Political Economy 67(1): 90-91. [JSTOR]

Professor Noble explores the philosophical underpinnings of the progressive reform movement in the United States from roughly 1880 to 1920 in separate essays on Croly, the editor-philosopher; Baldwin, the social psychologist; Lloyd, the publicist; Cooley, the sociologist; Rauschenbusch, the preacher; and Ely, Patten, and Veblen, economists. But what he builds is a structure, not a mosaic. He searches out the elements they had in common: all were serious students of society in the scientific sense. At the same time, they were seeking for intimations of social improvement within the disruptive process of industrialization. Their central [|] problem was the origin, nature of, and prospects for moral behavior within the intellectual context of evolution and the social context of industrialism. (Homan 1959: 90-91)

A general theme of the era.

To support their belief in progress, they rescued man from the status of being only the plastic resultant of institutional regimentation, endowed him with an innate propensity toward the good, and granted him a capacity for ordering his own social destiny. The task involved killing off some intellectual enemies, notably classical economics and Herbert Spencer. They adopted the Aristotelian conception of evolution as the perfection of a pre-existing potential and the eighteenth-century primitivist conception of human nature as essentially good but deformed by institutions. Progress requires only the conjuncture of circumstances necessary to break the mold of constricting institutions. (Homan 1959: 91)

Something to consider with regard to the galaxy seed programme in the end of L&FM.

The vision of inevitable progress was shattered by World War I and subsequent events. Successors to the progressive philosophers were left confused, and lost the capacity for a systematic treatment of values. (Homan 1959: 91)

Given.

Cochran, Thomas C. 1959. Review of The Paradox of Progressive Thought by David. W. Noble. The American Historical Review 64(3): 673-674. DOI: 10.2307/1905232 [JSTOR]

"Liberal" thought is based on the premise of the inherent goodness of human nature. The paradox that Mr. Noble finds in progressive thinking is that this inherent goodness was to be released not by a return to the primitive, as advocated by the French philosophers of the eighteenth century or the American Turnerians of the late nineteenth, but by the mechanisms of a perfected industrial civilization. (Cochran 1959: 673)

Pretty standard.

Developing industrialism offered the prospect of a democratic society of plenty. These optimists felt sure that man, with God's help, could reform the institutions of the ages of scarcity and allow natural instincts for cooperation and workmanship to mould a good society. As Noble puts it, these Americans wanted "freedom from history," a society that in some revolutionary way would demolish its own past. It is not surprising that this generation bequeathed not "tools of understanding" but useless affirmations to their successors. (Cochran 1959: 674)

Sounds like a parallel universe to what Lotman and Uspensky talk about in relation with the history of Russian culture. What really striked me here is the "affirmations", used in the same phatic sense as does Malinowski, though I hadn't realized it before that "affirmations" are loaded so.

Igo, Sarah E. 2003. Review of The Soul's Economy: Market Society and Selfhood in American Thought, 1820—1920 by J. Sklansky. Reviews in American History 31(2): 251-259. [JSTOR]

As he demonstrates, influential intellectuals slowly but surely over the course of the nineteenth century revised their notions of selfhood so that they were in tandem with the rhythms and demands of the market. This was a period of tremendous economic disruption, during which an agrarian and commercial society was remade, often violently, by corporate capitalism. (Igo 2003: 251)

With Cooley this probably has to do with the urban/rural debate.

Sklansky prefaces his study of nineteenth-century thought with a twenty-first-century concern, the disappearance of serious talk about class and social inequality from both political discourse and scholarly fashion. It is his project to introduce the economic and the material to what one might consider the most ethereal (albeit trendy) of topics: the history of selfhood. Sklansky's central interest is to explain how "psychic self-development" - our modern conception - came to displace an older understanding of "material self-rule" as the very substance of individual freedom (p. 72). How did the new model of selfhood gain ground? (Igo 2003: 251)

Not uninteresting.

Conceptions of selfhood, he argues, were fundamentally transformed by the supplanting of political economy - the old science of society - with an upstart social psychology, which Sklansky calls the "master science" of industrial capitalist society. (Igo 2003: 252)

Cool.

One of the book's insights is that theories of society and economy carry with them implicit constructs of human nature. (For evidence, one needs only think of the law's "rational man" or the self-interested actor of introductory economics texts.) A society thta would come to depend more on the language of association than contract, of sentiment or desire than willpower, required a different kind of self. Sklansky's book, in one reading, traces the search for a new modal individual to inhabit social scientists' models. (Igo 2003: 252)

We might be a different kind of people if we still appreciated and discussed sentiments, for example.

Sklansky chooses Emerson, Horace Bushnell, and Margaret Fuller - an ispired trio - to probe transcendentalism's urge to overcome the material self. As he shows us, each of these thinkers tilted more toward mental than material self-reliance, and formulated a spiritual, intuitive, and emotional self as an explicit counterpoint to political economy's ideal agent. (Igo 2003: 254)

Cooley is definitely in this group.

A new understanding of human beings as bundles of socialized habits, Sklansky points out, was keyed to developments in neoclassical economics, where the marginalist revolution was untethering value once and for all from the productive process. The final triumph of a socialized self and a psychologized market, however, is only manifest in Sklansky's closing chapter, an elegant reading of the intellectual careers of legal scholar Thomas M. Cooley and his son, social psychologist Charles H. Cooley. The father's appeal to a common law tradition in order to regulate corporations and the son's analytical turn away from tangible goods and toward "the stream of communication" each cut against producerist notions. But it is in the younger Cooley's celebrations of "self-expression," "interdependence," and "imaginative sociability" that Sklansky hears the death knell for economic man and the science that created him. (Igo 2003: 255)

Sklansky, Jeffrey 2002. The Soul's Economy: Market Society and Selfhood in American Thought, 1820-1920. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. [lg]

Harp, Gillis J. 2004. Review of The Soul's Economy: Market Society and Selfhood in American Thought, 1820—1920 by J. Sklansky. The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 3(3): 309-311. [JSTOR]

The Soul's Economy examines a subject both substantial and significant. Between the early nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a fundamental transition from classical political economy to social psychology occurred, a shift evident in the writings of a handful of key American thinkers. "While the new psychology described a much more seamless relationship between self and society," Sklansky argues, "in so doing it tended to set aside older questions about the structure of political and economic power". Although a gradual change, the ramifications of this transition were profound and wide-reaching. (Harp 2004: 309)

First mention of a real topic in said social psychology.

On one level, the subjectivism of Transcendentalists offered emancipation from material concerns and some embraced their analysis as an avenue of liberation. Yet by focusing on a higher unity that linked individuals to their larger human community and to nature (and, ultimately, to the divine), American Romantics actually served to legitimate the market society sprouting around them. In Sklansky's apt phrase, their perspective "ironically took the string out of the emerging class divide". (Harp 2004: 309)

Philosophy of poverty at a time of poverty?

George and Sumner "provided a bridge between the antebellum innovations of Transcendentalist and Comtean writers and the postbellum emergence of professional, academic social sciences". Sklansky's transition culminates in the Progressive sociology of Lester F. Ward and E. A. Ross and the social psychology of Charles H. Cooley. Building upon Ward's work, Ross turned (in works like Social Control, 1901) to an analysis of how society could control its members not on the basis of widely dispersed property ownership or through participatory democracy but through the expert manipulation of human desires and habits. Finally, pioneer social psychologist Charles Horton Cooley completed the movement from economic man to social self. Like some of his predecessors, Cooley concentrated on the means of exchange rather than those of production. He accepted the new corporate order and, indeed, believed it would "foster new values that transcended the competitive pursuit of self-interest and that would 'humanize' the corporate order in turn". (Harp 2004: 310)

Now I know that these guys were in a gang together.

Mecklin, John M. 1922. Review of The Principles of Sociology by E. A. Ross. The Journal of Philosophy 19(8): 216-220. DOI: 10.2307/2939395 [JSTOR]

The Principles of Sociology is a bulky volume of over seven hundred pages and is evidently intended to be the author's magnum opus. (Mecklin 1922: 216)

It felt shorter.

William James, in a striking characterization of Herbert Spencer's philosophy, calls "his whole system wooden, as if knocked together out of cracked hemlock boards - and yet the half of England wants to bury him in Westminster Abbey. Why?" Because "the noise of facts resounds through all his chapters" (Pragmatism, p. 39f.). Ross like Spencer is factually minded. He is most skilful, in selecting striking, interesting and apposite illustrations. (Mecklin 1922: 217)

Everybody sure loves beating down on ol' Herbert.

The result is that Professor Ross is forced to adopt in many instances shorthanded not to say dogmatic solutions to moot questions. The absence of any comprehensive principle of interpretation likewise places the writer more or less at the mercy of the welter of factual details. This appears in the tendency to multiply social principles and processes. (Mecklin 1922: 217)

True, there wasn't as much of a through-line as there was to Cooley.

For Ross, together with the majority of American sociologists, leans towards a voluntaristic conception of society as opposed to the intellectualism of Comte and the biological materialism of Spencer. To be sure earlier writers such as Ward and Giddings were profoundly influenced by Spencer but drew away from him towards a more voluntaristic point of view. Ward, who was the dean of American sociologists, broke with Spencer when he insisted that the state, which to Spencer was anathema, is the brain of society and conceived of sociology as the science dealing primarily with the evolution of the social will. For Giddings society is not, as Spencer asserted, an organism but an organization of a number of individuals who by virtue of their "like-mindedness" embody a common will. But neither Ward nor Giddings quite emancipated themselves from Spencer's influence. (Mecklin 1922: 218)

Valuable context.

A decided impetus towards a more psychological and voluntaristic conception of society was given by Professor Small with his doctrine of interests suggested by Ratzenhofer. To resolve all social forces back into interests, as does Small, to find in interests the clue to social evolution and the key to social problems is to plant sociology firmly upon a psychological and voluntaristic basis. Civilization thus becomes synonymous with socialization, culture a matter of the disciplining of elementary human nature rather than of the conquest of natural forces. Out of these basic "interests" arise the social ends that condition society and social progress becomes a matter of the criticism, the evaluation and the realization of these ends. It is thus a distinct contribution on the part of Professor Small to have introduced the idea of value into sociology and in particular to have stressed the intimate connection between sociology and ethics. Small's contribution suffers however from the vagueness inseparable from the idea of interest, a term too broad, too many-sided and too unscientific to provide a satisfactory basis for the science of sociology, a fact which Small seems to recognize in his later work The Meaning of Social Science, where interest is no longer emphasized. (Mecklin 1922: 219)

I quite liked the topic of interests in Ross. This must be Albion Woodbury Small.

Owing to this distrust of the speculative and theoretical and in spite of the imposing array of terms and principles to describe social phenomena the book often gives the impression that we are still dealing with the impulses, contacts and interests of individuals. The writer fails to impress upon the reader that there is a social as opposed to an individual reality, as is done so skilfully in the works of Cooley. Even in the last part, devoted to "sociological principles," these principles are merely generalizations drawn from the facts. (Mecklin 1922: 219-220)

Ross caught lacking.

Park, Robert E. 1922. Review of Human Traits and Their Social Significance by I. Edman. American Journal of Sociology 27(4): 524-525. [JSTOR]

Few sociologists will today admit that human nature is "a biological product." Since Cooley wrote his volume Human Nature and the Social Order nearly twenty years ago it has come to be pretty generally accepted that human nature is essentially a social, rather than a biological product. (Park 1922: 524)

Tsk-tsk.

This division is based upon the presupposition - which just now is the subject of a very searching criticism - that there is some fundamental distinction between the types of human behavior that are instinctive and, for that reason, innate and predetermined, and that same behavior under the influence of reflection, ideas, and ideals. The difficulties of maintaining such a distinction in practice are such that certain writers have gone so far as to deny the existence of anything that corresponds to instinct in human behavior. What we call instincts are merely habits that were learned early, and on the basis of very little experience. (Park 1922: 525)

"Instinct" still a boogeyman.

Bernard, L. L. 1927. Review of Recent Developments in the Social Sciences by E. C. Hayes. Social Forces 6(2): 295-298. DOI: 10.2307/3004710 [JSTOR]

Dr. Ellwood is inclined to think that the four major tendencies in sociology since 1909, when Professor Cooley's Social Organization wrought a sort of transformation in the outlook of the subject, have been (1) "to stress the importance of the mental side of social life," (2) "to overcome 'particularism' by an organic or synthetic views of social life," (3) "to develop a composite method which shall synthesize all minor methods of social research and investigations," and (4) "to develop sociology in the interest of ethical ideals and of social reconstruction." His treatment of his theme cuts across these major tendencies rather than develops them in detail. (Bernard 1927: 295)

A rundown of Cooley's main themes.

Hayes, Edward Carey (ed.) 1927. Recent Developments in the Social Sciences. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co. [Internet Archive]

Nearly two pages, first and last, are devoted to the discussion of Thomas' four wishes, but Thomas' name does not appear. (Bernard 1927: 298)

"They were: the wish for new experience, the wish for security, the wish for recognition, and the wish for response."

Hocking, William Ernst 1928. Review of The Individual and the Social Order by J. A. Leighton. The Philosophical Review 37(5): 513-516. DOI: 10.2307/2179843 [JSTOR]

Professor Leighton describes his own position as social humanism; his comment on Kant furnishes a fair clue to the significance of this phrase. It implies an opposition to a dualistic supernaturalism: "The improvement of the human lot depends on the development of the capacities resident in human nature. In the light of history and science we must put our faith, not in any intervention from supramundane sources, but in the development and functioning of the spiritual powers immanent in human nature" (p. 225). (Hocking 1928: 514)

As opposed to what kind of humanism?

Neither does the author's humanism imply an overvaluation of the whole, whether social or cosmic, as over against the individual. The self is not a social product, in the sense proposed by Baldwin or Cooley (pp. 266 ff). Nor yet in the sense proposed by Mr. Dewey. It is "at all stages of its career a living unity which strives to maintain and enhance its integral wholeness." Social patterns are agencies for its growth; but these patterns may be good or bad, and the self retains the function of selection, - it builds its own society. Nevertheless, through education and punishment society does much to mould the individual selector, who must be duly infused with a sense of "the need and value of conduct in harmony with the social order" (p. 292). Both sides of the persistent antinomy are duly presented; and the book may be said to be a discursive solution in rebus, rather than a solution in terms of abstract formulations. (Hocking 1928: 515)

I don't think this is actually opposed to Cooley, who discusses the formation of the self from external impulses and suggestions.

Angell, Robert C. 1930. Review of Human Nature: A First Book in Psychology by Max Schoen. American Journal of Sociology 36(3): 491-492. [JSTOR]

Human nature is defined as the psychological nature of the human individual and the book is, therefore, an elementary text in individual psychology. There is no explicit recognition of the fact that the greatest common divisor of human personality includes socially acquired attributes, though the discussion of the self implicitly recognizes this fact. (Angell 1930: 491)

Like an accent? Or a blue eye?

Vance, Rupert B. 1930. Review of Sociological Theory and Social Research by C. H. Cooley. Social Forces 9(2): 274-276. DOI: 10.2307/2570320 [JSTOR]

Twelve selected papers of an acknowledged master, a savant grown grey and honored in his science, lie on the table with the fugutive [sic] papers of that science's most promising and eager neophyte, unhappily dead. Cooley's place is secure. In a field of ponderous tomes his five slender volumes contain a contribution which no future sociologist will have the hardihood to ignore. (Vance 1930: 275)

(1) Human Nature and the Social Order; (2) Social Organization: a Study of the Larger Mind; (3) Social Process; (4) Sociological Theory and Social Research; and (5) Introductory Sociology, I assume.

Smith remains relatively unknown. He died at work on a magnum opus which, it is feared, may never see the light. But he left a record of his talks to his classes which Professor Giddings and Dean Hawkes have, as a labor of love, gathered in this small sheaf. Here may have ben an emerging Cooley, more filled with doubt and irony and a certain post-war weariness, but honest, questioning, and with the gift for the trenchant phrase. (Vance 1930: 275)

Smith, Russell Gordon 1930. Fugitive Papers. Edited by Herbert Edwin Hawkes and Franklin Henry Giddings. New York: Columbia University Press. [lg]

In this age of high-powered search and neglected undergraduates, Smith gave himself to his boys without saint. Students respond; critics of the goose-step notwithstanding. There has long been a Cooley cult; there is, no doubt, more ever-present help in Cooley's Life and the Student and Smith's Fugitive Papers to the searcher for approaches in teaching sociology than in many monographs. (Vance 1930: 275)

Cooley, Charles Horton 1927. Life and the Student: Roadside Notes on Human Nature, Society, and Letters. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. [Internet Archive]

Cooley's volume shows the range of his development. He begins with the economics of transportation and ends with the dialectic of personal growth. The William James of sociology, Cooley wrote a social psychology without terminology - which means, as far as his work is concerned, one good in any terminology. He was the first to see that heredity and environment were inextricably interfused. He gave us the concept of the primary group and an organic view of society very different from that of Spencer, but he founded no school of sociology, bound himself to no system of concepts. A style that was the man and a deep and sympathetic grasp of complex human life mark his work. (Vance 1930: 275)

The praises continue to sing.

Hughes, Everett C. 1936. Review of The Concept of Our Changing Loyalties by H. A. Bloch. American Journal of Sociology 41(6): 818. [JSTOR]

It has been some time since we have had a volume devoted almost entirely to the problem of the individual and society. Mr. Bloch has given us one, based largely on the fundamental conceptions of Mead, Dewey, Cooley, MacIver, and Baldwin (although the latter is not mentioned, unless I am mistaken). He has shown himself thoroughly familiar with the philosophical, psychological, and sociological literature pertinent to his prbolem. One would be rather at a loss to say just what is new in the work, unless it be an unusual emphasis on the dynamic aspects of the social individual. Even this, while unusual, is not new. The excellence of the work lies rather in its thoroughness in following out implications. (Hughes 1936: 818)

Bloch, Herbert Arron 1934. The Concept of Our Changing Loyalties: An Introductory Study into the Nature of the Social Individual. New York: Columbia University Press.

Mr. Bloch has not given the subject of mass behavior its due. One has a slight suspicion that he doesn't like mass behavior, and especially mass movements. Stripped of its rather heavy verbiage, his ideal state is one with an "alert citizenry," which I take to mean our old friend the rational, free citizen, who does not share the unfortunate tendency of the larger mass of people "to be irascibly averse to the prickings of a novel idea or theory." This suggests another suspicion; that the author, in spite of the care taken to define the limits of reason in human life, still implicitly over-emphasizes its rôle to the neglect of those less reasonable and less conscious aspects of the human mind which seem to be involved in mass movements. (Hughes 1936: 818)

Very much like Trotter and Ross in their treatment of the mass's aversion to new ideas. Too bad the book is practically inaccessible.

Bain, Read 1935. Review of Social Psychology: The Natural History of Human Nature by L. G. Brown. American Journal of Sociology 40(6): 844-845. [JSTOR]

Psychologists will probably resent having their field restricted to the organic functions, and logicians of science will question whether psychology tells how, while social psychology tells why, people [|] behave as they do. Psychological social psychologists are depending more and more upon cultural data even though they seldom give sociology and credit. Sociologists, on the other hand, will probably contend that much of Brown's material is merely elementary sociology. (Bain 1935: 844-845)

See cultural psychology.

About seventy pages are bibliography and class "helps," about 400 are "case materials" and quotations, and the remaining 185 are Brown's own work. So it is really a combined case- and textbook. (Bain 1935: 845)

Reminds me of a fugitive idea of writing and publishing a treatise that cites everything I've read and quoted on this blog, just to create a piece of writing in which the bibliography far exceeds the length of the content.

This may be true, if research really confuses, but certainly undergraduates should not be given the idea that all is known when in reality so little is known. For example, attitudes, etc., seem to take the place left vacant by the moribund "instincts" with little more critical analysis than instincts used to receive. Watson's there "emotions" seem to be accepted as gospel with no reference to Sherman's work. (Bain 1935: 845)

Instincts and ~~sentiments~~ attitudes. Watson's three "emotions" are fear, love, and rage.

Ross, Eva J. 1944. Review of Dictionary of Sociology by H. P. Fairchild. The American Catholic Sociological Review 5(3): 193-195. DOI: 10.2307/3706476 [JSTOR]

We have looked for an adequate dictionary of sociology for the use of students, and for handy reference for professionals, for a long time. Eubank's Concepts of Sociology is useful for certain types of reference. (Ross 1944: 193)

Eubank, Earle Edward 1932. The Concepts of Sociology: A Treatise Presenting a Suggested Organization of Sociological Theory in Terms of Its Major Concepts. Boston, etc.: D. C. Heath and Company. [Hathi Trust]

Sometimes the author most clearly connected with a specialized term is cited, such as the association of Bagehot with the phrase cake of custom, or Durkheim with the term social mind, or Comte with positivism. (Ross 1944: 194)

Noted.

Eugenics is given, but not euthenics. (Ross 1944: 194)

"a science that deals with development of human well-being by improvement of living conditions"

Foote, Nelson N. 1950. Review of Social Psychology by T. M. Newcomb. American Sociological Review 15(5): 581-683. DOI: 10.2307/2086929 [JSTOR]

Professor Newcomb directs at Michigan what is virtually a unique, separate department of social psychology, linking sociology and psychology. Although trained primarily in psychology, he has thus inherited Cooley's mantle. After many years of distinction as an original researcher, he has gathered his thinking into a textbook which will attract more than ordinary attention. The reader will be curious to examine it not only as a textbook, but also as a measure of progress in American social psychology since Cooley published his Human Nature and the Social Order in 1902. Its own contributions to this burgeoning field will be apparent. (Foote 1950: 681)

Tracing the lineage.

Newcomb, Theodore Mead 1950. Social Psychology. New York: The Dryden Press. [Internet Archive]

The writing is admirably lucid, even-paced, workmanlike. Cooley admired writing for its own sake and his works abounded in the color, vigor and drama of the personal essay. Where Cooley was adorned with literary and timely allusions, Newcomb holds himself to incorporating the findings of professional experimenters; where cooley was moralistic, Newcomb is rather austerely detached. (Foote 1950: 681)

A note on Cooley's style.

The teacher of social psychology is fortunate to be able to choose from four such excellent texts as those by Lindesmith & Strauss, Coutu, Sargent, and Newcomb, which have all appeared in the past year. It is piquant to note that Lindesmith & Strauss came from the same publisher as Newcomb. The publisher feels that the two do not compete. This is probably correct, since where Lindesmith & Strauss is a concise, trenchant and up-to-date statement of the symbolic interactionist point of view, Newcomb is encyclopaedic. (Foote 1950: 681)

Lindesmith, Alfred R.; Strauss, Anselm L.; Denzin, Norman K. 1988. Social Psychology. Sixth Edition. Englewood Cliffs, N.J. : Prentice Hall. [Internet Archive]

Coutu, Walter 1949. Emergent Human Nature. New York: A. A. Knopf. [Internet Archive]

Sargent, Stephen Stanfeld; Williamson, Robert C. 1966. Social Psychology. Third Edition. New York: The Ronald Press Company. [Internet Archive]

Where Cooley was a Moses, Newcomb is a Noah. He comes not to lead his chosen people to the promised land, but to consolidate and harmonize, or, as the jargon has it now, to integrate. All the theoretical creations since Cooley's time - behaviorism, psychoanalysis, symbolic interactionism, gestaltism, functionalism, personality-and-culture, sociometry, group dynamics - after selection for compatibility, are packed aboard the ark, with scarce room left for Noah. His patently conciliatory tone discourages any stirring up of the animals; no tidings are given of unknown seas to be explored; if the various species are supposed to mate and produce fertile offspring, they cannot in the space and time given each; the whole effort of the pilot is to create the appearance of a happy family among his herd of unlike concepts. (Foote 1950: 681)

The update package. Is it executable?

In general Newcomb conceives his task as that of bringing psychological motivation together with social structure through the medium of a concept of interaction. This does not, however, make him a symbolic interactionist of the Cooley-Mead-Dewey tradition. Dewey is never mentioned, nor his ideas; Mead's concept of taking the role of the other is utilized somewhat, and he is referred to as "plausible" and "influential," but Margaret Mead gets far more attention than George Herbert. (Foote 1950: 681)

"Interaction" as a central concept without commitment to symbolic interactionism.

The precise [|] functions of language in conducting the social process, where mentioned at all, are gloriously mixed with gestaltian "frames of reference." The author's conviction that he has mastered an interactional point of view with minimum benefit of a symbolic component gives special point to Dewey's preference for the term "transaction." (Foote 1950: 681-682)

These "gestaltian "frames of reference"" may imply a compatibility with Jakobson's scheme of the linguistic functions of speech. (The necessity of Dewey's transactionism escapes me.)

Newcomb starts not from the ongoing social process or the situation but individual motives. These are called methodologically necessary intervening variables inferred from behavior. They are compounded of drives and goals, but drives and goals in turn arise from the activation of attitudes ("states of readiness for motive arousal"). And attitudes in turn arise largely from shared frames of reference acquired through interaction with others à la Sherif's autokinesis experiment. Personality is organized mainly around certain self-other attitudes, which may be goal-oriented (secure) or threat-oriented (insecure), depending upon perceptions (not conceptions) of self in group situations. (Foote 1950: 682)

Admittedly, "activation of attitudes" does sound alien. Otherwise it's a near-repeat of the sentiment debate. Attitudes in interaction, sentiments in communion. Kimball Young is probably involved in Americanizing this trend in British social psychology. That the personality is organized around "self-other attitudes" comes across as a summary of Cooley's looking-class self, with his "personal ideas" replaced by attitudes. In the end we have covered the whole triad of the sources of selfhood or something: (1) perceptions or self in group situations; (2) conceptions of self in social interaction; and (3) "personal ideas" of self in social intercourse.

His concept of motivation is predispositional rather than situational. The organization of experience into systems of uniform response, which occurs through the powers of conceptualization shared by the common man as well as the social psychologists, is explained not through language but through the imputation of generalized predispositions. Though these are said to be inferred from behavior, Newcomb includes a chapter on attitude measurement - "the most outstanding technical achievement of social psychologists" - in which he scoffs at the insistence of certain methodologists that the validity of verbal report can only be established by reference to overt behavior. (Foote 1950: 682)

Crystallization or ossification of signs into sign systems. I suspect that Newcomb's "generalized predispositions" might mirror Cooley's "general tendency" (cf. Cooley 1922: 354). Sounds a bit like Schopenhauer's Will.

In calling drives "bodily states felt as restlessness, which initiate tendencies to activity," he merges an organic state of irritation, which sets a problem for the person, with an organic mobilization to perform the act appropriate for solving the problem. Moreover, like the functionalists, he talks of acquired drives which, directed toward acts originally instrumental to the relief of organic tension, mysteriously become "ends in themselves." Also, apparently accepting neither the direct discovery of values in experience nor the situational determination of instrumental and preferred values, he clings to the reductionist organism environment framework of the gestaltists, as well as their visual and field-of-forces-in-equilibrium analogies. (Foote 1950: 682)

So, somewhat Malinowskian. This was exactly the time when Dorothy Lee was writing brilliant papers on the role of means becoming ends in themselves (e.g. instrumental speech → phatic communion and other variations that can be reduced to work → play) through the concept of "futility". That is to say, Newcomb's psychology may be used to demonstrate the emergence of phatic communion just as well as Cooley's, Ross's, McDougall's, etc.

The concept of role, however, he finds too sociological, and so he sets up a new concept, "role behavior," which is supposed to bridge the gap between individual variations in motive and behavior and the recognizable meeting of role specifications by others. A role behavior is something like Mead's social act, in that it is a sequence or episode of behavior in a social setting. It is delineated, however, not by the resolution of a problematic situation, but by the reduction of drive. That is, it is a special kind of motive pattern, which in turn is another synthetic bridging concept: "a segment of behavior, a unit of performance-perception-thought-affect which continues so long as a single motive pattern prevails." The phrase "role behavior" thus becomes the pivot on which the whole book turns - the integration which is offered as the solution of the key problem of social psychology. (Foote 1950: 682)

"Rollikäitumine" kõlab samavõrd pentsikult kui "tähistamispraktikad". It looks like there's been some jangling with the triad: (1a) perception; (1b) affect; (2) performance; and (3) thought. They're set in a determinate process sequence - see how many debates were held over this in various symposia in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. The doubling of firstness may not necessarily be the case. "Affect" could be read as a Fourth very easily if, for example, replaced or implemented with something like Cooley's "affectation", i.e. the futile need to "impress" (to try to improve one's self-image in an affected manner). In this case, though, the outcome might be a question of crystallization or ossification, e.g. enigmatic episodes becoming paradigmatic episodes (Harré & Secord 1976: 12).

No doubt a phrase like "social psychology" itself combines two ideas, but it is one thing to use such a phrase to set a problem, that of specifying the relations of individual and group, and quite another to offer it as a solution. "Role behavior" as a concept sets a problem, it does not solve it; it defines what social psychology is after, not what it is achieved. Perhaps it is enough if the book has done this, but under the weight of years since 1902 we might have hoped for much more. (Foote 1950: 682)

Newcomb is more theoretical (programmatic) than empirical (results-oriented), then? Or is this just a critique of this obtuse "role behavior" concept?

Hartung, Frank E. 1951. Review of Social Psychology: An Integrative Interpretation by S. S. Sargent. American Journal of Sociology 56(6): 607-608. [JSTOR]

Professor Sargent says that his purpose in this book is "to present a systematic, integrated, dynamic, and useful social psychology." Part I contains four chapters on the general topic "Socialization of the Individual," a survey of the interaction of "biological and social forces" in individual development, specifying the major sociocultural influences upon personality and behavior, and treating socialization as a form of learning. Part II, "The Dynamics of Social Behavior," discusses motivation, frustration, and mechanisms, and also "ego-development and ego-involvement." Part III, "The Patterning of Social Behavior," deals with language, the major forms of social interaction, the role of the person, leadership, and the person in social situations. Part IV, "Understanding Social Phenomena," is devoted to the interpretation of public opinion, propaganda, fads, fashions, crowds, rumors, social change and social movements, and group differences and prejudice. The last two chapters (xix and xx) show that social psychology is useful today and will be more so tomorrow. (Hartung 1951: 607)

Sounds like Cooley's stuff, perhaps with a tinge of psychoanalysis. Part III once again the semiotic portion, as in Locke's essay. This summary of the 1950 edition looks very different, on surface, from the table of contents in the 1966 edition cited somewhere above. Instead of "Socialization of the Individual" there's "The social setting of personality"; instead of "The Dynamics of Social Behavior" there's "Bases of social behavior"; instead of "The Patterning of Social Behavior" there's "Group Dynamics"; and instead of "Understanding Social Phenomena" there's "Mass communication and collective behavior". It looks like the overall structure is the same but the terminology was updated until unrecognizable over just 15 years. (They didn't throw out "Role Behavior" tho - it's in the '66 edition still; or was it absent in '50 and added due to Newcomb?)

It is a book by a psychologist who uses considerable anthropological and sociological material. If social psychology is defined as the study of the interaction of human beings, then not all statements about human behavior are social psychological, although Sargent appears to think they are. Statements as to how persons function as organisms are not social psychological because they imply no interaction. Nor are statements about persons which refer them to culture and to social structure social psychology, if they fail to refer to the collective psychological processes which are reflected in individual behavior. It may be interesting to read about the mores and the social processes of accommodation, and the like. (Hartung 1951: 608)

Oh wow. This Hartung thinks that Sargent muddies social psychology with personality psychology. Initially I thought this was about "folk social psychology", i.e. unempirical or hypothetical statements about human behavior in general which are sourced from social intercourse because it's basically gossip. The object of social psychology, though, is "the collective psychological process" - as in the Social Mind thinking of something and the individual person performing that something as a consequence. And now here's the kicker: Hartung suggests the study of social mores and "processes of accommodation", i.e. sociability, gregariousness, conviviality, altruism, futility or whatever else you may call it in phatic communion. That is, "National Character" (Sargent's ch. 3 in '66) comes about because a national community has as-if somehow collectively decided that they should all behave in such or such manner in social intercourse, and all (or at least most) members of said community somehow know this and act they way this ephemeral collective Will suggests one should act.

However, Sargent has not integrated the individual and the social psychological, the anthropological and sociological approaches. He has just put them side by side, and said, as Cooley did fifty years ago, that they are heads and tails of the same coin. By "integrated" he means "bringing together psychological, sociological, anthropological, and psychiatric techniques and findings" (p. 31). But he has not effected an integration in the sense of a unity. (Hartung 1951: 608)

So, "a total social process" is not "a unity"; mutual "dependence" is not "integration". Sounds to me like a quibble over terminology, again.

In his third chapter, "Culture and Personality," he presents, side by side, the conceptions of culture held by Linton, Kroeber, Benedict, Kardiner, and Horney. In Kraeber's view the individual behaves institutionally, for example, is religious, because of pre-existing culture patterns. But, according to Kardiner, institutions exist because of the "projective systems" of the individual. The student receives no assistance in resolving this conflict and is given the definite impression that the highly dubious "culture and personality" studies are valid. By way of evaluating them he says that we need more facts and more careful research. The discussion of personality is largely devoted to psychological aspects of learning and sociological aspects of variability due to differences in culture and experience. (Hartung 1951: 608)

This guy again. Lotman and Bauman belong to this "highly dubious" tradition with their culture-personality isomorphisms. Abram Kardiner doesn't come across as very appealing from this short summary; I hope there's more to it.

Sargent leaves up in the air the problem of "what to believe" about motives (chap. vi). His treatment is individual-psychological, wholly omitting the significance of symbolization in behavior in general and in motives in particular. In the discussion of frustration in chapter vii Sargent in effect denies the pragmatist position that out of frustration intelligent behavior arises. In contrast, the potentiality of reasonable behavior resulting from frustrations is one of the basic ideas in Dewey's Human Nature and Conduct and Mead's Mind, Self, and Society and is also present in Cooley's Human Nature and the Social Order, all social-psychological works. Frustration, treated as a ubiquitous cause of irrational response, is one of the basic concepts in Sargent's work. (Hartung 1951: 608)

No ~~bitches~~ semiotics? Overreliance on psychoanalytic concepts is still unappealing for me. In any case it sounds like a thing to read after having first read some Freud and Kardiner, and another thing to afterwards revisit La Barre with Sargent (or a critique of his ideas) in tow.

In chapter viii, "Ego-Development and Ego-Involvement," Sargent makes it plain that he never realizes the basic conflict among the pragmatist social psychology of Cooley, Dewey, and Mead, and the irrationalistic individual psychology of psychoanalysis. The self will be more of a mystery to the student after reading this chapter than it was before. He fails to indicate the irrationalism basic to the psychoanalytic approach and also fails to link the self and symbolism. The universality of human nature thus escapes him, and he deals only with its changing aspects due to specific cultural and social influences. (Hartung 1951: 608)

This sounds like a valid critique. What an intense review.

Strong, Samuel M. 1951. Review of Emergent Human Nature: A Symbolic Field Interpretation by W. Coutu. American Journal of Sociology 57(2): 204-205. [JSTOR]

The reader of this volume is confronted with a complicated statement of a complex system of social psychology. After mastering the many new terms, the reader realizes that this piece of work results from arduous study and observation [|] of diverse fields of knowledge of human behavior. The author conceives of it as a "new social psychology [...] which synthesizes the situational or field approach with the symbolic interactionist approach." A large portion of the book is given to a description of the process of selective responsiveness of the person through the formulation of a "theory of selectors." He conceives of personality as a dynamic system operating as an energy system in symbolic fields. The problem of motivation is dealt with by the author in terms of a situational field theory, the general point of view of the book being that "man always behaves in accordance with what the situation means to him." (Strong 1951: 204-205)

So, the logical conclusion of Thomas's definition of the situation? This was certainly timed perfectly for one Erving Goffman. Sadly, "field theory and operationalism" are strangers to me.

The study begins with a consideration of an appropriate unit of measure in order to identify a behavioral unit of analysis. Such units as stimulus-response, attitude, or act are not regarded as adequate units of measure. Instead, the author proposes the concept of tinsit as "a unit process of action." This term was arrived at by abbreviating the phrase "tendency in situation." It is pointed out that "tendency in situation" is not to be confused with a form of vitalism or other internal drive. The guiding conception is that human personality and behavior are related to condition or situation. Tinsit "includes all other behavioral units on all levels [...]; every time of act or mechanism earlier referred to as a tendency will hereafter be referred to as a tinsit, whether it be a habit, mental act, attitude, disposition, idea, impulse, trait, or any other behavior. Tinsit is defined as a probable behavior in a given situation or a behavior or a given probability under stated conditions. The tinsit is an inference based on frequency of a given behavior in a given situation." This, according to the author, would lead to the use of statistical operation in a study of individual as well as group behavior. One wonders how such a vague concept, that includes so many things, can be used as a unit of measure. And, further, is it feasible to regard the concept of tinsit, which the author also defines as an "inference" as suitable for statistical manipulation? (Strong 1951: 205)

Behold! General tendency has become a statistical semiosphere of thirdness - a Tinsit!

In order to explain his conception of the development and meaning of human nature, the author introduces the concept of personic. The concept of personic isolates the person "as a process or system of processes distinguishable from the other processes called the body." The author regards human nature as "personic nature which is fundamentally the ability to communicate with self and others by the use of symbols, in other words, the ability to participate in the symbolic process." (Strong 1951: 205)

My lord, I love this. Everything mental, spiritual, rational, cognitive, emotional, etc. is now simply personic. I wonder what the consequences of viewing human nature as personic nature are - in other words: what's the fluidity level? Everything being "symbolic" sounds just about right for 1950 (e.g. Cassirer and Wheelwright).

It is perplexing that the author of this system of social psychology who uses symbolic interaction as a frame of reference should not have referred to the work of Cooley on human nature in the primary group. Surely, Cooley's discussion of the significance of communication in Social Organization (pp. 61 ff.), in which he introduces the remarkable illustration in the case of Helen Keller by the statement "without communication the mind does not develop a true human nature," and his chapters on "Sociability and Personal Ideas," "Sympathy or Understanding as an Aspect of Society," "The Social Self and the Various Phases of the I" (Human Nature and the Social Order), are worth considering in a treatise on human nature. (Strong 1951: 205)

Claiming that there is an already viable theory of communication in Cooley's Human Nature and the Social Order, and implying that he had a workable understanding of human nature based on that theory. And the central thesis, I take it, is that without (linguistic) social intercourse a human being is not fully human. That is, the pivot is the semiotic domestication of human beings. This was another superb review. I think I like this era in scientific communication. The demon of terminological invention was reigning supreme.

Meyer, Henry J. 1956. Review of Sociological Theory: Present-Day Sociology from the Past by E. F. Borgatta and H. J. Meyer. Social Forces 35(2): 166-167. DOI: 10.2307/2573368 [JSTOR]

It contains 61 classical selections from sociological writings ranging over the past century which have required surprisingly little modification in the light of subsequent research. Indeed, some of the best contemporary research has contributed little more than precision of detail to the depth of insight and sophistication of theory already achieved by these sociological pioneers. Ten of the selections are from Cooley; six from Durkheim; five from Linton; four from Simmel; three each from Baldwin, Ross, and Thomas and Znaniecki; two from MacIver, Maine, K. Mannheim, Mead, Peaget, Radcliffe-Brown, Sapir, Thomas, and Veblen; and one from Le Bon, W. McDougall, L. H. Morgan, Park, Royce, Small and Vincent, Spencer, W. Waller, and M. Weber. The editors have added their own brief and incisive interpretations to each of the six parts into which the selections are divided, as well as a preface that should be read. (Meyer 1956: 166)

A real springboard, this. Too bad it's inaccessible. Amazon ~~stole and withhholds~~ sells a reprint for $50. Even Hathi Trust doesn't have it, though searching "Borgatta Meyer" does bring up a treasure-trove of interesting late 1950s and subsequent sociological research.

Borgatta, Edgar F.; Meyer, Henry Joseph (eds.) 1956. Sociological Theory: Present Day Sociology from the Past. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

The purpose of the editors is not to provide a substitute for extensive reading of the sources but to motivate students to turn to them for intellectual stimulation and for germinal ideas in their own work. The selections included are of such a nature that readers who feel that the study of the history of systematic social theory is a waste of time will have occasion to ponder how thoroughly our predecessors have plagiarized many of our best ideas. (Meyer 1956: 166)

Oh wow. Epigraphic! It's been a hot minute since I've come across something to the sting of quotes in the sidebar of this blog.

One need not accept the full implications of the Durkheimian realism in order to recognize the wisdom of the selection from Durkheim which the authors have adopted as an epilogue to the volume, "[...] from the moment that it is recognized that above the individual there is society, and that this is not a nominal being created by reason, but a system of active forces, a new manner of explaining men becomes possible." (Meyer 1956: 167)

"Society" is not a figment of imagination?

Bolton, Charles D. 1956. Review of The Direction of Human Development by M. F. A. Montagu. American Journal of Sociology 61(5): 491-492. [JSTOR]

The thesis unfolds in three stages: (1) an attempt to show, Kropotkin-style, that co-operation, not competition, is the fundamental law of organic nature and hence that man is continuous with a biological descent in which co-operativeness is the basic mechanism of survival; (2) a variety of data to show that, in the absence of the mothering type of love, both human and subhuman infant organisms undergo severe and often irreparable physiological degeneration; and (3) evidence that a lack of supportive mothering in the early years produces a malfunctioning personality. (Bolton 1956: 491)

Rings a bell from a biosemiotics lecture.

The evidence is presented within the framework [|] of what Montagu calls "sociobiology," which turns out to be a combination of biology and psychoanalysis, with a shot of behaviorist learning theory and a dash of Malinowski's theory of basic and derived needs, to give the impression of comprehensiveness. Sociologists will find Montagu's biology much more palatable than his conceptions of the social. (Bolton 1956: 491-492)

This is a parade of red flags.

The invariably interactive character of the heredity-environment relation is handled with unusual consistency. However, his conception of the "social," which includes such things as purely symbiotic relations and the intrauterine period, is so broad as to be meaningless to sociologists. Anyone who takes Mead and Cooley seriously will feel that Montagu has erred most grievously in failing to place any emphasis upon the profound influence of language on the direction of human experience and behavior. (Bolton 1956: 492)

No habla semiotica?

This sort of book raises the question of whether consideration of the infant stage alone can account for the unique direction of human development. Aside from last-chapter rhapsodies, there is nothing in Montagu's prescription that would be varied for raising a troop of apes, no real recognition that the direction of man's social development is to transcend the biological by becoming a minded creature capable of molding, collectively, his own world and motivations through language and its ramifications. For all the abuses it is heir to, neither scientist nor social actor is long likely to turn his back on the image of himself as a creatively free, minded creature, in order to accept an image of himself as a biogenically directed creature of drives and emotions. (Bolton 1956: 492)

A thorough devastation of a review.

Martel, Martin U. 1961. Review of The Nature and Types of Sociological Theory by Don Martindale. American Journal of Sociology 67(3): 338-340. [JSTOR]

Martindale's book is a singularly valuable contribution to sociological theory. It is the first attempt since Sorokin's Contemporary Sociological Theories (1928) to present a comprehensive summary and comparative analysis of major theoretical approaches since Comte's time. Serious attention is given to works of more than fifty leading theorists, including most persons found on standard lists for the period and several welcome additions. Coverage divides fairly evenly between works produced before and after World War I, with considerable attention paid to contemporary viewpoints. (Martel 1961: 338)

Martindale, Don 1960. The Nature and Types of Sociological Theory. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. [Internet Archive]

The two earliest schools were positivistic in orientation and placed emphasis on sociocultural systems over individuals. The original school (called "Positivistic Organicism") sought to combine an empirical methodology with an idealistic, organicist conception of social order. Organied society, vaguely conceived, was taken as the focal point, with social change viewed as an orderly transition from one organized state to another. First represented in the works of Comte, Spencer, and Ward, this school reached its zenith with Tonnies and Durkheim. Afterwards, tensions between empiricism and organicism led to its breakup, as indicated in the breach between Lundberg and Sorokin. (Martel 1961: 339)

And by "sociocultural systems" you mean institutions?

During the same period a second school ("Conflict Theory") arose that accepted the empiricism of the first but held to a non-idealistic definition of social reality. As advocated by Marx, Gumplowicz, Ratzenhofer, and others, group conflict became the critical focus. Orderly social life was viewed as a problematic outcome within a broader continuing process of ferment. (Martel 1961: 339)

Early sociology was basically socialism, huh?

The first subschool Martindale calls "Pluralistic Behaviorism." In France, Tarde approached social phenomena as the repetitive distributions of individual behaviors, reflecting personal beliefs and desires learned through imitation. This approach was expanded and modified by Giddings, Chapin, Ogburn, and others. (Martel 1961: 339)

I wasn't aware of the Tarde → Giddings connection.

Most influential in America was a second branch, pioneered by James, Cooley, Thomas, and Mead ("Symbolic Interactionism"). Individual socialization was brought to the core of attention, with human interaction viewed as a conscious process of communication between intersocializing individuals. (Martel 1961: 339)

Good company. The Cooleyan paraphrase of this would run a little something like "language [...] can never be dissociated from personal intercourse in the mind" (Cooley 1922: 91-92).

Thus, as Martindale seems to acknowledge, his account has a backward reference. His contribution is mainly one of substantially clarifying past sources of present theoretical viewpoints; leaving to others the related task of determining how differences can be constructively resolved within the framework of empirical science. (Martel 1961: 340)

These historians, I mean, it's like they're obsessed with the past or something.

Hulett, J. Edward Jr. 1964. Review of Communication and Social Order by H. D. Duncan. AV Communication Review 12(4): 458-468. [JSTOR]

A definitive statement of the relevance of the so-called "symbolic interactionist" doctrine for theory and research in communications is long overdue. The development of symbolic interactionist thought took place during the three decades after 1900, with C. H. Cooley, John Dewey, and W. I. Thomas as the principal early contributors. The modern form of the theory emerged during the late 1930's with the posthumous publication of three books by George Herbert Mead, and it has since had a lively career in sociology and in the sociological branch of social psychology. (Hulett 1964: 458)

This has somehow become one of my favorite eras. I guess it may have something to do with the copyright expiration length. Everything up to 1928 is currently open.

The book, described on the dust jacket as "the result of many years of work and thought in the tradition of symbolic interactionism," begins with a chapter on "Symbolic Interaction in Freud's Work" and ends with a chapter on "A Sociological Model of Social Interaction as Determined by Communication." (Hulett 1964: 459)

Jesus Christ, he's everywhere!

As it turns out, however, the little that the book contains on symbolic interactionism consists mainly of a sophisticated but rather too severe critique of Mead's work and an occasional use of some of the principles here and there to clarify a point of interpretation. The principal frame of reference chosen by Duncan for his analysis is not formal symbolic interactionism. Rather, the analysis is based on the concepts and categories of the offshoot of symbolic interactionism that goes under the name of "dramatism," or the "dramaturgical school," a method of interpreting human action that was developed principally by Kenneth Burke. (Hulett 1964: 459)

Oh, so just internecine conflict.

Despite the fact that the book was written by an author who is versed in the tradition of symbolic interactionism, and is based specifically on Burke's dramatism model, no formal theory of communication based on either of these approaches is presented. What we have here, instead, is a collection of brilliant insights, speculations, and after-the-fact interpretations of the uses and misuses of the grand symbol systems of the society in the establishment, maintenance, and manipulation of social structure. The specialists who will gain the most profit from the book are the sociologists, and particularly those sociologists who are interested in social processes in general and in the sociology of knowledge and of art. (Hulett 1964: 459)

Well, this doesn't sound that bad for what it is.

Duncan, Hugh Dalziel 1962. Communication and Social Order. Totowa, N.J.: Bedminster Press. [Internet Archive | lg]

The first problem facing the sociologist seeking to understand the drama of society is, in Duncan's view, the problem of discovering which of the expressive symbol systems (art, drama, religion, mythology, and so on) of society most graphically reveals the struggle [between authorities of widely different views] in all its fullness. Of all these systems, art, and especially comic art, is the best source of the desired insights into the functions of symbols in establishing and changing the social order, the key to the understanding of society's dramaturgical striving for enduring social bonds. Not religion (which sociologists heretofore have considered the key), for religious rites cannot be taken as the universal symbolic struggle for social order, because they are founded upon an authoritarianism that cannot admit the possibility of, and so cannot examine and resolve, doubt, uncertainty, ambiguity. Only in the realm of art, "where the expression of doubt, ambiguity, and difference is normal," do we find a social symbol system wherein the great drama of the struggle for social order can be fully manifested. Art gives us a form which makes it "possible for us to confront our differences and thus brings them into consciousness so we can communicate with each other. [...] The study, then, of art, and particularly comic art, is the proper study of man in society, because it is the study of the resolution between order and disorder in society" (p. xxvii). (Hulett 1964: 460)

There is plenty here to compare with Lotman's theory (of the interactions between society, art, and science). The authorianism can't art properly argument certainly calls Lotman's theory to mind. That there's this Petersonian struggle "between order and disorder in society" on the other hand is off-putting. The order-loving Vorlon vs the chaotic Shadow.

"Sociologists think of the nonsymbolic realm as clear, while the symbolic realm is hazy and 'subjective' [...]" (p. 145), and even the symbolic interactionists Cooley, Mead, and Dewey, "[...] and despite all their talk about symbolic action, tell us little about how art and language do all the things they are supposed to do [...]" (p. 151). (Hulett 1964: 461)

Strong disagree. I can't vouch for Mead atm but Dewey wrote books on art theory (consummatory stuff, etc.), and Cooley wrote extensively on literary fiction (Goethe and the rest).

Duncan himself starts as if he were headed in the direction of science. He leads off with an introduction that states his purpose, and follows this with seven chapters dealing critically with the work of other scholars - Freud, Simmel, Malinowski, Dewey, Mead. (Hulett 1964: 462)

Why is it always you three? There is a very slight possibility that Duncan may have discussed or at least alluded to phatic communion or something connected with it.

The symbolic interactionist model of the social (communicative) act, properly developed, can provide valuable leads to the solution of difficult problems in this area, such as those suggested by the following questions. How does the communicator select the symbols to be included in his message so as to be confident that it will transmit his intended meaning? Success in the selection of symbols depends upon several contingencies, the most important of which is the sender's image of the receiver. Further, since it may be taken as a truism that no message can be construted that contains in full detail the entire intent of the sender, the message as sent and as received will be incomplete, even when the channel is maximally efficient and free of "noise." Thus, the receiver is faced with at least two problems: how to exact from the received message the message intended by the sender (a process that depends upon the receiver's image of the sender, among other things) and how to supply the information needed to fill the gaps in the message. Most ordinary communicators probably are entirely unaware that such gaps exist in their messages. On the other hand, a skilled communicator, such as an orator or an advertiser, can "innocently" communicate forbidden or disapproved content by manipulating the inevitable gaps and ambiguities in his message in such a way that he can depend upon the receiver to insert approximately the desired content. How can he, or any other communicator, be sure the receiver will supply the "correct" material to fill the gaps? (Hulett 1964: 466)

Oh heck yeah, it's 1964! Cooley's personal idea meets communication theory. The example of such manipulation that comes to mind is dog-whistles.

To return to an illustration used by Duncan, his analysis of Hitler's rhetoric does not and cannot fully explain its success. What else is needed is an analytical scheme that allows us to say something about the way Hitler solved the problem of selecting the symbols that would have the maximum appeal to that portion of the German population that was to give his movement its initial strength. (Hulett 1964: 467)

Eerily reminiscent of La Barre's treatment of the psychotic culture-bringer Hitler and how his unique capability of phatic communication (i.e. "charisma", "sympathy", or whatever) one madman's ideas made a whole nation crazy or something.

Killian, Lewis M. 1965. Review of Symbolic Leaders: Public Dramas and Public Men by O. E. Klapp. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 360: 196-197. [JSTOR]

He [Klapp] argues that, while structure lends stability to social life, the whole world is a potential audience ready to identify with a hero and, in the process of drama, make and break statuses, shift mass preoccupations, and create new organizations. The capacity for sympathy and the common stock of sentiments which Cooley postulated as the essence of human nature are held to be basic to the universality of drama as a solvent transcending stable structures. (Killian 1965: 197)

Celebrification theory in the early 1960s?

Francis, Roy G. 1965. Review of The Problem of Social-Scientific Knowledge by W. P. McEwen. The Sociological Quarterly 6(1): 68-70. [JSTOR]

In a preliminary jousting with various school of philosophical thought, McEwen provides a gimmick or paradigm which turns out to be a firly effective tool. He proposes inquiry into the value-situation (including the dominant motive of the described researcher), the meaning-situation (the kind of knowledge which can be acquired if the particular point of view is rigorously held to), and the knowledge-situation (the issue of method and criterion by which beliefs are warranted). (Francis 1965: 69)

This is most definitely triadic but why "value" and "meaning", I can't surmise without reading it.

The book suffers from the author's lack of acquaintance with those who [|] based their work on Cooley (who, incidentally, is cited twice). The reason I say this so categorically is that the "symbolic-interactional" school represents not only a theory of behavior but contains its own epistemology. We propose to explain meaning, by our theory, as well as how it is that man comes to have the view of the world he does (the sociology of knowledge). (Francis 1965: 69-70)

Oh, ok. That might explain why McEwen's book comes across as very "muddy", at least in Francis's exposition.

Wolff, Kurt H. 1968. Review of International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences by D. L. Sills. American Sociological Review 33(5): 808-813. DOI: 10.2307/2092893 [JSTOR]

Among those of sociologists and near-sociologists, the following strike me as comparably excellent but in need of brief comments: Auguste Comte (René König [...]); Charles Horton Cooley (Robert C. Angell; there might be a bit more on the several meanings Cooley attached to "primary" in "primary group"; the "looking-glass self" and Cooley's potential contribution to the sociology of knowledge might have been mentioned; [...] (Wolff 1968: 809)

Angell, Robert Cooley 1968. Cooley, Charles H. In: Sills, David S. (ed.), International encyclopedia of the social sciences. Vol. 3. New York: Macmillan, 378-383. [lg]

[...] Herbert Spencer (Robert L. Carneiro; Spencer's paper on his reasons for dissenting from Comte, Spencer's dichotomy of military and industrial societies, Durkheim's critique of Spencer's notion of the origin of religion, and the recent revival of Spencer and evolutionism, notably by Parsons, might have been pointed out; the last remark also applies to René König's article on Leopold von Wiese [16: 548a]); [...] (Wolff 1968: 809)

I have also missed the memo.

Least satisfactory to me among the biographies are Talcott Parsons' of Durkheim and Pareto, both of which present their writer's and his subjects' ideas in a synthesis known to the reader of The Structure of Social Action and later works by Parsons, but hardly enabling the novice to distinguish between Parsons and Durkheim or Parsons and Pareto. In the Durkheim article, I missed something on the significance of Suicide for causal analysis and on Durkheim's interpretation of pragmatism. (Wolff 1968: 810)

Again, where was I when this memo was spread around?

Mitchell, G. D. 1971. Review of The Social Bond: An Introduction to the Study of Sociology by R. A. Nisbet. The British Journal of Sociology 22(2): 216-217. DOI: 10.2307/588216 [JSTOR]

The second main criticicsm lies in the particular predilections of the author, who seems to be committed to social behaviourism and symbolic interaction theory. This raises in this reviewer's mind the question of how far an introductory text-book can with propriety rely so heavily on a particular methodological approach. For whilst this approach may have its roots in the writings of Mead and Cooley and indeed of the great Max Weber, it should not pass un-noticed as being the current popular fashion. Whilst a text-book need not be old-fashioned it should at least be concerned with the received tradition rather than emphasize theoretical novelties. (Mitchell 1971: 217)

Nisbet, Robert Alexander 1970. The Social Bond: An Introduction to the Study of Sociology. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. [Internet Archive]

The Social Bond is well written, interesting and informative. As the title indicates it focuses attention on a discipline which is fundamentally concerned with social order, the social nature of human life and as such is non-reductive and opposes attempts to reduce the study of social life to the biological nature of man. (Mitchell 1971: 217)

Oh wow: (1) well written; (2) interesting; and (3) informative.

Motz, Annabelle B. 1971. Review of Assumptions of Social Psychology by R. E. Lana. American Sociological Review 36(5): 963-964. DOI: 10.2307/2093749 [JSTOR]

Throughout the book Lana strains to reduce the complexity of the ideas of various social psychologists to a few major "elements" (cause, necessary connections, inductions, etc.); but he constantly has to point out that the perspectives discussed contains elements of ambiguity. Decisive distinctions are difficult to come by. The result is a confusion of terminology, abstruseness, and circumlocution. (Motz 1971: 964)

Exactly why causality and free will are such unappealing topics. My impression is that after 150 years the philosophical problems with free will are much the same as in E. R. Clay's treatise but now constructed with precise and verbose terminology.

There is no mention of sociological social psychologists, not a single reference to G. H. Mead, Stryker, Deutscher, Cooley, Strauss, Clausen, Becker, or Blumer! Obviously, Lana has restricted his investigations to the work of modern social psychologists who are affiliated with psychology departments and to persons of psychoanalytic persuasion. (Motz 1971: 964)

Too bad.

Peters, George R.; Orbach, Harold L. 1972. Review of Social Relationships by G. J. McCall et al. The Sociological Quarterly 13(1): 140-142. [JSTOR]

This slim, but meaty and challenging volume contains five independently prepared essays which focus upon the structure, character, and functions of social relationships, and a collaborative final chapter. While each of the authors emphasize somewhat different aspects of social relationships, there are common elements which tie the papers together. (Peters; Orbach 1972: 140)

McCall, George J.; McCall, Michal M.; Denzin, Norman K.; Suttles, Gerald D.; Kurth, Suzanne B. 1970. Social Relationships. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company. [Internet Archive]

The authors emphasize the importance of the symbolization or recognition of the relationship by its members. To a considerable extent such recognition determines the probability of recurring interaction. The form which interaction in a social relationship assumes is based upon some functional fit between members respective roles and/or selves. (Peters; Orbach 1972: 140)

Brilliant! This may very well be the source for this emphasis in John Laver's treatment of "Communicative functions of phatic communion" (1975).

Finally, there is agreement that it is useful to view social relationships as a form of social organization. The reader will not, however, find a systematic and tightly argued treatment of this proposition throughout the book. Rather, the theoretical bases of the proposition are outlined in chapter one (by G. McCall) and reviewed in the collaborative final chapter. The final essay attempts to show how the remaining four papers - each of which could stand by itself - touch upon various organizational aspects of social relationships. (Peters; Orbach 1972: 141)

Just plain weird.

In chapter one G. McCall develops a framework for analyzing social relationships as a type of social organization. He argues that social relationships exhibit certain organizational features - bonds which tie members together into a common collectivity, structure, and culture. (Peters; Orbach 1972: 141)

Le bonds of union.

In chapter two M. McCall suggests that all social organizations may be analyzed in terms of their focus and boundary rules. She discusses these structural characteristics as found in encounters (à la Goffman) and social relationships. Her analysis produces an interesting and potentially fruitful paradigm which points up the complementarity or reciprocality between the focus and boundary rules of social relationships and encounters. (Peters; Orbach 1972: 141)

Focal/peripheral is an appealing distinction (e.g. Polanyi's focal and subsidiary attention) but "rules" not so much.

In chapter three Denzin is concerned with the rules (norms) of social relationships, which he distinguishes from the rules of the civil-segal order and rules of civil propriety. He suggests that the latter two categories are daily violated in enduring social relationships, indeed, such relationships are built on a deliberate violation of such rules. (Peters; Orbach 1972: 141)

I don't get it. I had to read this passage several times because I initially thought he was saying the exact opposite, that this process of daily and deliberately violating the rules for the sake of building up the relationship concerns "the rules (norms) of social relationships". As in, your relationship with an intimate partner may have stages or phases such as becoming comfortable passing gas in each other's company. Or "inside jokes" which break the rules of everyday language and would sound like nonsense to third persons. Or humans meowing at each other (or other cats, or dogs - who don't even know the language) or talking "baby talk" with children. Phatic communion on the whole, in this very general sense, is a violation of the norm of conveying ideas in a communicative situation; yet a necessary phase for social relationships to form (this is like saying "the beginning is important").

More significant, however, is his excellent discussion of the process by which relational rules are developed, elaborated and imposed within social relationships. His treatment of the internal structure of social relationships in terms of deviation from relational rules and of the ties between relational morality and the broader social order should be of significance to the student of social relationships. (Peters; Orbach 1972: 141)

Oh damn. I'm becoming increasingly convinced that this book is the basis of Laver's theory. I may have to read it.

In chapter four Suttles discusses friendship as a social institution. He shows how rules of public propriety are distinctly transformed with friendship relations. Deviation from the rules of public propriety may serve as one basis for the formation of friendship since it is one means of presenting a "real self," an essential component in friendship. Occasions for such deviation may become institutionalized. (Peters; Orbach 1972: 141)

The exact point I was making a paragraph earlier. Generally, I would tie it to the topic of sincerity or authenticity in phatic communion. I.e. the somewhat unexplored area of why it is that some persons saying some words wins you over while other persons saying the same words have negative or no impact. Perfunctory phatic communion vs profound personal communion. The point that these "deviations may become institutionalized" sounds valid; like children's summer camps, or parents insisting that their children go out and make trouble and friends now (I think it's a sitcom trope).

In chapter five Kurth contrasts The personal and social functions of friendship and friendly relations and examines differences between the two types of relationships in terms of bases of attraction, maintenance rules, and change. She focuses upon the character of interaction within friendship and friendly relations with a discussion of the differential impact of conflict and third parties upon the two types of relationships. (Peters; Orbach 1972: 141)

Could just as well call them personic functions. Now "attraction, maintenance rules, and change" sounds awfully lot like establishing, prolonging and discontinuing (Jakobson), or approaching, relationship maintenance, and detachment (Ruesch).

Since the authors call attention to what they see as the relative neglect of the study of social relationships as a phenomenon sui generis - that is as something other than simply the expression, however expanded or indirect, of "role relationships" - there is criticism, both implicit and explicit, of "role theory" à la Parsons as well as other frameworks for diverting "sociologists interested in interpersonal phenomena from their concern with social organization." (Peters; Orbach 1972: 141)

I'm really starting to form the impression that many people didn't like Talcott Parsons.

No sooner is the distinction made (by G. McCall) between "role" relationships and "social" relationships than it becomes clear that "role" relationships are viewed as "social" relationships at one end of a continuum whose basic dimension is formality-informality. That is, when the primary constraints upon behavior in social relationships are the assembled characteristics of the roles attendant upon positions the persons occupy, we have formal (social) relationships; when the primary constraints upon behavior are the interactors' conception or knowledge of the other and of themselves as persons, we have personal (social) relationships. However, what is not made clear - although implicitly recognized by the assertion that all social relationships are partly formal and partly personal - is the point that the sociological notion of role à la Mead is not "an abstract pattern of expectations, rights, and duties," and that there is no inherent opposition of role relationships and personal relationships; in fact, personal relationships are role relationships, albeit of a different character than formal relationships. One example is the social role of being a "true friend." This problem becomes central when McCall seeks to differentiate the structure of social relationships by arguing that the essential shape of formal relationships is determined by "the fit between a pair of roles" while that of personal relationships is "the fit between the personas that members of a relationships present to one another." But persona has been defined for us as any one of revealed sub-sets of role identities that constitute the self-structure of an individual and role identities are "a person's imaginative view(s) of himself as he likes to think of himself being and acting as an occupant of a particular social position." In short, the distinction breaks down because the author implicitly recognizes the central Meadian contribution to our understanding of social persons - that all social characteristics arise out of the meanings imparted by the role behavior we learn and our individualized adaptation of these. In this connection one might note the curious fact that although Cooley, Simmel and Weber are cited and quoted favorably, Mead is somehow not even mentioned or cited in a single one of these essays! (Peters; Orbach 1972: 142)

Wow. The "formality-informality" continuum is very basic stuff, and I've had to think along these lines many a times in relation with e.g. phatic communion during service encounters or doctor visits (e.g. Couplands arrive here two decades later through Laver). With "the interactors' conception or knowledge of the other" we're returning to Cooley's looking-glass self, social imagination, personal ideas, etc. The overall point here can be traced to Ruesch and Bateson's metacommunication, too (wouldn't be surprised if they were amongst the sources) - e.g. knowledge of the life and consciousness of others, and mutual recognition of this recognition. As to Mead's conspicuous absence, the situation is similar with my until-now confusion as to why Laver cites Malinowski and his contemporaries and fellow travelers then why does Laver's overall theoretical framework look like it was copy-pasted from several points in Jakobson's work (e.g. beginning, middle and end of the communication process; focus on past, present, and future; iconic, indexical and symbolic aspects, etc.). This Social Relationships being an intermediary would definitely explain it.

One other critical point should be noted. McCall consistently treats personal relationships as if only dyadic relationships qualify, following no doubt from his concern to exclude role considerations, while the other contributors make no such assumption and Denzin explicitly speaks of "two or more people engag(ing) in either symbolic or co-present interaction." (Peters; Orbach 1972: 142)

Just like Laver. The quote heavily implies that symbolic interaction is non-co-present interaction, i.e. communication via letters, and thus may not discriminate between real and fictional communicants, much like Cooley's "personal ideas". This review has been very valuable for my further research.

Glass, John F. 1974. Review of Sociology for the Modern Mind by I. Seger. Contemporary Sociology 3(1): 83-85. DOI: 10.2307/2063477 [JSTOR]

Chapter 3, entitled "The Classical Period of Sociology," discusses in some detail the contributions of Weber, Simmel, Pareto, and Durkheim. A much too brief section on human socialization compares Durkheim, Freud, Cooley, and Mead as four independent discoverers in common: "They discern a process, a slow development of the personality through the interaction of something given and something acting on it from the outside that then becomes part of the personality, is exposed to further influences, and so on" (p. 74). (Glass 1974: 84)

Why is it always you three? This very obvious statement is exactly what I'm currently grappling with - the boundary of the semiosphere and how an external input is selected and semiotized into the personality-culture of its target. Sadly practically inaccessible:

Seger, Imogen 1972. Sociology for the Modern Mind. New York: Macmillan.

Seger, although her sympathies are neo-Parsonian (i.e., Mertonian), fairly presents different sides of the controversy and, to her credit, does not neglect Sorokin's work as an alternative position. (Glass 1974: 84)

Echoes of some sociology department troubles.

Etzioni's "active society" is held out as an example of progress in sociological theory, a new, non-deterministic theory, which does not necessarily equate power with coercion and conflict, and allows for cooperation. (Glass 1974: 84)

Etzion, Emitai 1968. The Active Society: A Theory of Societal and Political Processing. New York: Free Press. [ESTER]

Hinkle, Gisela J. 1974. Review of The Structure of the Life-World by A. Schutz and T. Luckmann. Contemporary Sociology 3(2): 112-114. DOI: 10.2307/2062873 [JSTOR]

There has been during the last decade of American sociology a renewed interest in questions of social meaning, fundamental principles, and qualitative relationships which has encouraged awareness of more subjective-idealist theoretical orientations. Rather than seeking ideas in earlier American writings - such as those of Cooley, Small, Ellwood and the symbolic interactionists, these more recent theoretical concerns have focused on segments of Continental social philosophy. A unique figure in this movement has been Alfred Schutz who has become the major theoretical spokesman for phenomenological sociology and who has posthumously become a godfather to ethnomethodology. (Hinkle 1974: 112)

Pragmatism vs phenomenology. Peirce and Husserl having proxy arguments.

Furthermore, this life-world is structured in terms of various dimensions. First, it is the major realm of reality; the realms of fantasy, dreams, religion, and science being others. Secondly, it is distributed spatially both in the physical sense and in terms of social distance. Thirdly, it has temporal arrangements from the perspective of homogeneous or externally spatially measured time and of inner time or dureé. All of these affect the interaction and understanding of the ego or actor and the other and of ego's actions. (Hinkle 1974: 113)

Sounds like there's a primary modelling system (umwelt, natural language) and secondary modelling systems (art, play, and science).

Having examined the hypothetical case of two persons stranded (like Robinson Crusoe) on an island, they conclude that a "society" has indeed been formed because a society may consist of only two people if they share "a common fate, i.e., typically similar problems, a factual social structure, in this case limited to a we-relation, a common language, and a common stock of knowledge" (p. 289). Grounding society in the physical organisms of two (or more) people seems hardly in keeping with the priority of individual consciousness basic to phenomenology! (Hinkle 1974: 114)

If society is sharing a common fate then where do you draw the line? Is all humanity a society? Is all life a society?

Heydebrand, Ruth V. 1974. Review of The Making of Sociology by R. Fletcher. Contemporary Sociology 3(3): 222-224. DOI: 10.2307/2062567 [JSTOR]

Sociology is conceived of in broad terms, a "humane" subject; consequently psychology, history, anthropology, and social philosophy all require consideration:
Sociology - I hope to show - is not only one subject among others, but a subject which pervades, informs and transforms all others. It is a subject which stems from, and attempts to satisfy, the modern need to articulate all human knowledge into one large ordered perspective both for the sake of understanding, in itself, and to provide a basis for a sane and well-balanced social reform. It is the subject of central importance in and for our time (V. 1, p. 5, italics in original).
This statement should certainly cheer up those among us who have somehow been made to feel that there is little they can do in order to affect the course of events. (Heydebrand 1974: 222)

Hopeful.

Practical need and curiosity, inherent in human nature, are the basis of common-sense, which is actually "science in embryo." Any science is a critical reflection on and an elaboration of commonsense assumptions. (Heydebrand 1974: 222)

Phraseology. Made me think of how "phatic communion" is "a critical reflection on and an elaboration of commonsense assumptions" about everyday conversation, social intercourse, small talk, etc. ...Seeing that Cooley, too, has all the elements of phatic communion on his pages, I suspect that the notion is so common because it as-if sprouts naturally; it is conceived in a more-or-less recognizable form in so many places because the practical need and curiosity finds it everywhere.

Societies are systems of interconnected institutions, and particular institutions can only be understood in the context of such systems, or associational processes. In addition, society must be seen as essentially an historical process developing from simple to complex forms, but diversity of types of societies is limited because of universal features of human nature; thus universal generalizations are possible in sociology. (Heydebrand 1974: 222)

And here we have the science-fiction question: if human nature were more fluid than we thought, then the natural consequence would be more diverse types of human societies.

The need for a science of society as a means of control marks with few exceptions all further contributions to the field. Comte proclaims sociology as science, Mill sets down the rules, Spencer adds the dimension of evolution. Emphasizing consistency and continuity, or "system-building," Fletcher amply documents that sociology is moving toward the position he endorses. (Heydebrand 1974: 223)

Bada-bing, bada-boom.

In the second volume, Fletcher covers the contributions of the following sociologists: Toennies, Westermarck, Hobhouse, Durkheim, Weber, MacDougall, Cooley, Mead, Freud, Pareto, Malinowski, and Radcliffe-Brown. (Heydebrand 1974: 223)

Why is it always you three? I'm starting to get all too familiar with this crowd.

Strasser, Herman 1975. Review of Ferdinand Tönnies: A New Evaluation. Essays and Documents by W. J. Cahnman. Contemporary Sociology 4(5): 545-547. DOI: 10.2307/2063656 [JSTOR]

Although Tönnies is widely recognized as one of the founders of modern sociology, his role in American sociology has largely been that of a textbook celebrity. (Strasser 1975: 545)

Coming out of the gate hot.

It is true that Tönnies owes much to Marx's and Spencer's work - sociological classics that were in America for a long time either expelled from consideration as sociology, or declared dead. Undoubtedly, Tönnies discursive rather than systematic view of the comprehensive problem of human relations does make great demands on the student's erudition. However, there are numerous examples that a difficult style does not prevent a sociologist from becoming prominent. Rather, the obscure style of sociologists like Tönnies may have protected their work against adverse criticism. (Strasser 1975: 545)

Oh yeah, the Gemeinschaft vs Gesellschaft guy. Indeed, in many a textbook but rarely included in the active discussion of anything anymore, or so it feels.

In his study of the German academic community between 1890 and 1933, F. K. Ringer has recently shown that this represented a grave misunderstanding of Tönnies' scientific as well as political intentions The reactionary arguments (against modern society and for a romanticized revival of community) which others derived from his social theory made his work suspect to liberals and socialists. On the other hand, since Tönnies accepted socialism as a logical outcome of his social presuppositions of modern society, and since he also integrated Marxian ideas into his work, he had little chance to gain enduring acceptance by many conservatives. And yet, socialist intellectuals lacked comprehension of his work, the voluntaristic emphasis of which appeared alien to them. (Strasser 1975: 546)

On the fence and rejected by both sides? "They're throwing eggs! — They did this last time."

Tönnies' point of departure in pure or theoretical sociology is the idea that all social interactions and groups (i.e., social entities) are creations of human thought and will. Since social relationships exist only insofar as they are recognized and willed by the participants, social entities are conceived as being established by will which, in turn, is differentiated according to its relation to ends and means. Consequently, Tönnies arrives at two opposed and complementary types of social organization: one based on natural will (leading to Gemeinschaft), the other based on rational will (leading to Gesellschaft). The parallelism to Weber's types of social action is obvious. (Strasser 1975: 546)

To me, this just looks like a serious case of the Missing Firstness.

Although Tönnies held that the inevitability of the outcome of the historical process as claimed by Marx was unsubstantiated, and although the dissolution and transformation of the ties of community was to be considered a tragic necessity, he did envision, within rational modern society, the development of new types of social relations based on rational ethics. This would eventually lead to a socialistic order, which he viewed as dialectically uniting Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft on a new, higher level. (Strasser 1975: 547)

Traditional community, modern society, and then put a little mash-up remix in there, bada-bing, bada-boom.

Braude, Lee 1975. Review of The Context of Social Psychology: A Critical Assessment by J. Israel and H. Tajfel. Contemporary Sociology 4(3): 296-297. DOI: 10.2307/2063236 [JSTOR]

This is an important book that deserves to be read by sociologists trained largely within the North American ambit. It is a difficult book to read, perhaps because 3 of 11 chapters are translations; nevertheless, the necessary diligence pays off handsomely in providing the reader an insight into European perspectives on social psychology that transcend geographic or cultural boundaries. (Braude 1975: 296)

Israel, Joachim; Tajfel, Henri 1972. The Context of Social Psychology: A Critical Assessment. New York: Academic Press. [Internet Archive]

Moscovici examines "Society and Theory in Social Psychology" (Chap. 2) and concludes that the field has failed to develop a central theoretical focus, despite myriad experimentation. He argues for linguistic communication as inter-individual linkages as such a focus. (Braude 1975: 296)

To me this comes across as regular run of the mill "fact of communication"-phaticism.

Johan Asplund suggests that any theoretical approach to human behavior is freighted with value; Weber notwithstanding, a wertfrei social psychology is impossible. When once the evaluational character of these approaches is recognized, it will be found that the "classics" - notably the symbolic interactionism of Cooley and Mead - can still provide clues to an understanding of conduct that are meaningful even in our supposedly amoral contemporary world. (Braude 1975: 297)

"All sign systems are ideological" type claim.

Finally, in Chapter 11, Rom Harré maintains that social psychology ought to be concerned with the meanings that individuals bring to overt behavior. In order to understand interaction, a model must be generated that has some reference to the real world of human beings; the study that leads to such a construction Harré calls "ethogeny." The variables to be studied are the interrelation of meanings that occur among the participants in episodes, and the normative frameworks that structure the genesis and persistence of meanings. (Braude 1975: 297)

It is 1975, after all. It would have been weird if Rom Harré did not come crawl out of the woodwork.

Sztompka, Piotr 1975. Review of The Foundation of Sociological Theory by T. Abel. The Polish Sociological Bulletin 31/32: 78-80. [JSTOR]

Theory is a life-long preoccupation of Theodore Abel. Sometimes it is a source of distress, and sometimes - satisfaction. This is usually the case with people who are true to one idea despite changing circumstances. (Sztompka 1975: 78)

Fellow traveler.

The big asset of Abel's book is, that it is neither purely historical nor purely analytical. Instead it attempts to combine both approaches to sociological theory; discusses history of sociology from the point of view of its contemporary significance, and discusses contemporary theories from the point of view of its historical roots. (Sztompka 1975: 78)

The ideal.

Whereas the synthetic tradition is concerned with the comprehensive interpretation of the origin, the continuity and the destiny of human society, and clinical tradition with the alleviation of current social problems, analytical tradition takes up the study of the nature of human collectivities and social relations in their concrete varieties. (Sztompka 1975: 79)

Didn't I at one point invent a makeshift term for these process-triads that remind be of Jakobson's establish-prolong-discontinue?

The analytical approach focuses exclusively on "social factors," i.e. those determinants of human conduct that are generated by human associations and interactions. It attempts to provide propositions about the uniform relations of social factors with other social factors, or with factors of the different order, in either quantitative or qualitative (ideal-typical) terms. (Sztompka 1975: 79)

Reminds me of this: "Nor are statements about persons which refer them to culture and to social structure social psychological, if they fail to refer to the collective psychological processes which are reflected in individual behavior." (Hartung 1951: 608, above)

Dibble, Vernon K. 1976. Review of The Sociologists of the Chair by H. Schwendinger and J. R. Schwendinger. History and Theory 15(3): 293-321. DOI: 10.2307/2504731 [JSTOR]

This very important book "is a study of the relationship between the newly emerging science of sociology" in the United States during the forty years around the turn of the century and "a particular phase in the development of liberalism." Sociology was born in an era when "laissez-faire liberalism was reconstituted and a new mode of thought, corporate liberalism, emerged as the dominant liberal ideology" (xvii). "Sociology was essentially a liberal response to the great conflicts of the times" (3). It was and is, in large measure, an apologetic for corporate capitalism. The writings of the founders of American sociology were "patently ideological statements" in which the authors were "explicit" about their "ideological defense of capitalism, imperialism, racism, and sexism" (6). (Dibble 1976: 293)

My fav era. The claim about sociology reminds me of some economics history professor I heard on a podcast who said that most economics departments in the U.S. teach bunk and are paid to teach bunk just to stave off the competition of Marxist economics. In any case, right off the bat this sounds like advanced level reading better put off till later. [Also, 600-page "basic books" — nu-huh.]

Schwendinger, Herman; Schwendinger, Julia R. 1974. The Sociologists of the Chair: A Radical Analysis of the Formative Years of North American Sociology (1883-1922). New York: Basic Books. [Internet Archive | lg]

Second, in response to the urgent need for "new instruments of social control," the American sociologists "became preoccupied with the concept of social control [and] generally refrained from analyzing the systematic use of violence for the maintenance and expansion of capitalism." Instead, they stressed "mutual obligations and value consensus" (443). The authors suggest that this "concentration on moral relationships" stemmed from "the close identification between sociology and [...] social work, public welfare, and sectarian or non-sectarian philanthropic agencies" which attempted to "ameliorate the problems of working-class people chiefly through moral means" and without recourse to outright political (much less revolutionary) tactics" (444, emphasis omitted). (Dibble 1976: 296)

Abstinence for sexual education and abortion, church for alcoholics and narcotics addicts, prayer for school shootings, community donations instead of universal healthcare, etc. etc. until you have a perfect society with no catastrophic moral failings at all. | Vegetarianism and "green lifestyle" are moral choices for the consumer and not something factory farming and fossil fuel companies have any involvement with.

In religious versions of natural law, its ultimate source is the divine will. God established nature, and human society was subordinate to nature. Hence, the ultimate origin of society was God's will. When natural law became secularized, however, the ultimate origin of human society was no longer God, but human nature. For example, Hobbes "regarded natural human purposes to be chiefly organized around the desire for self-preservation: it was therefore man's earthly characteristics which justified social relationships, rather than the natural necessity to move closer to God" (11, emphasis omitted). (Dibble 1976: 297)

Noted because of "human nature" being a common theme between Cooley and Stapledon.

First, societies are rooted in the human nature of individual persons. Second, whether human beings seek primarily to defend themselves against others (Hobbes), or to experience pleasure (Bentham), or rationally to calculate advantages to themselves in exchange relationships (Smith), they are egoistic in their competition for scarce goods. There is a basic contradiction between "individual" and "society." Hence, as William A. Whyte wrote in 1920, "the problem of society is to integrate their activities." That "integration" might be "sovereignty" as in Hobbes; the "social contract" as in Locke; or the "invisible hand" of Adam Smith and of laissez-faire liberalism. Under corporate liberalism it was "socialization" and "social control." Quoting Whyte again: "The individual in his cultural progress brings his instincts under increasingly better control" (362). (Dibble 1976: 298)

(1) experience pleasure; (2) defend themselves; and (3) calculate advantages. Bringing instincts under better control of reason being a novelty I deem suspect; what about the virtue of modesty or steadfastness in reigning in one's passions in Ancient Greece? I have the impression that the very earliest philosophy was largely about self-control and the repression of passions or our "animal nature" or whatever else. — In fact, I'm pretty sure that it went like this: Step 1 — Everything is water, fire, earth, and air; Step 2 — Man is part animal, part god, and the godly part must subdue the animalistic part; Step 3 — Triangles all the way down.

As Ross and others used this concept, it bridged the most macrosociological and the most microsociological topics. It could refer to the reconciliation of conflicting interest groups by the state; to internal controls which depend, in the words of Ross, on "a developed self-sense" (207); and to many things in between, such as tradition and public opinion. (Dibble 1976: 298)

Arenenud enesetunnetus. This must be Ross's Social Control (1900) — damn, earlier than I thought (I was off by a decade into the 20th c.).

Their reading is based, first of all, upon the plain meaning of published words. When Albion Small writes that he sees no alternative to capitalism, no great interpretative leap is required to assert that he was not a socialist. When Franklin Giddings writes that "the combination of small states into larger political aggregates must continue until all the semi-civilized, barbarian, and savage communities of the world are brought under the protection of the larger civilized nations," no great interpretive leap is required to assert that he supported imperialism. But the meaning of words is not always plain. (Dibble 1976: 299)

Is European Union an example of imperialism? Are there many empires in history that expanded through diplomacy and voluntary membership?

On some points their case would have been weaker. But on others it would have been stronger. For example, they assert that the "absence of socialist writings" from the American Journal of Sociology under Albion Small's editorship "is the most affirmative indicator of the ideologically restricted boundaries of the field during the formative years" (509). They could have strengthened their case by pointing out that one of Small's purposes in founding the Journal was precisely to combat socialist or other radical ideas, and to promote reformism. In a letter of April 25, 1895 to President Harper of the University of Chicago, Small proposed that the university found a journal of sociology and argued that such a journal was "needed both to exert restraint upon utopian social effort and to encourage and direct well advised attempts at social cooperation." (Dibble 1976: 301)

Of course.

Again, the significance of the fact that E. A. Ross avoided "any reference to a ruling class or oligarchy in modern differentiated societies cannot be overestimated. In his work, the dynamic functions of a ruling class in capitalist societies were replaced by vague references to a mystical collective mind and public consciousness" (209). (Dibble 1976: 301)

I have to say, I think I've come around to it. Now "a mystical collective mind" sounds kinda cool and I want to know the background of this idea.

For example suppose that the concern of Cooley and of Mead with selves and with self-images was an attempt to bring the values and the individualistic modes of cognition characteristic of free-market capitalism, and of laissez-faire liberalism, into the era of Big Business and of monopoly capitalism. Once we have the concept of "self" and of "self-image," however, we can ask questions about other societies which we could not otherwise ask. For example, what was it about medieval society, for all its definition of persons in terms of structural position and ascribed social location, that generated literature (such as troubador romances) in which selves seem strongly present; while selves are virtually absent from, say, Homeric epics? (Dibble 1976: 302)

The supposition leaves me a little baffled. Does the author think that the philosophers' concern with the self began in the Victorian age? The other point comes from Julian Jaynes' Bicameral Mind?

For example, Durkheim's concept of "anomie," and the importance of that concept in his thought, depended upon his more or less Hobbesian view of human nature. Anomie is tormenting only because the human passions, unlike those of the lower animals, are inherently open-ended. Hence, in the absence of external control over the passions, human beings cannot gratify any desires, and are doomed to unending torments. (Dibble 1976: 303)

Beautiful.

It does seem sensible, however, and helpful for clarity of communication, to reserve that term to describe people who, first of all, support a revolutionary change from capitalism to socialism, and ultimately to communism, in a sense which includes the abolition of commodity production and of commodity exchange; and who also accept and use in their thinking a large number of the concepts and laws of motion mentioned above. (Dibble 1976: 308)

Degrowth and stopping this obscene waste.

For example, the founders of American sociology rarely footnoted or took over terminology from their colleagues. Cooley's "larger mind" or [|] "larger whole" had affinities with Small's "social process" and with Giddings's "consciousness of kind." But, so far as I know, none of these three ever attempted in print to figure out the overlap and the differences between their central concepts. Were they in a market that required product differentiation in the packaging? And could this fact be the source of the "terminological chaos" to which the authors refer? Cooley's Human Nature and the Social Order (1902) was reviewed in dozens of daily newspapers all over the United States. Shortly after the turn of the century Ross went in for popular travel books. Small lectured to lay grounds and, like Giddings, wrote for non-scholarly readers in non-scholarly journals. These facts suggest that the market for the ideas of the founders of American sociology was to a significant extent in a mass public. They were not writing simply for each other, but were also competing for attention in the market. They were attempting not only to converge into a science, but also to maintain their product differentiation. (Dibble 1976: 311-312)

So glad I didn't quit before getting to this (I briefly considered it - 30 pages is overstaying one's welcome for a book review.) This is the first note I have, I think, of someone pointing out how tedious it is that all these American writers all have their own unique little idioms for everything (Mead and Goffman are especially at fault with this). Well, it might as well be marketing. We're talking about the definition of the situation™.

The founders could not have learned Marxism in the German universities where Small, Ross, Cooley, Park, and Mead studied. Members of the socialist party, Marxist or not, were exclided from university faculties there. So they had to learn Marxism on their own, just as they might have learned the teachings of Confucius, Aquinas or Mary Baker Eddy. And, when you try to learn Marxism on your own, the chances are very good that you will simply misunderstand it. (Dibble 1976: 317)

You need to come learn Marxism with us and no you can't call your mother, she's an enemy of the people.

Finally, in the absence of such an uprooting from their liberal heritage, as the founders of American sociology looked around the society in which they lived, they saw many issues - such as the place of immigrants, the [|] relations between state governments and the federal government (on which Cooley's father wrote a book), and controversies over prohibition - to which Marxism did not appear to speak. (Dibble 1976: 318-319)

Cooley, Thomas M. 1871. A Treatise on the Constitutional Limitations Which Rest Upon the Legislative Power of the States of the American Union. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company. [Internet Archive]

Soper, Philip 1977. Review of Knowledge and Politics by R. M. Unger. Michigan Law Review 75(7): 1539-1552. DOI: 10.2307/1287810 [JSTOR]

On the one hand, the morality of desire projects a portrait of the self as an unconnected sequence of arbitrary, changing desires, having nothing necessarily in common with the same self over time or wit hthe rest of mankind. It thus denies both "The continuity and the humanity of the self" (p. 57). The morality of reason, on the other hand, whose formal, indeterminate laws ignore individual strivings, has an opposite and equally unhappy consequence: negation of the self's "capacity for moral innovation and its individual identity" (p. 57). (Soper 1977: 1541)

I can't follow this reviewer at all but this phrase sold it for me.

Unger, Roberto Mangabeira 1975. Knowledge and Politics. New York: The Free Press. [Internet Archive | lg]

This is not to say that one must accept Christian dogma in order to accept Unger's invitation. Unger is not attempting to persuade one of the existence of a heavenly kingdom, but of the possibility of establishing a kingdom of man on earth that significantly improves on the only kingdom that Unger believes liberalism is capable of supporting. Like Marx and Weber, Unger is sensitive to the connection between theoretical doctrine and social experience and to the difficulty of meaningfully altering the one without simultaneously altering the other. (Soper 1977: 1542)

This author has such a tentacle-like style of writing that it is a torture to read. It's like listening to Ben Shapiro talk. Here's more:

Soper, Philip 1984. A Theory of law. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. [lg]

Soper, Philip 2002. The Ethics of Deference: Learning from Law’s Morals. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [lg]

It is a view that rejects both extreme individualism (under which community collapses) [|] and extreme collectivism (under which self disappears). (Soper 1977: 1542-1543)

Is this Herbert Spencer's "dead-level" theory?

One can reason about ends more or less likely to produce happiness (perhaps by reference to those same aspects of human nature than Unger describes), even though the proof that happiness itself is the ultimate end rests, like all first principles, beyond the reach of reason. (Soper 1977: 1545)

I don't know what it is about this writer but these 15 pages are twice as torturous as the devout marxist's 30 pages on how to be a devout marxist.

But unlike treatises that confine their analyses to "the order of ideas," Unger continually compares the theoretical order with "the order of social consciousness," giving life to abstract discussion by reference to experiences ranging from personal, romantic, and perverse love (pp. 218-19) to the philosopher's quest for ontological proof of the existence of God (p. 293). (Soper 1977: 1547)

It's too bad the reviewer waxes on about whatever worms are rotting his brains and only quotes out-of-context phrases because these out-of-context phrases themselves sound extremely rad in comparison.

Utopian theories have, after all, received a bad philosophical press of late, not so much or only because they are implausible, but because they do not appear necessarily preferable to nonutopian alternatives. Unger insists that his is not a plan for utopia, because utopias envision a static society isolated in history, whereas Unger contemplates continued reciprocal development of society and self through history (p. 237). (Soper 1977: 1548)

Every sentence an unclear insinuation. Even the paraphrase sounds rad and in line with Cooley and stuff.

But if the motivation for the establishment of organic groups is provided by an ideal that seeks complete resolution of uncertainty in the central aspects of human existence, then the recognition that only God can achieve the ideal perhaps should and will at some point eliminate the motivation. (Soper 1977: 1548)

"Well, first of all, through God all things are possible, so jot that down."

Manning, Peter K. 1977. Review of Drawa in Life: The Uses of Communication in Society by J. E. Combs and M. W. Mansfield. Contemporary Sociology 6(6): 733-735. DOI: 10.2307/2066398 [JSTOR]

The problem of symbolic interactionism, reflected in this collection, is that it has become a litany, a responsive reading, a ritualized program to be extolled on cue, performed mechanistically, exhorted and exclaimed. (Manning 1977: 734)

"a liturgical form or process in which leader and congregation read passages aloud alternatively"

Rituals are not easily eviserated; etiolated or not, they continue to mark the outer boundaries of a sacred concern, and lie at the heart of any perspective. (Manning 1977: 734)

Can you be! "to bleach and alter the natural development of (a green plant) by excluding sunlight"

Is all dramaturgical analysis "humanistic," or rooted in concern for the individual, his/her feelings, moods, and situationally negotiated choices? I would argue it is not, and would further argue that although Goffman is consistently labeled here as a dramaturgical sociologist, that he is not focused upon or concerned with interaction (Encounters, 35); it is interested in the rules that organize and make meaningful experience, not experience itself (Encounters, 28, 41; Frame Analysis, chapter 10; and is not interesting in individuals, but their situations (Interaction Ritual, 3). Rather than showing the inherent freedom of individuals, Goffman aims to show [|] the profound limits upon them. Rather than elaborating the joy of creative meaning construction, he trods on the balloon of meaning showing that it, like computer tape, is as thin as any other strip of human doing. The orderly nature of human society is not fragile, not constructed by humans (as the litany goes), but in Goffman's terms, is based upon an ever-so-powerful invisible code. That it may be occasionally perceived as being fragile is an important datum, but its abiding invisibility is far more significant. We have often in employing dramaturgical analysis grasped at straws, failing to see what winds were carrying them. (Manning 1977: 734-735)

This writer's style I enjoy immensely. Vivid imagery, rare words, and scotching critique - it has everything. (I've apparently read one piece here before from this reviewer - I was certain the name was familiar.)

But Bourdieu, Bernstein, Leach, and Goffman do hold forth a less eclectic version of drama, a vision rooted, not floating, in neo-symbolic meanings unattached to the system of signs constituting the rules of experience. (Manning 1977: 735)

Even the a titles are grand. This one really sounds like a band name.

Giddens, Anthony 1979. Schutz and Parsons: Problems of Meaning and Subjectivity. Contemporary Sociology 8(5): 682-685. DOI: 10.2307/2065417 [JSTOR]

This framework was first of all outlined in The Structure of Social Action, originally published in 1937. There are many (including myself) who would regard this formidably long and dense volume as a greater achievement than any other single work or essay-collection that Parsons has published subsequently. (Giddens 1979: 682)

Parsons, Talcott 1949. The Structure of Social Action: A Study in Social Theory with Special Reference to a Group of Recent European Writers. New York: Free Press. [Internet Archive]

Schutz read The Structure of Social Action, when it appeared, with much more attention and excitement than his own work had awoken in Parsons, as the exchange of letters reported in the book under review reveals. Parsons read Schutz's book, he says, "shartly after it appeared," but "did not find it of primary significance" for the issues he was working on in his researches for The Structure of Social Action. Schutz acquired a copy of Parsons' book early in 1938 and "realised immediately the importance and value" of the system of thought which it outlined. (Giddens 1979: 682)

"For in this use of speech the bonds created between hearer and speaker are not quite symmetrical, the man linguistically active receiving the greater share of social pleasure and self-enhancement."

The exchange of letters terminates in an intellectual impasse, but also takes on a tone of slight bitterness. Schutz's reply to Parsons' defence of his point of view is one of rather hurt reproach. He sent his paper to Parsons, he says, only as a draft, in order to elicit Parsons' comments, and in the belief that most of his ideas were complementary to Parsons' own. But Parsons "interpreted it exclusively as a criticism" of his work and, Schutz felt, rejected it in its entirety. Parsons replied in a conciliatory way, agreeing that his critical remarks "were rather sharply formulated," but adding "I did not in the least intend them to be derogatory but only to state my own position as clearly as I possibly could." (Giddens 1979: 683)

The human ego is a hellova drug.

Orum, Anthony M. 1980. The Varieties of Sociological Experience. Contemporary Sociology 9(6): 746-754. DOI: 10.2307/2065258 [JSTOR]

He [Kenneth Bock], like several other authors in the book, mentions the pivotal role of Condorcet in fashioning the conceptual imagery of the stages of development and progress in mankind. And later, it becomes clear that Auguste Comte's images of progress and of history, of the three stages through which mankind is presumed to pass, owes much to the inspiration and genius provided by Condorcet. (Orum 1980: 748)

I'm still confusing Condorcet and Condillac.

But Freund's Weber is not the only one represented here. Take the Weber of Dawes, for example. Here Weber is the scholar in whose eyes the creativity and emotional activities of human beings become transformed into institutions metaphorically conveyed as the iron cage. (Orum 1980: 751)

Not far removed from "institutions exist because of the "projective systems" of the individual" (Hartung 1951: 608, above).

Yet, by and large, the work of the American theorists would appear to be simply that of social reform, and a smattering of insights here and there. George Herbert Mead, whose ideas have begun to take hold among a wide variety of students, particularly those interested in the character of language insofar as it involves and presupposes relationships and interaction, comes off as virtually paltry and unrecognizable. Charles Horton Cooley, a most interesting figure who has prompted a variety of scholarly endeavors, also seems here to be very uninteresting and rather intellectually timid. (Orum 1980: 752)

That the early American social theorists (including Cooley) were all gung-ho for eugenics and social control reminds me of an anecdote told possibly by Lorenz (maybe, possibly in a book about Instincts that I don't think ended up on this blog) about zoology goes: the Europeans started with the study of worms, fish and birds to work their knowledge up to understand mammals whereas the Americans started with the study of dogs, dolphins and chimpanzees to work their knowledge up to manipulate humans.

Thus, in various places, American sociology is passed off as mere positivism, as simple-minded empiricism, as the vapid social anthropology of W. Lloyd Warner, or, in the case of America's most eminent social theorist, Parsons, as mere borrowing, and subsequent distortion, of European ideas. But perhaps Americans come off the very worst for their obvious virtues. That which Americans have done so well, in Dawes' words, for instance, ah docing and eclecting, for these achievements they are portaryed here as the Devil incarnate, furthering the tendencies, let us say, of Weber, rather than offering the hope of restoring the necessary critical judgment and reason to the "course of the world." (Orum 1980: 753)

Mis sa eklektid siin? This out-of-nowhere jab at whoever this unconnected social anthropologist is made me look him up: W. Lloyd Warner's "research included important studies of black communities in Chicago and the rural South" and "Warner's focus on uncomfortable subjects made his work unfashionable". Which is it, then: vapid or uncomfortable?

Avison, William R. 1981. Review of Conceiving the Self by M. Rosenberg. The Canadian Journal of Sociology 6(2): 212-214. DOI: 10.2307/3340091 [JSTOR]

A major difficulty that often confronts the scientist is the problem of distancing oneself from one's research. This is all the more difficult for the social scientist who studied his fellow human beings. The problem is further exacerbated for the social psychologist by the fact that he studies how others think. For him, the pitfalls are to explain by empathy and introspection and to confuse what we say with what we think. These are traps into which symbolic interactionists are inevitably enticed. (Avison 1981: 212)

Comes across a bit blunt and reductionistic.

How does social life - interpersonal interaction, immediate social context, broader social structure - help to shape the individual's views of what he is and wishes to be? (Avison 1981: 212)

Rosenberg, Morris 1979. Conceiving the Self. New York: Basic Books.

Part 1 of Conceiving the Self devotes two chapters to the first two questions. Rosenberg asserts that the self-concept has three broad "regions." The extant self represents how the individual sees himself. For Rosenberg, any consideration of this region must necessarily consider its various parts, their interrelationships, and the limits of the extant self. The desired self reflects how the individual would like to see himself while the third region, the presenting self, describes how the individual shows himself to others.
Rosenberg then focuses on two motives, self-esteem and self-consistency, that are related to the self-concept. He advances four principles that purport to account for diffecences in self-esteem. The principles of reflected appraisals, social comparison, self attribution, and psychological centrality are all derived [|] from well-known sources such as Sullivan, Mead, Cooley, Thibault, and Kelley. These principles are described and elaborated in what is perhaps the key chapter in this monograph. (Avison 1981: 212-213)

Doesn't sound that bad. Sadly it is currently practically inaccessible.

Reynolds, David 1981. Review of School and the Social Order by F. Musgrove. British Journal of Sociology of Education 2(1): 105-113. [JSTOR]

Four pages later he argues that "The serious unbridgable gap is not between [|] middle class teachers and working class pupils but between teachers who are actually working in schools and educationists who proscribe for them. Teachers in slum areas of big cities know that their middle classness is not part of the problem of educational failure and is in any event an invention of sociologists". (Reynolds 1981: 105-106)

The madeupness of middleclassness.

The thoughts of Pierre Bourdieu are "concealed in verbose language and a tedious and pretentious terminology. The only saving grace would be that he is sometimes right. He seldom is" (p. 26). Paolo Friere writes "quite incredible verbiage and in any case is "only saying one thing of note, which any competent teacher knows anyway" (p. 57). (Reynolds 1981: 106)

"Why would you say something so controversial yet so brave?"

This 'middle ground' of Musgrove's, his espousal of the ideas of Cooley, "who found a convincing middle ground between emphasis on society as a 'thing', on the one hand, and as an idea on the other" (p. 15) and his assertion of the importance of institutional definitions of the situation as well as individual re-definitions, mark mould, looking at how reality and identity are formed and re-formed both by individual definitions of the situation and 'institutional' constraints. (Reynolds 1981: 108)

Musgrove, Frank 1979. School and the Social Order. New York: Wiley. [Internet Archive]

Musgrove comments - with obvious relish - that "The middle class child socialised to a universe of transcendant meanings can find school only persecutory, a sustained assault on his essential self" (p. 52). (Reynolds 1981: 111)

What meanings are those?

Ultimately, though, Musgrove's book must stand faulted by its own sizeable deficiencies in scholarly merit. There are many examples of statements that are (by all conventional canons of validity) simply wrong - on page 190, for example, we are told that "The Public School must be abolished. This is not because they are strongholds of privilege - in fact they are highly meritocratic". (Reynolds 1981: 111)

Oh look, it's the 1980s already! The reviewer is extremely critical of the book and I noticed that just like Soper, above, the Reynolds quotes short sentences frequently.

Bannister, Robert C. 1982. The Historical Case of Sociological Knowledge. History of Education Quarterly 22(2): 239-244. DOI: 10.2307/367754 [JSTOR]

The authors focus on six figures who shaped the discipline in the decades before World War I: Lester F. Ward, William Graham Sumner, Franklin H. Giddings, Albion W. Small, Edward A. Ross, and Charles H. Cooley. In addition, Professors Smith and Lewis examine the contributions of the philosophers Peirce, James, Dewey, and George Herbert Mead, while extending the list of sociologists to include William I. Thomas, Charles A. Ellwood, and Edward C. Hayes. (Bannister 1982: 239)

Fuhrman, Ellsworth R. 1980. The Sociology of Knowledge in America 1883-1915. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. [Internet Archive]

Hinkle, Roscoe C. 1980. Founding Theory of American Sociology, 1881-1915. Boston, etc.: Routledge & Kegan Paul. [Internet Archive]

Lewis, J. David; Smith, Richard L. 1980. American Sociology and Pragmatism: Mead, Chicago Sociology, and Symbolic Interaction. Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press. [Internet Archive]

Although Hinkle limits himself to an essentially descriptive summary of university expansion, changes in related social [|] sciences and European influences, he leaves the impression that the rise of sociology was somehow an inevitable stage in the growth of science, a thesis not unlike that Albion Small urged half a century ago in his Origins of Modern Sociology (1924). (Bannister 1982: 240-241)

Small, Albion W. 1967. Origins of Sociology. New York: Russell & Russell. [Internet Archive]

Not only did Hayes never significantly refer to Durkheim then or later (despite awareness of his work), but he explicitly criticized the social realism of Luther Bernard's "Transition to an Objective Standard of Social Control" (1911), a thesis by a maverick Chicagoean who owed a much clearer debt to Durkheim. In line with his own attack on the "social forces error", Hayes welcomed Bernard's assault on theorists who rooted institutions in desire (Ward) but would not accord society the priority over the individual that Bernard proposed, insisting rather that the test of social standards remains "democratic individual satisfactions." (4) (Bannister 1982: 242)

Bernard, Luther Lee 1911. The Transition to an Objective Standard of Social Control. A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Literature in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Department of Sociology. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. [Internet Archive]

Although at Columbia and Chicago sociology assumed different forms in the 1920's, the outcome of these developments had some common characteristics: an emphasis on methodology over substance; an attack on "metaphysical" speculation now associated with pre-war evolutionism; and a cult of neutrality that seemed to place social science at the service of anyone who would pay the tab. (Bannister 1982: 242)

Saucy.

The fashionable emphasis on "social control" also misses an irony in the ideological aims of these founders. In Dynamic Sociology Ward's purpose was "radical", not merely "in part", but in the fundamental conviction that the only end of social organization was the satisfaction of "desire", a view closer to the sexual radicalism of the 1960s than of the Taylorism of the 1910s. A shift in this balance from liberation to order, from subjective desire to their behavioral manifestations - evident in different ways in Small's theory of "interests", in Giddings' measurements of "social pressure", and even in Ward's Pure Sociology (1903) - was a complex process that cannot be reduced to taxonomy. (Bannister 1982: 243)

Ward, Lester F. 1926. Dynamic Sociology, or Applied Social Science: As Based Upon Statical Sociology and the Less Complex Sciences. In two volumes. Vol. I. New York; London: D. Appleton and Company. [Internet Archive | Vol. II]

Smith, Kenneth J. 1982. Introducing Sociology: Left, Right, and Conventional. Contemporary Sociology 11(4): 377-379. DOI: 10.2307/2068778 [JSTOR]

The discipline of sociology really does not need four more introductory text books. In spite of the overwhelming number of textbooks in print, however, the four reviewed here are worth considering. (Smith 1982: 377)

Benkin, Richard L. 1981. Sociology: A Way of Seeing. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. [Internet Archive]

Giner, Salvador 1975. Sociology. London: Robertson. [ESTER]

Otten, C. Michael 1981. Power, Values, and Society: An Introduction to Sociology. Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman.

Zeitlin, Irving m. 1981. The Social Condition of Humanity: An Introduction to Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press. [Internet Archive]

Giner's Sociology is a translation and revision of a work originally published in Catalan, and first published in English in 1974. The functionalist point of view pervades this short, terse, and unelaborated work; the book is not really suitable for an introductory sociology course. (Smith 1982: 377)

Cool. There's a copy at the library. I might try a chapter.

Otten's chapter on culture is the linchpin of the final section, "Structures of Consciousness." Culture is not an integrated entity but is driven by a dialectic of competing material and nonmaterial ideas. Technology and power are the dominant forces influencing culture. The upper culture controls the "modes of mental production" and legitimizes the distribution of wealth and power; however, the cultural world has a degree of autonomy. While material interests are the stronger influence, occasionally cultural values can upset material cultures. (Smith 1982: 378)

As basic as it gets.

Benkin brings in the work of Freud, Cooley, and Mead to emphasize the social nature of human learning. (Smith 1982: 378)

Why is it always you three?

Pfohl, Stephen J. 1982. Review of The Sociology of Knowledge in America: 1883—1915 by E. R. Fuhrman. Social Forces 61(1): 302-304. DOI: 10.2307/2578096 [JSTOR]

Fuhrman examines the work of William Sumner, Lester Ward, Franklin H. Giddings, Albian W. Small, Edward. A. Ross, and Charles H. Cooley. These "founding fathers" are selected because each is said to have contributed significantly to the "intellectual tone" of early American sociology, occupied a position at one of the important early centers of graduate training (Brown, Yale, Columbia, Wisconsin, Chicago, and Michigan), and served as president of the American Sociological Association (then Society). (Pfohl 1982: 302)

Already on the list.

Other indices of early American sociology's propensity to legitimize and rationally improve the existing capitalist order are suggested in Fuhrmann's consideration of how the major theorists dealt with the problem of knowledge. Each, in one way or another, conceived of knowledge as derived from the whole society in its organic totality. None, with the possible exception of Cooley, viewed the production and distribution of knowledge as guided by political-economic interests. (Pfohl 1982: 303)

Thus far I've only read one book by Cooley and don't yet recognize what this might be referring to.

Fuhrman's description of the similarities and dissimilarities in the thinking of the six early theor1sts and his attempt to excavate their implicit political commitments are the strong points of this book. (Pfohl 1982: 303)

Sem1toic!

Campbell, James 1984. Review of The Individual and the Social Self by G. H. Mead and D. L. Miller. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 20(1): 72-75. [JSTOR]

George Herbert Mead died in April of 1931, having published during his lifetime a substantial number of suggestive articles. However, were these articles all that we knew of Mead's ideas, it is unlikely that he would have become a major figure in American philosophy. They hinted at, but did not develop, a systematic philosophical position. Over the years there has been a great deal of discussion about why Mead did not publish more, most of it generally conforming to Dewey's view that Mead was continually seeing "new phases and relations" in his thinking. (Campbell 1984: 72)

Similar ordeal as with Malinowski: both lived at a time when scientific paradigms were swapping left and right.

Soon after his death, it was some of these same students and colleagues who undertook the project which eventually saw into print four volumes of manuscripts and transcriptions of classroom lectures: The Philosophy of the Present (1932), Mind, Self and Society (1934), Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century (1936), and The Philosophy of the Act (1938). This material, affixed onto the skeleton of his published articles, made Mead's systematic philosophical position apparent and finally raised him to the position of a major American thinker. (Campbell 1984: 72)

Mead, George Herbert 1932. The Philosophy of the Present. London: The Open Court Company. [Internet Archive | lg]

Mead, George Herbert 1934. Mind, Self and Society: From the standpoint of a Social Behaviorist. Edited, with introduction, by Charles W. Morris. Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press. [Internet Archive | lg]

Mead, George Herbert 1936. Movement of Thought in the Nineteenth Century. Edited by Merritt H. Moore. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. [Internet Archive]

Mead, George Herbert 1938. The Philosophy of the Act. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. [Internet Archive | lg]

Mead, George Herbert 1982. Mead The Individual and the Social Self: Unpublished Works of George Herbert Mead. Edited with an Introduction by David L. Miller. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. [Internet Archive | lg]

In any case there is no 'new' Mead to be found in The Individual and the Social Self. The figures whom Mead discusses are the same ones he discusses elsewhere: Wundt and Darwin, James and Cooley, Thorndike and Watson. The examples Mead uses are the same as well: fighting dogs, baseball teams, boxers and fencers, parrots and songbirds, oxen and primates. And the ideas and concepts are the ones that Mead worked on all his life: the naturalized mind, consciousness and self-consciousness, the gesture and the significant symbol, the I and the me, etc. (Campbell 1984: 73)

My impression is that if one has read Mind, Self and Society, they have read it all.

Behind Miller's efforts is the belief that Mead had an overall vision of the social and reflective origin and nature of the self which he repeatedly tried to get into words. As Miller writes, Mead "spent most of his intellectual life unraveling the implications of this insight" (pp. 10-11). (Campbell 1984: 74)

Personally, I too find the nexus of imagination, reflection, and society in Cooley's writings appealing, and would like to examine if it can be translated into other semiotic idioms. There's definitely a real nugget in there.

Krohn, Roger 1984. Review of The Social Basis of Scientific Discoveries by A. Brannigan. The Canadian Journal of Sociology 9(1): 102-106. DOI: 10.2307/3340473 [JSTOR]

Brannigan is also historical in his in-depth review of the literature, ultimately locating his own formulations as the reversal of an original sixteenth-century Platonic mystique about the non-rational sources of discovery. Brannigan's critique of the explanation of discovery by special talent or "genius" extends also to a critique of Gestalt psychology, in which he fails to find any opening for an investigation of the cognitive moves made by an inventor/discoverer. (Krohn 1984: 103)

Revelation?

Brannigan sees the psychological line of study (Polanyi, Popper, Koestler, and Kuhn) and the cultural maturation line as sharing a "mentalistic" conception of discovery, as assuming that the key events of discovery occurred "inside someone's head" and as ignoring (Popper, Koestler) or underplaying (Kuhn) the social process by which claims come to be taken as discoveries. This mentalistic conception is to be countered by his social constructivism. (Krohn 1984: 104)

Brannigan, Augustine 1981. The Social Basis of Scientific Discoveries. New York: Cambridge University Press. [lg]

The cultural maturation line of studies has also a dialectical structure (not Brannigan's term), originating in social Darwinism (F. Galton) stressing the role of hereditary genius and the difference of science from mere common sense, and of creative from mere routine science. The social Darwinists were opposed on the one side by social progressives (Ward, Baldwin, Cooley) and on the other by the cultural maturationists (D. Thomas, Ogburn, Kroeber, Merton) who used multiple independent discoveries rhetorically to undermine the uniqueness of discovery and to refute any necessary role for extraordinary talents in discovery. (Krohn 1984: 104)

Pretty intense discussion.

These cases together reveal and illustrate the considerable interpretive work involved in establishing a knowledge claim, and the operation of the common, but not necessarily well articulated, four-fold definition of discovery scientists use. The claimed finding must be (1) possible - expected, plausible, coherent with existing knowledge, (2) motivated - purposefully, seriously sought, (3) valid - taken to be true, (4) unprecedented - the first public presentation of the findings ("originality is not enough"). This is his [.|.Brannigan's] combustion. (Krohn 1984: 105)

A triad with/plus novelty: (1) possible claims; (2) motivated claims; (3) valid claims; and (4) unprecedented claims.

Carter, Gregg Lee 1988. Review of Introduction to Sociology by Coser et al. Teaching Sociology 16(3): 306-308. DOI: 10.2307/1317539 [JSTOR]

In my first 12 semesters of teaching Principles of Sociology, I changed texts eight times. Part of the problem was that I shied away from books that didn't practice mainline "standard American sociology" (S.A.S.); for example, I would not adopt Eitzen (1987) because they expect too much from conflict theory, nor Hewitt and Hewitt (1986) and Shibutani (1986), who demand too much from the symbolic interactionist orientation. (Carter 1988: 307)

Coser, Lewis A.; Nock, Steven L.; Steffan, Patricia A.; Rhea, B. 1987. Introduction to Sociology. 2nd ed. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Hewitt, John P.; Hewitt, Myrna Livingston 1986. Introducing Sociology: A Symbolic Interactionist Perspective. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. [Internet Archive]

Shibutani, Tamotsu 1986. Social Processes: An Introduction to Sociology. Berkeley: University of California Press. [Internet Archive]

Czitrom, Daniel 1990. Communication Studies as American Studies. American Quarterly 4294): 678-683. DOI: 10.2307/2713172 [JSTOR]

Over the past twenty years, James W. Carey has produced an impressive body of work that has enlarged and revitalized the field of communication studies. Offering nothing less than a radically alternative understanding of how to study and think about communication. Carey's writings have provided a potent intellectual antidote to the prescribed nostrums that dominate communications departments, journalism schools, and their attendant conferences. (Czitrom 1990: 678)

Carey, James W. 1988. Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society. Winchester, Mass.: Unwin Hyman. [Internet Archive | lg]

He offers an original and subtle analysis of American history and culture by focusing on the key role played by communications technology in shaping the republic, and he persuasively outlines and extends an American intellectual tradition as our best hope for understanding media and democratizing scholarly discourse on communication. (Czitrom 1990: 679)

Worth checking out, then. The history of the concept of phaticity is largely a history of communication technologies.

A social theorist, Carey emerges as the missing American link to the British tradition of cultural studies. He effectively demonstrates the connections between his American heroes - John Dewey, William James, Harold Innis, and Perry Miller, to name a few - and the ideas of Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, and Stuart Hall. As a historian and critic, Carey shows us how to deepen our understanding of American history and culture by rethinking our basic assumptions and metaphors about communication, media, and technology. (Czitrom 1990: 679)

Not sure I know all of these guys.

Innis, Harold A. 1951. The Bias of Communication. Introduction by Marshall McLuhan. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. [Internet Archive | lg]

Miller, Perry 1939. The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century. New York: The Macmillan Company. [Internet Archive | lg]

Hoggart, Richard 1957. The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life. London: Chatto & Windus Ltd. [Internet Archive | lg]

Williams, Raymond 1958. Culture and Society: 1780-1950. New York: Harper & Row. [Internet Archive]

Hall, Stuart; Whannel, Paddy; Dyer, Richard 2018. The Popular Arts. Durham: Duke University Press. [lg]

By contrast, the ritual view of communication is much older than transmission, as is implied by the linguistic ties between "communication," "communication," and "community." It is directed "not toward the extension of messages in space but toward the maitenance of society in time; not the act of imparting information but the representation of shared beliefs" (18). Here the central meaning of the communication process is understood to lie not in the transmission of information at a distance but "in the construction and maintenance of an ordered, meaningful cultural world [|] that can serve as a control and container for human action" (18-19). Whereas a transmission view of the news, for example, focuses on the press as an agent for disseminating information and changing attitudes, a ritual view sees news writing and reading as dramatic acts, inviting our participation in an arena of dramatic forces and action. (Czitrom 1990: 679-680)

All of this is otherwise quite appealing but the suspiciously Goffmanian "dramatic acts" act as a red flag.

Drawing on Dewey and his descendants in the Chicago School (Charles Horton Cooley, Robert Park, George Herbert Mead, and Erving Goffman), as well as the interpretive anthropology of Clifford Geertz, Carey offers a new definition of communication aimed at redressing the imbalance: "a symbolic process whereby reality is produced, maintained, repaired, and transformed" (23). (Czitrom 1990: 680)

The true novelty here is repairing. Communication repairs reality? A similar issue sometimes appears in post-Couplandian phatics, which wishes to keep the Jakobsonian emphasis on prolongation but also reintroduce the Ruesch-Batesonian communicative relationship maintenance aspect. (I say "reintroduce" because this aspect was immanent in Malinowski's phatic communion, though expressed in terms we no longer consider very scientific, e.g. bonds of personal union.) In any case Carey's approach sounds more and more appealing.

His plea is for a reorientation to a "cultural studies approach," one that insists (and here the echo of Dewey is clear) that communication "is a form of action - or, better, interaction - that not merely represents or describes, but actually molds or constitutes the world" (94). Cultural studies of communication concentrate on the hermeneutic issues of meaning and interpretation, in contrast to the search for laws and functions. They seek to illuminate the human activity of communication - the complex practices, conventions, and expressive forms that are empirically observable in time and space. (Czitrom 1990: 681)

Really just a few feet removed from Cooley.

The common sense view holds that modern media "have drastically altered the ordinary terms of experience and consciousness, the ordinary structures of interest and feeling" (1-2). Yet, the stories we tell ourselves about technologies, "the talk of a communications revolution and exalted hopes and equally exaggerated fears of the media, are repetitions so predictable as to suggest undeviating corridors of thought" (2). (Czitrom 1990: 683)

Phraseology. Kõrvalekaldumatud mõttekoridorid.

Franks, David D. 1991. Review of Social Sensitivity: A Study of Habit and Experience by J. M. Ostrow. Contemporary Sociology 20(6): 948-949. DOI: 10.2307/2076224 [JSTOR]

This book is small in pages and thick in thought. On completing it, one has traveled a long way against traditional intellectual currents. It is about the relationship between symbolic, interpretive processes and coherent experience. (Franks 1991: 948)

Ostrow, James M. 1990. Ostrow Social Sensitivity: A Study of Habit and Experience. Albany: State University of New York Press. [Internet Archive | lg]

Ostrow argues convincingly that not all human experience is linguistically interpreted, and that words are insufficient to capture experience in its totality. (Mead did agree with this, though his emphasis was different.) In chapters that critique Cooley, Mead, and Goffman, the author argues instructively that self is more than a process of self-representation and reflexive impression management. His critique of Goffman's notion of "expressions given off" is especially relevant for those interested in emotions. Wherein Mead lodges the self in taking the role of the other and reflexivity, Ostrow argues for a prereflexive, corporeal sense of self that is more fundamental than self-awareness, but thoroughly social. He describes how we can be sensitive to our own presence in the world prior to being objects to ourselves. (Franks 1991: 948)

Sounds good. Almost like the viewpoint I would end up in if I started seriously considering the linguistic self in Mead. Especially because my preferred version would stem from Clay's recognition concept ("that man is my father"), which is sort-of echoed in Cooley.

In order to portray the domain of experience that is "more than words can capture," Ostrow uses Merleau-Ponty's distinction between sense and signification or enactive, motor knowledge and abstract, symbolic knowledge. Knowledge on the prereflective level of sense is reflected in the common assertion, "I can't tell you how I do it, just watch me." Action on this level is not self-conscious, but habitual. Reflectively telling yourself "to concentrate" can distract you from the unmediated immediacy of true concentration. Any good driver takes advantage of this prearticulated level of sense given through habit and corporeal sensitivity. Though he does not say it precisely this way, Ostrow's argument assumes that we gain our capacity for self-awareness, and the behavioral control that it makes possible, at the cost of our alienation or separation from the world as experienced. Cognition distances us from the unreflective givenness of an unquestioned world. Ostrow is critical of Schutz's phenomenology for not appreciating the distinction between actual experience and our talk about it, thus overintellectualizing his model of knowledge. (Franks 1991: 949)

I think E. R. Clay sharpened his psychological terminology exactly for these kinds of discussions.

Kuhnert, JoAnn 1992. Review of MicroSociology: Discourse, Emotion and Social Structuce by T. J. Scheff. Humboldt Journal of Social Relations 18(2): 177-180. [JSTOR]

How do humans really communicate? What part does communication play in the development of a society and social bonds within that society. Using references and studies from all the social sciences as well as philosophy, computer science, humanities and the arts, Thomas Scheff attempts an enormous undertaking, linking human emotion, response to language and social bonding on a micro level, to a macro level of community social development. He attempts to show how unacknowledged emotions such as shame can be responsible for alienation, both personal and social, in our modern world. (Kuhnert 1992: 177)

Scheff, Thomas J. 1990. MicroSociology: Discourse, Emotion and social Structure. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. [Internet Archive | lg]

This text presents what Professor Scheff refers to as a new theory and method for studying relationships between roles, social bonds and social solidarity. He directs his theory toward the significance of emotion in relations between humans. Incorporating the emotions of shame, pride, self-identity and self-esteem into language interpretation, he advocates a new way of looking at human relations ranging from the interpersonal level to the international level. (Kuhnert 1992: 177)

Sounds a bit like Weston La Barre but with the language of "social bonds".

Professor Scheff organized this work into five parts, with the first section examining human nature and the social bond as well as a discussion of the micro-macro worlds of community and society. Here the author states that the maintenance of human bonds is critical to all issues of human behavior. He cites work from a number of theorists, including Bowen antd Kerr (1988), Durkheim (1897, 1902, 1906) and Etzioni (1989) regarding models of social bonding and its various subsystems. He also uses material drawn from Goffman and Cooley in his discussion of communication and emotion, and their relationship to social bonding. In this first section, Scheff's main points focuses on the idea [|] that all humans must have a sense of social bonding, a feeling of belonging in order to be fully functional, and that this sense of bonding whether it is present or not, is a factor in interpersonal relationships. He takes the issue of social bonding from the personal to the community level and points to language as a primary factor in the development of social bonding, and he also examines compensatory actions taken by individuals and societies when such bonding is lacking. (Kuhnert 1992: 177-178)

Kerr, Michael E.; Bowen, Murray 1988. Family Evaluation: An Approach Based on Bowen Theory. New York: W. W. Norton Company. [Internet Archive | lg]

Etzioni, Amitai 1989. Humble Decision Making. Harvard Business Review 67(4): 122-126. [Harvard Business Review]

From the very beginning of this intriguing text, the author addresses an issue sociologists have been wrestling with for as long as sociologists have argued theory, the micro-macro link. The author incorporates work by Shibutani (1955) involving community and society into a framework for research on the micro-macro link, stating that "Although Shibutani limits his analysis to the interpersonal level, there is no inherent reason that it may not also be applied to the societal level" (24). (Kuhnert 1992: 178)

Easy-peasy.

In the second section, Understanding: A Verstehende Soziologie, Scheff discusses the structure and process of interpretation. He argues that interpretation of language requires understanding the implications of a discourse, understanding the deeper levels and forms of interactive conversation. Scheff writes that "...natural language, as it occurs in spontaneous conversation, is always ambiguous because most words and gestures each have more than one conventional meaning and because, in varying degrees, [|] meanings are unconventional, improvised at the moment of encounter" (39). Statements such as the one above reinforced my original opinion, that much of the author's theory was closely aligned and indeed based upon symbolic interactionist theory, particularly when he describes interpersonal interpretation of language (verbal and nonverbal) as a basis for understanding a situation. (Kuhnert 1992: 178-179)

To me it sounds like Scheff rediscovered phatic communion.

Giddens also says that this book is not written in a narrative fashion, and that the style is "idiosyncratic." This analysis is definitely true. Unfortunately it is not smooth reading nor easy to follow, and is somewhat rambling in its presentation. While Professor Scheff's theories, are most intriguing, getting them out of a morall of verbiage is an undertaking of some magnitude. Particularly complex and difficult to process were chapter six and seven. Using an analysis of Goethe's novel Werther as an example of the use of non-verbal cues, the author's purpose became somewhat confusing and the [|] reader may become somewhat frustrated trying to understand the point being made in a long and involved transcript of a conversation. (Kuhnert 1992: 179-180)

Ooh, nice. And the most cryptic chapters are about concourse?

Emirbayer, Mustafa 1995. Review of The Semiotic Self by N. Wiley. Contemporary Sociology 24(6): 733-736. DOI: 10.2307/2076661 [JSTOR]

Pragmatism offers to sociology new ways of overcoming such familiar dualisms as objectivism and subjectivism, structure and agency, and society and individual; by taking interactions (not persons or societies) as its analytical point of departure, [|] it provides a promising alternative to neofunctionalism, systems theory, and rational choice perspectives, and resonates with recent work, for exampl, in network analysis and semiotics. Moreover, it suggests the outlines of a new critical theory of society, one that avoids the rationalism and transcendentalism of recent German social thought and the irrationalism and historicism of French post-structuralism. (Emirbayer 1995: 733-734)

Much like cultural semiotics takes its departure from the creative communicative act. I should look into what this "neofunctionalism" referred to in the early 1990s.

In this provocative and important new book, Norbert Wiley turns back to the insights of Peirce, Dewey, James, and Mead for a new dialogical theory of the self (or subject), and with it a new grounding for the ideals of American liberal democracy. What is needed, claims Wiley, is an account of a "universal human nature, characterizing all human beings in the same generic way" (p. 1), one to oppose to their discrete social "identities," which are historically specific and particular. Such an account is required as a basis for the ideals of equality (since all selves possess an identical structure), freedom (since all selves' dialogic processes are relatively autonomous), and intrinsic worth (since all the capable of what Wiley terms "internal solidarity"). (Emirbayer 1995: 734)

IDK, nailing down "human nature" is not very appealing. Its fluidity, on the other hand...

Wiley's own theory is a neopragmatist one, centering on an image of the self as a structure consisting of three elements: the I, you, and me. (The idea of an "i-you" polarity derives from Peirce, while that of an "I-me" polarity comes from Mead; the key move of the book, which Wiley generously credits to philosopher Vincent Colapietro, consists in synthesizing the two into a complex new structure, or "triad.") The I/you/me triad Wiley further associates with two others: a temporal one of present, future, and past, respectively (selves are "'three-legged' [structures], with one leg in the present, a second in the future, and a third in the past" [p. 216]), and a semiotic one of sign, interpretant, and object. The self becomes an overlay of these three structures, of a "triad of triads," in relation to which particularistic identities are as parts to a whole: "subordinat, contained, dependent" (p. 36). Wiley sees these various elements as in continual interaction with one another, in an ongoing "semiotic flow" of meaning: The self is "a kind of public square [...] the members of which are in constant conversation" (p. 72). This idea of an internal "trialogue," an internal conversation, dovetails nicely with recent theories of the "dialogic self" offered by such writers as Charles Taylor. (Emirbayer 1995: 734)

Oh boy, okay. So, in "the I, you, and me" the I has a reflexive thirdness: I communicate with you to find out who is me. At this point, I think, there are two alternatives. The emotive I and the conative you remain in place but depending on whether the third item is (a)bove or (b)elow, it could go either: (1) I communicate with you to find out what is it; and (b) I communicate with you to find out who is we. In other words, a referential it or a phatic we. As to the "triad of triads" I can't fathom - before reading Wiley - why exactly the temporal and the semiotic, and not, for example, spatial (one, many and all) and psychological (emotion, volition and reason). After all, you can construct the structure of the self out of whatever you want. The term "trialogue" I like!

Taylor, Charles 1991. The Dialogic Self. In: Hiley, David; Bohnman, James; Shusterman, Richards (eds.), The Interpretive Turn: Philosophy, Science, Culture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 304-314. DOI: 10.7591/9781501735028-017 [degruyter.com]

In the two most abstract and difficult chapters of the book, Wiley develops a theoyr of two other important properties of the generic self: reflexivity and solidarity. Reflexivity means that the internal trialogue is circuitous in nature: "the I communicates directly with the me" (p. 83). All thought is reflexive, and some is also reflexive in a "second-order" way: i.e., "thought about thought." Solidarity, for its own part, means a kind of "self-feeling" (Wiley here draws more upon James - and Cooley - than Peirce and Mead), an internal sense of "sacredness," energy, or force. Wiley theorizes it by bringing Durkheim's "macro" account of solidarity, ritual, and effecvescence down to the "micro" level of the individual, and in the process "semiotizing" Durkheim. (Emirbayer 1995: 734)

This sounds exactly like something I've been yearning for. The "sacredness" is a red flag, but it would be nice to find out what this paradoxical solidarity is a kind of self-feeling might mean, and taking the collective out of Durkheim's collective effervescence sounds exciting. Though, what neat stuff I did find from Durkheim I think is more serviceably approached through Cooley. That is, I suspect that Cooley is much easier semiotized.

As Wiley himself notes on several occasions, all four of his symbolic levels - the self but also interaction, social organization, and culture - have semiotic properties. Hence any account that establishes all levels upon a common semiotic footing needs to integrate [|] a systematic theory of "structural holes," blockages, and the like into each. What applies to the self extends to all the other levels, and vice versa. (Emirbayer 1995: 735-736)

Merely a variation of Ruesch's cylinder (intrapersonal, interpersonal, group, society). I've noticed in recent readings a variation that went ego, dyad, community, society (e.g. the latter two were Gemein- and Gesell- after Tönnies). I have very little against placing culture (i.e. unprecedented claims) as the fourth but "social organization" still rubs me the wrong way.

One can imagine interesting applications to cognitive sociology, for example, or to research on the emotions (much here is reminiscent of Randall Collins's excellent work in that area), but these, like other such possibilities, are left relatively unexplored. (Emirbayer 1995: 736)

Collins, Randall 1998. The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. [Internet Archive | lg]

Dhanagare, D. N. 2003. Antinomies in Ideologies and Institutions. Economic and Political Weekly 38(44): 4661-4672. [JSTOR]

The subtitle of the book, however, provides cues to the contents. Quintessentially the essays are about ideas, ideologies and institutions. They focus mainly on the nature of contradictions one encounters in ideas and ideologies, among intellectuals and the positions they do or do not take on social and political issues, inconsistencies between what they preach and what they ractise, in the functioning of institutions like the state, universities and civil society, and also in ideas like secularism, governance and empowerment. (Dhanagare 2003: 4661)

Not bad. Could use some more ideas.

The affinity of the notion of antinomies with the dialectical tradition, that brought the word into currency in social philosophy in the first quarter of 19th century, has to be placed centre stage while critically looking at the essays in this volume. It means that an in-depth explication of the concept of 'antinomies' is essential for clarifying the methodology of discourse analysis that the essays in this volume are about. Though most scholars tend to use terms like 'antinomy' and 'contradiction' interchangeably almost as synonyms, the finer nuances of the term 'antinomy' as spelt out by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant cannot, and must not, be overlooked. (Dhanagare 2003: 4661)

Oh no. (1) "the known world; (2) "the mind that knows; and (3) "an attempt to think of a whole that includes both [...] which Kant calls 'the ideal of pure reason'" (ibid., 4661).

Secondly, had he probed the fourfold typology of antinomies seriously, such an exercise would have revealed to him that the nature of contradictions, inconsistencies and tensions in ideas, values and institutions in Indian society are akin to the last two antinomies. Hence, while talking about secular and fundamentalist forces, about universities of excellence and of mediocrity and about governance and empowerment, both the statements of thesis and antithesis can be, or tend to be, true at the same time. (Dhanagare 2003: 4662)

This may be a good supplementary reading to David Zilberman's stuff. Sadly inaccessible:

Beteille, Andre 2000. Antinomies of Society: Essays on Ideologies and Institutions. Delhi: Oxford University Press.

That ideologies have built-in streaks of mystification (and false consciousness) is by now an accepted view that need not be disputed. History provides ample instances of such mystifications. What is noteworthy is that Beteille has attempted to project ideology as akin to symbolism than to theory. Although ideology is indispensable for launching a struggle for power, what ignites any struggle is not just the reason and rationality but also people's emotions and intuition of political ideologues that creates images and deploys symbols deftly in mass mobilisation. The full meaning of symbols, however, remains hidden (pp 20-24). This position of Beteille is basically a restatement of views of Georges Sorel (1970: see for instance, the section on 'the Proletarian strike' pp 119-50). (Dhanagare 2003: 4663)

To me this looks like a meeting of La Barre's take on phatic communication in political leadership and Durkheim's collective effervescence.

Sorel, Georges 1915. Reflections on Violence. Authorised translation by Thomas Ernest Hulme. London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd. [Internet Archive | lg]

His submission is that these laboratories have performed well in creating space for eminent scientists as well as for young budding researchers with potential to contribute significantly to scientific discoveries and technological innovations (p 68). However, it needs to be recognised that, barring notable exceptions of visionaries like Homi J Bhabha, Meghanad Saha, Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar, P C Mahalanobis, and others, most scientists tend to be committed less to 'science', 'pursuit of knowledge' as an end in itself and more as means to achieve professional ends. (Dhanagare 2003: 4663)

Bhabha, Homi J. 1994. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge. [Internet Archive | lg]

Even using Beteille's own yardstick ('the role of the intellectual is associated with critical, creative and contemplative activities' p 61) every scientist in a national laboratory or a faculty member of a university may not measure up to his expectations. To this reviewer, in ways more than one, an intellectual is one who has capacity to form poinions independently, perform conscience-keeping function in society, and who can act as an opinion maker and social catalyst when needed. (Dhanagare 2003: 4663)

How would Stapledon's "skeptic" compare with Dhanagare's intellectual?

However, it needs to be stressed that there is a strong tendency among social scientists to view complex social reality through a simple binary prism. The most hackneyed dichotomies that come to mind immediately are 'gemeinschaft and gesselschaft' (community and society by F Tonnies0, mechanistic and organic solidarity (E Durkheim), primary and secondary (Charles Cooley), folk-urban (Robert Redfield), joint and nuclear family and the like. This trend of dichotomising social reality is more pronounced in sociology than in its sister social science disciplines. (Dhanagare 2003: 4665)

Huh. My reading has indeed been limited. I didn't even know there were secondary groups.

Dumont, on the contrary, hold the view that the ideology of caste system in India revolves around the basic idea of differentiation and complete separation of 'status' from 'power'. Those who enjoyed the first (namely, the priestly status in ritual hierarchy) had no access to the second, while the kings, princes and monarchs who might have controlled the temporal - economic and political - power could never violate sanctity and sacred status of the priestly order. In fact the temporal power almost always sought its legitimisation by the priestly class that commanded spiritual and ecclesiastical authority and that represented sort of 'a moral order' [Dumont 1972: 73-76; also 104-12]. (Dhanagare 2003: 4665)

Wow, Dumont making some sense?! This differentiation between priestly status and kingly power is at the heart of Plato's proposal in the Republic: the prince should be priestly, i.e. a philosopher. The philosopher-king does have economic and political power, but he is merely the pinnacle of a priestly caste of philosophers who bestow him this status, and ideally the philosophers are not interested in economic and political power for their own self-interest - what with their blood already containing gold - but in the welfare and interests of the commoners and the guards. How "power could [...] violate sanctity and sacred status" played out in the drama of Rome and Vatican.

Dumont, Louis 1974. Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. [Internet Archive | lg]

It would be a more sensible, and also historically correct, to say that some elements of 'modernity' (as an ideal type) and secular disposition always coexisted in what is depicted today as 'traditional societies'. In contrast some traditional beliefs and irrational practices, including at times blatantly communal sentiments, persisted even in those societies that have all along enjoyed the image of being modern, [|] egalitarian and secular. (Dhanagare 2003: 4665-4666)

This gives me an idea. The "phatic complaint" in modern society - is it an expression of "communal sentiments"?

Indian religions have emerged historically as responses to creative attempts to blend three otherwise inseparable parts as their constituents: they are - (a) a cosmology and broader world view; (b) an ethical - prescriptive as well as proscriptive - code of conduct often carrying religious sanctions with them that regulated every day life; and (c) a system of ritual practices or ritual symbolism to propitiate the supernatural. The extent and degree of intensity of each of the three components vary in different religions with varying permutations and combinations. But Beteille appears content with limiting his discussion to 'theology' alone (p 102) and thereby leaving out the ways in which a broad world view gets translated into norms and patterns of every day life (i e, practical ethics and ritual behaviour). (Dhanagare 2003: 4666)

This I like. It's part of the discussion of "what is religion", i.e. not just transcendental beliefs but also ritual practices, identity, etc. Here: (1) the saint has a system of ritual symbolism; (2) the revolutionary has an ethical code; and (3) the skeptic has a cosmology.

Perhaps those in the faculty who think that they are more 'academic' than others do not mind even if academic programmes receive a setback as a result of their indefensible intolerance vis-a-vis the administration. In this context Beteille goes to the extreme of arguing: "If one is serious about academic work it is better to be a victim of the administration than to join it in the hope of improving things" (p 119). (Dhanagare 2003: 4667)

University, kids, don't do it!

In doing so he weaves in ideas that are essentially drawn from Newman's (1976) classic work as well as from Nehru's oft-quoted convocation speech at Allahabad University. That universities are expected to be the homes of intellectual adventure was also emphasised by the Radhakrishnan Committee report. While continuing the relentless pursuit of truth, science and scholarship, universities ought to stand for excellence in research and in quality of education as an end in itself (pp 131-33). (Dhanagare 2003: 4668)

Newman, John Henry 1873. The Idea of a University: Defined and Illustrated. Third Edition. London: Basil Montagu Pickering. [Internet Archive | lg]

While reading this chapter, a reader feels that Beteille has viewed 'governance' as no more than a functional extension of formal bureaucracy, and therefore insights into the dynamics of power relationships and also into rising expectations of people from the state have been missed completely. (Dhanagare 2003: 4671)

Governmental institutions are functional projections of formal bereaucratic desires.

Secondly, ideas and concepts in the writings of Hegel, Marx, Spencer, Durkheim, Weber, Parsons, Merton, or Habermas and Foucault have originated in non-Indian contexts. But this has not prevented sociologists from using and applying some of those concepts freely, at times indiscriminately, in Indian context. (Dhanagare 2003: 4672)

12 pages in 3 columns is a bit much for a review. The reviewer went on several different screeds throughout this piece. It wasn't bad but it did drag on for too long.

Mee, Alisa Potter 2005. Review of Inside Social Life: Readings in Sociological Psychology and Microsociology by S. E. Cahill. Teaching Sociology 33(1): 116-118. [JSTOR]

The theoretical and rhetorical selections included in part I explore the cultural and social nature of human experience, while parts II, III, and IV examine the social construction of the self and people's subjective responses as they interact in various social contexts. Parts V and VI investigate how social interaction is organized and patterned, as well as how relationships are socialyl constructed. The next two sections of the text, parts VII and VIII, tackle the various ways social structures are built out of and maintained by micro-level interaction patterns. Part IX presents the political nature of social reality and reminds readers that power allows some parties to define the social realities that constrain other individuals and groups. Finally, part X highlights two competing postmodern approaches to the self in contemporary society. (Mee 2005: 116)

Cahill, Spencer E. (ed.) 1998. Inside Social Life: Readings in Sociological Psychology and Microsociology. Second edition. Los Angeles: Roxbury Publishing Company. [Internet Archive]

Eight of the readings could be considered "classic," from the work of Charles Horton Cooley, George Herbert Mead, Lev Vygotsky, Howard Becker, Erving Goffman, and Herbert Blumer. (Mee 2005: 117)

Becker, Howard S. 1963. Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance. New York: The Free Press. [Internet Archive]

Bernard, L. L. 1928. Some Recent Trends in Psychology and Social Psychology. Social Forces 7(1): 160-166. DOI: 10.2307/3004564 [JSTOR]

Psychology as a science is becoming highly self-conscious, but in the purposive manner of earl maturity rather than in the bashful way of adolescence. (Bernard 1928: 160)

Weld, H. P. 1928. Psychology as Science. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd. [Internet Archive]

Perrin, F. A. C.; Klein, D. B. 1926. Psychology: Its Methods and Principles. New York: Henry Holt & Co.

Berman, Louis 1927. The Religion Called Behaviorism. New York: Boni & Liveright. [Internet Archive]

Herrick, Charles Judson 1926. Brains of Rats and Men: A Survey of the Origin and Biological Significance of the Cerebral Cortex. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. [Internet Archive]

Storck, John 1927. Man and Civilization. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co. [Internet Archive | lg]

Alverdes, Friedrich 1927. Social Life in the Animal World. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co. [Internet Archive]

de Laguna, Grace Andrus 1927. Speech: Its Function and Development. New Haven: Yale University Press. [Internet Archive]

Sprowls, Jesse William 1927. Social Psychology Interpreted. Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins Co.

Young, Kimball 1927. Source Book for Social Psychology. New York: Alfred A Knopf. [Internet Archive]

Thomas, William I.; Znaniecki, Florian 1927. The Polish Peasant in Europe and America. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. [Internet Archive | lg]

Burrow, Trigant 1927. The Social Basis of Consciousness: A Study in Organic Psychology Based upon a Synthetic and Societal Concept of the Neuroses. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co. [Internet Archive]

Roback, A. A. 1927. The Psychology of Character. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co. [Internet Archive]

Bagby, English 1928. The Psychology of Personality: An Analysis of Common Emotional Disorders. New York: Henry Holt & Co.

Myerson, Abraham 1927. The Psychology of Mental Disorders. New York: The Macmillan Co. [Internet Archive]

Valentine, P. F. 1927. The Psychology of Personality. New York: D. Appleton & Co. [Internet Archive]

Vaughan, Wayland F. 1928. The Lure of Superiority: A Study in the Psychology of Motives. New York: Henry Holt & Co. [Internet Archive]

de Man, Henry 1928. The Psychology of Socialism. New York: Henry Holt & Co. [Internet Archive | lg]

Edwards, Lyford P. 1927. The Natural History of Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [Internet Archive]

For example, he [Weld] divides social psychology into the genetic psychology of peoples and collective psychology. Why he omits the psychology of personality integration from this grouping is difficult to understand, unless the author has failed to realize the importance of sociology for psychology. The integration of personality is social or it is nothing, as the work of Cooley and others has abundantly demonstrated. (Bernard 1928: 160)

Personal, social, and integration.

A humorous little book by an ardent and somewhat resentful rival religionist is Berman's The Religion Called Behaviorism. It is humorous because it illustrates so well the author's own doctrinaire dogmatism in defense of his glandular hypothesis and his criticism of Watsonianism. Dr. Berman does not seem to realize that there are two conceptions of behaviorism. The one, held by Perrin and Klein and by practically all psychologists, which looks upon it as merely the study of behavior, seems to be unknown to our author. The other, which regards it as another term to cover Dr. Watson's personal views on some metaphysical questions, is the one invariably selected by religionists and dogmatists of various stripes to bolster up their own disintegrating faiths by means of the well-known device of pronouncing vituperative anathema. (Bernard 1928: 161)

I get the impression that the reviewer is not themselves a religionist.

Mrs. de Laguna's work on Speech represents the opposite trend. To be sure it is not a concrete study of either animal or human behavior in association, but rather an attempt to generalize the significance and modes of a certain aspect of this associative behavior - that of speech. Here again we see the sociological conception to the fore as a background for psychological interpretation. Speech is not so much an attempt to give expression to inner impulses as it is to secure response in an adjustment situation. (Bernard 1928: 162)

Secure response from whom about what?

Trigant Burrow, in The Social Basis of Consciousness, has implied the sociological background of psychology in a somewhat different way. Himself a psychoanalyst, he has carried the individualistic psychoanalytic philosophy to its logical conclusion. Chief of all of our repressions is that which comes from the necessity of comforting to the mores. Society imposes its standards and traditions upon us remorselessly. Hence social consciousness becomes a consciousness of inferiority, and right and wrong are moral bludgeons which smash the unity of our personalities. Conformity is the chief of the neuroses and the most moral are the most neurotic. (Bernard 1928: 163)

Psychoanalysts sure are funny.

The Lure of Superiority by Vaughan illustrates once more (and do the volumes by Burrow, Bogby, and Myerson) the growing influence of psychoanalytic theory upon social psychology. But it is a much chastened and refined psychoanalytic psychology which is being taken over by the writers on personality. The crude Freudian metaphysics and mythology have an effectually disappeared from it as has the metaphysics of the mediaeval theologians and neo-Platonists from our modern (scientific) psychology. But much of the psychoanalytic terminology is here, and also its basic concepts. (Bernard 1928: 164)

I think I liked the neo-Platonist metaphysics of 19th century philosophical psychology more.

We are due for a new revolution in about three generations, to establish industrial democracy on a par with political and social democracy. This theory of revolutions is much less negativistic and appeals less to the facts of abnormal psychology than does the theory of E. D. Martin in his The Behavior of Crowds, but at times one is reminded of this book. (Bernard 1928: 165)

Martin, E.dodkk Ddal 1920. The Behavior of Crowds: A Psychological Study. New York; London: Harper & Brothers Publishers. [Internet Archive]

soul searching or just looking for fights

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