Chapter Info (Click Here)
Book No. – 25 (Sociology)
Book Name – Masters of Sociological Thought
What’s Inside the Chapter? (After Subscription)
1. THE WORK
1.1. THE LOOKING-GLASS SELF
1.2. THE ORGANIC VIEW OF SOCIETY
1.3. THE PRIMARY GROUP
1.4. SOCIOLOGICAL METHOD
1.5. SOCIAL PROCESS
1.6. INSTITUTIONAL ANALYSIS
2. THE MAN
2.1. THE SAGE OF ANN ARBOR
3. THE INTELLECTUAL CONTEXT
3.1. DEBT TO BALDWIN AND JAMES
4. THE SOCIAL CONTEXT
4.1. COOLEY S ACADEMIC SETTING AND AUDIENCE
4.2. COOLEY’S HERITAGE
Note: The first chapter of every book is free.
Access this chapter with any subscription below:
- Half Yearly Plan (All Subject)
- Annual Plan (All Subject)
- Sociology (Single Subject)
- CUET PG + Sociology
LANGUAGE
Charles Horton Cooley
Chapter – 8
Table of Contents
THE WORK
THE LOOKING-GLASS SELF
- Cooley emphasized the organic link between self and society, arguing they are twin-born and cannot be separated.
- He opposed the Cartesian tradition, which separated the subject (thinking individual) from the external world.
- Cooley believed that the objects of the social world are integral to the subject’s mind and self.
- He sought to remove the conceptual barrier between the individual and society, stressing their interpenetration.
- According to Cooley, a separate individual is an abstraction, and society cannot be regarded as something apart from individuals.
- Cooley argued that society and individuals are collective and distributive aspects of the same thing, reflecting different views of the same reality.
- A person’s self grows through commerce with others; it arises through communication and is not initially individual.
- One’s consciousness of self reflects the ideas about oneself that one attributes to other minds.
- There is no isolated self; the sense of “I” is inseparable from the **correlative sense of “you,” “he,” or “they.”
- Cooley compared the reflected self to a looking glass: each person reflects another, affecting how they perceive themselves.
- The looking-glass self consists of three elements:
- Imagination of our appearance to another person.
- Imagination of their judgment of that appearance.
- Self-feeling, such as pride or mortification.
- The self arises through social processes of communicative interchange, reflected in a person’s consciousness.
- George H. Mead elaborated that the self consists of ideas entertained by others about the self and vice versa, creating a dynamic interaction of ideas.
- Cooley illustrated this idea with an example involving Alice and Angela, demonstrating multiple phases of self-perception and social interaction:
- The real Alice, only known to herself.
- Alice’s idea of herself (e.g., “I look well in this hat”).
- Alice’s idea of Angela’s perception of her.
- Alice’s idea of what Angela thinks Alice thinks of herself.
- Angela’s perception of Alice’s self-judgment.
- Cooley argued that society is an interweaving and interworking of mental selves, where individuals perform mental feats based on others’ perspectives.
- Society is internalized within the individual psyche, becoming part of the self through continued multilateral exchanges of impressions and evaluations.
- This process links and fuses individuals into an organic whole, where society and self are deeply interconnected.
THE ORGANIC VIEW OF SOCIETY
- Cooley’s sociology is holistic, focusing on the systemic interrelations between all social processes.
- When Cooley refers to society as an organism, he does not draw an analogy with biology (like Spencer), but emphasizes the interconnectedness of social processes.
- Society is a complex of living and growing processes that interact with each other, forming a unified whole where changes in one part affect the rest.
- Society is a vast tissue of reciprocal activity, illustrating the dynamic interdependence of all its components.
- Cooley opposes utilitarian individualism, which underpins classical economics and Spencerian sociology.
- In America and England, there is a strong tradition of individualism that leads to an approach toward ideal society through distributive formulas like “the greatest good of the greatest number.”
- Cooley argues that such formulas are unsatisfying to human nature, and that the ideal society should be conceived as an organic whole.
- The ideal society must be conceived directly to engage the imagination and to be meaningful to individuals.
- Cooley insists that life is a single human whole, and true knowledge can only be gained by understanding it as such.
- He stresses that if society is divided or cut up, it ceases to exist in its true form.