Methodological Individualism

Society as subjectively meaningful interaction 127dilemma’. I agree with Alexander (and Parsons) that there is such an individualistdilemma, but my interest, in this chapter, is in individualism per se, withoutthe dilemma.Symbolic interactionismSymbolic interactionism is an American movement of thought usually associatedwith the name of George Herbert Mead, but really a creation of his pupil andfollower, the sociologist Herbert Blumer. A philosopher and social psychologist ofthe pragmatist school, Mead was influenced by the work of Charles Peirce,William James and John Dewey. 2 Also important for Mead’s theory of the individualand society were some ideas of the sociologist Charles Horton Cooley. Athird influence – in this case it is probably better to talk about cross-fertilisation –was the so-called Chicago School of Sociology, founded by William I. Thomasand Robert E. Park. Although mainly an American product (Alexander, 1987:196ff; Joas, 1987: 94ff), symbolic interactionism was also influenced by Europeanthinking. Among the more remote sources of symbolic interactionism we findAdam Smith and other representatives of the Scottish Enlightenment, theGerman Romantics and Hegel. 3 A more immediate influence came fromVölkerpsychologie, Dilthey and Simmel. 4I take Cooley, Thomas and Mead to be the most important progenitors ofsymbolic interactionism. I dispute, however, that any one of them was a‘symbolic interactionist’, in the present-day sense of that term. I also doubt thatany one of them held the intersubjectivist theory of society, or was a theoreticalindividualist (cf. Joas, 1987: 94ff). 5 I do agree, however, that all of them developedcertain ideas, which, if taken in isolation, were important contributions tothe further development of symbolic interactionism into an individualist theoryof society.Cooley’s contribution to symbolic interactionism was his theory of thelooking-glass self and the theory of society that it suggests. The looking-glass selfhas ‘three principal elements: the imagination of our appearance to the otherperson; the imagination of his judgement of that appearance, and some sort ofself-feeling such as pride and mortification’ (Cooley [1902] 1964: 184). Animportant part of our selves, then, is the way we imagine we appear in other peoples’minds. From this, it is but a short step to suggest that people exist primarily or,exclusively, as ideas in the minds of one another.Cooley’s conception of society, as advanced in his first and most influentialbook Human Nature and Social Order (1902), is probably the most extreme version ofan idealist and intersubjectivist theory of society ever proposed by a sociologist.Society, according to Cooley, is mental: ‘The immediate social reality is the personal idea… Society, then in its immediate aspect, is a relation among personal ideas … Societyexists in my mind as the contact and reciprocal influence of certain ideas named‘I’ Thomas, Henry, Susan, Bridget, and so on’ ([1902] 1964: 119). A consequenceof this view is ‘that there is no separation between real and imaginarypersons; indeed to be imagined is to become real, in a social sense’ (p. 95).