ABSTRACT
Best known for his development of symbolic interactionism, Herbert Blumer, like Talcott Parsons, was a center of controversy throughout his career. As structural functionalism emerged in the 1950s, he became the spokesman for a small group of dissidents and has been recognized as "the single mid-century sociologist who could rival Talcott Parsons in his significance for the development of social theory." Blumer was a persistent critic of logical empiricism, with its dualistic assumptions concerning the separation of subject and object, knower and known, mind and action, and structure and process, that was coming to dominate social science in the 1940s and 1950s. Blumer had also held visiting positions at the University of Hawaii from February to August 1939 and again in 1950–1951, and the University of Iowa from January to March 1943. Blumer was inducted into the US Army on October 1, 1918, and immediately transferred to the Student Army Training Corp.
