ABSTRACT
In the closing decades of the nineteenth century and the opening decades of the twentieth, Charles Horton Cooley (1864-1929) and George Herbert Mead (1863-1931), along with the pragmatist John Dewey, represented the very best that the philosophical camp of social idealism had to offer. They helped found a major new variety of social-psychological reasoning that was later to be called symbolic interactionism. Their concern with the fate of the person caught up in the massive process of industrialization, differently addressed by Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Karl Marx, led them to focus on the relationship between the individual and the collectivity. Herein lies their contribution. This chapter, therefore, focuses on Cooley’s and Mead’s views on self and society.
