ABSTRACT

The history of an intellectual debt usually is rather complicated, but the story of how I came to owe one to Everett Hughes is very simple. The first time around as a graduate student at Chicago I missed him. He was there, but I passed through the department unscathed and unaffected by him. Unlike most graduates, however, I had a double chance, so, not quite a decade later, the second time around, he got to me. Since explanations which rely on personality are distasteful to sociologists, the early oversight can naturally only be accounted for in social structural terms. My sociological career started in college, and, fired by Dewey, Thomas, and Znaniecki, I moved right on to Mead and Blumer. Afterward, when I returned to Chicago, I had begun dimly to realize that although most sociologists lacked an effective social psychology, in turn the Meadian tradition lacked an effective sociology. Plunged into the world of Everett and his students, what was a self- defined social psychologist to do but learn how to be simultaneously a sociologist and a social psychologist? Although Everett is more the one than the other, he has never, as we know, split the two halves of the sociological self. Confessions aside, the straight line of development between his work and this paper should be easily recognizable.