Charles Horton Cooley and the Methodological Origins of Humanism in American Sociology

Charles Horton Cooley, Pragmatist or Belletrist? The Complexity of Influence and the Decentering of Intellectual Traditions

“…This I call personal or social knowledge. It might also be described as sympathetic, or, in its more active forms, as dramatic, since it is apt to consist of a visualization of behavior accompanied by imagination of corresponding mental processes. This dichotomy reflects Blaise Pascal's opening distinction, in the aphoristic Pensées , between the “intuitive” and “geometric” or mathematical minds (Jacobs ). As Pascal puts it, the mathematical mind rests on palpable (exact and plain) principles removed from ordinary life, whereas the intuitive mind rests on principles which, “found in common use…are before the eyes of everybody” (Pascal :1).…”

“…Within the local context of the University of Michigan, which, unlike Chicago originally had no established sociology courses, let alone a department (Cooley's Ph.D. was in economics, with qualifying exam questions in sociology sent by Giddings from Columbia), Cooley encouraged the development of a department that up through the mid‐1940s fostered a cosmopolitan sociological orientation opposing positivism and emphasized qualitative methods and a humanistic sociological orientation (Steinmetz :328–35). I suggest that Cooley's cosmopolitanism, whether it be more narrowly methodological or more generally sociological, stems from his humanism, which stretches beyond the academic confines of the discipline (Jacobs ). With respect to method, as we have seen, his inspiration and creative impetus to foreshadow what would later become thoroughgoing critiques of positivism, derives from the essay tradition.…”