What is symbolic interactionism? Processual view of society as the constant remaking of human interactions at small scale through purposeful interactions of people towards one another in the context of an object world imbued with symbolic character, as well as the symbolic, hence meaningful, character of the activities themselves. Fundamental point that human beings act on the basis of their interpretation of others’ actions as well as their own, and that this process of interpretation is emergent, iterative (repeated) and mediated by symbols.
Needs to be understood against the particularities of American experience and thought
Intellectual origins of American social science
USA: a ‘religious outpost of England’ transformed by an Enlightenment project based on immigration, enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and in the Constitution; appeals to what are natural/self-evident rights – life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. Inclusion in this of Adam Smith’s notions of an unfettered market, freed from historical inequalities that Europeans were fleeing, as in his account of early settler societies in the Americas. Transformation of early New England Puritanism, with emphasis on sinfulness and striving for perfectibility, at least in part, into an optimistic outlook about the indefinite improvement of society. Self-consciously a new society/beginning unburdened by the weight of history and the accumulation of power/inequality), but rather recreated by the activities of its members. Coincides with Alexis de Tocqueville’s observation of the USA as a country of voluntary associations.
Against this ideal, some of the contrary actualities: the fate of Native Americans at the hands of immigrants; the massive importation of African slaves and a civil war fought in the unsuccessful attempt to retain slavery in the South; the conditions of many of the urban, manufacturing areas (in USA, as elsewhere under early capitalism). Mix of lofty ideals, including religious ideals (and movements like Mormons etc.), impoverished immigrants (Irish from the famines, Italians, Poles and Jews southern and central Europe …etc) and economic realities.
The establishment of universities on the model of their English and Scottish equivalents. By 1880s, Herbert Spencer is representative of liberal individualism, laissez-faire capitalism and scientific evolutionism. Increasing influence of German research universities: eg Columbia founded to train clergy, but later Boas’s base and to be host to Frankfurt School; Chicago founded in 1892 with support from J.D. Rockefeller on German model with particular strength in social sciences.
Anthropology tended to be concerned with indigenous peoples, often researched by interviews in reservations, hence ethnographic method more evident earlier in urban sociology.
Significance of Chicago
Chicago as a/the quintessentially American city, inland (on Lake Michigan not coast), mid-western, and industrial: by mid-nineteenth century the railroad junction between east and west. Founded 1830s; rapid population growth to nearly 100k by early 1860s; third of a million by 1870s; 2 million early in twentieth century; business centre destroyed in 1871 by fire; rebuild emphasised grid, public space, permanent buildings (not in wood). Architecturally, more purelyAmerican than most cities. Home to social thought that tended to be liberal and reformist, addressed to resolution of social problems: poverty, discrimination etc.
1910-40: ‘The Chicago School’ loosely structured movement lacking the dominant/ charismatic figure who might have made for conformity. Named a ‘School’ in 1937 by Herbert Blumer; in part coordinate with symbolic interactionism (particularly in George Herbert Mead’s posthumous Mind, Self and Society published from lecture notes in 1934).
Chicago School associated, unusually for the time, with empirical studies. This emphasis on empirical research reflected dominance of pragmatist philosophy, a strongly American school that was inviting to sociological investigation. Main figures included: Charles S. Peirce (1839-1915) who was the originator of modern pragmatism as a theory of meaning embedded in human actions. William James (1842-1910) an empiricist psychologist, whose Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) argued that religious truths arose from the effects of religious practice/practitioners. John Dewey (1859-1952) the educational philosopher, who argued – against distinctions between scientific and everyday knowledge – that learning occurred through experience leading to reflection and then to knowledge, as part of an interaction between the individual and the environment. The mind/body dualism was not natural but a product of a class society with a specialist elite of thinkers (a reflection of their ‘habitus’ as later writers might put it).
Robert E Park (1864-1944; Chicago 1914-23), a journalist and polymath, turned sociologist, who studied with Simmel and took a German doctorate. Early studies of ‘urban ecology’, competition between groups for opportunities and resources in an urban environment, notably that of Chicago.
William I Thomas (1863-1947); collaborated with Florian Znaniecki on a study of Polish diaspora (Polish Peasant in Poland and America) using ethnographic method and letters home to study what was then an ethnic underclass in Chicago (reference in lecture outline). Sociologists rather than anthropologists in US doing participant observation at this time.
Later included William F Whyte (1914-2000) author of (1943) Street Corner Society: the Social Structure of an Italian Slum, gang study based on four years of fieldwork in an Italian slum in Boston. Joined Chicago after initial fieldwork.
E. Franklin Frazier (1894-1962) The Negro Family in Chicago, earliest black sociologist in Chicago School.
The social psychology of Charles Horton Cooley (1864-1929) author of Human Nature and the Social Order (1902) and proponent of ‘the looking glass self’ (ie self as formed interactively via perception of others’ views of one’s self) and of George Herbert Mead (1863-1931), see below, connected with a new emphasis on the active subject. W.I. Thomas’s notion of the ‘definition of the situation’ as constitutive of external realities
In general, symbolic interactionists see society as continuously remade by human agency. They strived to overcome antinomies they ascribed to European thought, including individual versus collective; subjective versus objective. In European thought, they relate most closely to Weber and Simmel, especially to the latter since the former was hardly translated when the School came into being. Symbolic interactionism is akin to Weber’s method of Verstehen, as well as to Simmel’s emphasis on sociation as process (Vergesellschaftung) rather than society as product. Idealistic tendency, as in Thomas’s ‘definition of the situation’, suggests that social realities are perceptual. Also informed by ‘pragmatism’ as an American philosophy (espoused particularly by psychologist William James, brother of novelist Henry, at Harvard, and by John Dewey, in philosophy of education at Chicago, see above). Truth seen to be practical more than contemplative. Attempt, epistemologically, to transcend the European polarity between empiricism and idealism: the former tends to make the mind passive (Locke), the latter emphasises the active role of mind (as in some versions of Kant). Question of the real versus the true; given-ness of the world versus the made-ness of propositions. For instance, W. James argued that the truth of religion should be sought in its effects on lives, both individually and collectively. Mead represents a more psychological version of this: society is in the mind.
The conventional critique of idealism and processualism points to this account being historically thin, emphasising the will of the individual rather than the deposits of history. Consciousness of the person seems to arise from the immediate environment. Here there appears to be a fit with the ethnic mosaic of Chicago described earlier.
This view clearly contrasts with behaviourism (positivistic in its exclusion of consciousness as an unobservable ‘black box, in favour of stimulus and response) and Freud’s view of the realised subject as a compromise between Ego and Id. For Mead, there was instead a balance in the self, between I (as impulse, action into the future) and Me (as rationality, reflection, memory), between projection and incoming impressions. The realised subject was appreciative of itself as an object to other subjectivities (MSS, p. 138). Thinking is internalized interaction with others. Raised the question of socialization: through play, children learn to balance I and Me; through games go on to develop an appreciation of rules as external parameters. In this guise of rules, Mead reintroduces considerations that other theorists might treat in terms of norms, customs etc. For Mead these are the ‘generalized other’ that must be internalized as society in individual minds through symbols as vehicles of shared values (self as social structure, in Mind, Self and Society p. 140).
Conclusions
Fit between symbolic interactionism as theory and the qualities of the US, most particularly Chicago, urban environment.
Mead poses more specific questions about the internalization of society by children during socialization than previous thinkers we have studied (at least in the texts we have studied). The interaction of I/me in constitution of self is made to bear a heavy theoretical load, albeit this is preferable to Durkheim’s over-socialized conception.
Emphasis on voluntarism does not address history, and its accumulation in social structure with power differentials, in the same way as European social theory. In this, a reflection of immigrant society making itself.
