Cooley, Charles Horton

Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929) is generally regarded as one of the key founders of social psychology or symbolic interactionism, the most important and lasting original American contribution to sociological theory. From his later work, Cooley's concept of the lookingglass self (“I am what I think you think I am”) and his articulation of the social significance and aptitude of both “primary groups” and “secondary groups” have had a lasting influence on the study of social relations within and outside of sociology. The distinction between group types as well as the notion of an individual's relation to or affiliation with multiple groups has led to many important studies of urban life. It is the city where interaction between and within “secondary groups” becomes the primary mode of interaction and becomes of greater importance than traditional kinshipbased ties indicative of rural or village settlements.

Cooley's earlier work, however, dealt directly with the growth and development of cities and the consequent effects on social organization and interpersonal relations. Battling both physical and mental illness, Cooley spent 7 years working toward a degree in engineering at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he was born. In 1890, Cooley returned to the University of Michigan for graduate work in political economy and sociology. His doctoral dissertation, entitled “The Theory of Transportation,” completed in 1894, was a forbearer to human ecology, in general, and “centralplace theory,” more specifically. First published in 1894 and republished without [Page 191]revision in a posthumous collection of Cooley's papers in 1930, the dissertation presented Cooley's geographic and topographic theory of urban location, whereby the size and amount of population and wealth needed for a large settlement like a city to exist tend to accumulate at breaks in transportation. The first American cities that obtained populations of 100,000 or more inhabitants were located near large masses of water such as the Atlantic Ocean (e.g., New York, Boston), a river (St. Louis, Pittsburgh), or a lake (e.g., Chicago, Cleveland). Later, landlocked cities grew out of the progression of transportation from waterways to railroads.

Later in his career as a faculty member at the University of Michigan, Cooley wrote about broad subjects such as “human nature” and “social organization.” He also conducted a number of ethnographic fieldresearch projects akin to those of his intellectual brethren at the University of Chicago. Cooley's ethnographies included studies of New York's Lower East Side and Jane Addams's Hullhouse in Chicago. Through such studies, he developed the method of “sympathetic introspection,” a technique intended to help the researcher analyze a social actor's consciousness by putting the researcher in the place of the actor and thereby allowing the researcher to experience the actor's social reality as if he or she were a part of it.