Charles Cooley: Socialism

“Our life is all one human whole, and if we are to have any real knowledge of it we must see it as such. If we cut it up it dies in the process: and so I conceive that the various branches of research that deal with this whole are properly distinguished by change in the point of sight rather than by any division in the thing that is seen. Accordingly, in a former book (Human Nature and Social Order), I tried to see society as it exists in the social nature of man and to display that in its main outlines. In this one the eye is focussed on the enlargement and diversification of intercourse which I have called Social Organization, the individual, though visible, remaining slightly in the background.”

Charles Cooley

Source: Social Organization: a Study of the Larger Mind, 1909, p. vii, Preface , lead sentece

Life , Books , Nature , Knowledge

“As social beings we live with our eyes upon our reflection, but have no assurance of the tranquillity of the waters in which we see it.”

Charles Cooley

Charles Horton Cooley, in Structure and Agency in Everyday Life: An Introduction to Social Psychology http://books.google.co.in/books?id=KMLEnR1hoDQC&pg=PA53, (1 January 2003), p. 53

Water

“The social self is simply any idea, or system of ideas, drawn from the communicative life, that the mind cherishes as its own.”

Charles Cooley

Source: Human Nature and the Social Order, 1902, p. 17

Life , Communication , Idea

“BY primary groups I mean those characterized by intimate face-to-face association and cooperation. They are primary in several senses, but chiefly in that they are fundamental in forming the social nature and ideals of the individual. The result of intimate association, psychologically, is a certain fusion of individualities in a common whole, so that one's very self, for many purposes at least, is the common life and purpose of the group. Perhaps the simplest way of describing this wholeness is by saying that it is a "we"; it involves the sort of sympathy and mutual identification for which "we" is the natural expression. One lives in the feeling of the whole and finds the chief aims of his will in that feeling.”

Charles Cooley

Source: Social Organization: a Study of the Larger Mind, 1909, p. 23 (1962)

Life , Way , Feeling , Nature

“"SOCIETY and the Individual" is really the subject of this whole book, and not merely of Chapter One. It is my general aim to set forth, from various points of view, what the individual is, considered as a member of a social whole; while the special purpose of this chapter is only to offer a preliminary statement of the matter, as I conceive it, afterward to be unfolded at some length and variously illustrated.”

Charles Cooley

Source: Human Nature and the Social Order, 1902, p. 1; Lead paragraph

Books

“Strong joy and grief depend upon the treatment this rudimentary social self receives.”

Charles Cooley

Source: Human Nature and the Social Order, 1902, p. p. 166

Strong , Joy , Dependency