“A separate individual is an abstraction unknown to experience, and so likewise is society when regarded as something apart from individuals.”
Source: Human Nature and the Social Order, 1902, p. 36
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Charles Cooley17
American sociologist 1864–1929Related quotes
“The general will rules in society as the private will governs each separate individual.”
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Merold Westphal (1940)
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Context: Courses were offered in such fields as nineteenth-century black history and Hispanic-American folk art. The activists made a peculiar claim for these classes. They insisted that the courses would alleviate the cultural anxiety of nonwhite students by permitting them to stay in touch with their home culture. The perspective gained in the classroom or the library does indeed permit an academic to draw nearer to and understand better the culture of the alien poor. But the academic is brought closer to lower-class culture because of his very distance from it. Leisured, and skilled at abstracting from immediate experience, the scholar is able to see how aspects of individual experience constitute a culture. By contrast, the poor have neither the inclination nor the skill to imagine their lives so abstractly.