Cooley: A Perspective

Abstract

When Human Nature and the Social Order' was first published, in 1902, the reviewer for the American Journal of Sociology said of it: "The volume is something of an anomaly in sociological literature, but it is none the less welcome for its very non-conformity." 2 One has only to go back to the works of the most influential of Cooley's contemporaries, particularly Ward and Giddings, to understand what the reviewer meant. These sociologists were obsessed by questions about the province and proper subject-matter of sociology; about the relation of sociology to the other social sciences; and about the essential principle of human society which distinguished it from animal life. Their writings, especially those of Ward, were voluminous, and packed with complex but not very arresting formulations designed to answer these questions. Whatever good ideas they had were hidden beneath a cloak of obscure expressions and concepts. It is hard to find passages in their books which communicate any sense of the America in which they lived.