Charles H. Cooley

Charles Horton Cooley

August 17, 1864 – May 7, 1929

“There is nothing less to our credit than our neglect of the foreigner and his children, unless it be the arrogance most of us betray when we set out to ‘Americanize’ him.” –Charles Horton Cooley

Charles Horton CooleyCharles Horton Cooley was born on August 17, 1864 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the fourth of six children. He was the son of Mary Elizabeth Horton and the renowned law school professor and State Supreme Court Justice Thomas McIntyre Cooley. Young Cooley was somewhat of a withdrawn, passive child. He felt intimidated and alienated by his successful father, a characteristic that haunted him for the rest of his life. Cooley attended the public schools of Ann Arbor and graduated high school in 1880.

Cooley attended college at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor where his father once taught. After seven years, interrupted by bouts of illness (some apparently psychosomatic), he graduated with a degree in mechanical engineering. After a period of travel to Europe, Cooley began work as a draftsman and statistician. While in school, he took several courses in history, philosophy and economics. These subjects peaked Cooley’s interest, and he began independent readings of Darwin, Spencer and the German sociologist Albert Schaeffle. Cooley returned to the University of Michigan in 1890 for graduate work in political economy and sociology. Because there was yet no formal instruction in sociology at the University of Michigan, he was forwarded test questions by Franklin Giddings. Cooley’s dissertation, “The Theory of Transportation” was most notable for its conclusion that towns and cities tend to be situated at the convergence of transportation routes. Cooley received his PhD in philosophy in 1894.

Soon thereafter, Cooley moved to Washington, D.C. to work for the Interstate Commerce Commission and later the Bureau of the Census. He read his dissertation paper, as well as a second work, “Social Significance of Street Railways” at a meeting of the American Economic Association in 1890.

Cooley married Elsie Jones, daughter of first Dean of the Homeopathic Medical College at the University of Michigan, in 1890. She was very outgoing and energetic and effectively balanced out Cooley’s shy, retiring side. They lived in Ann Arbor, within close proximity to the University, and had three children: a boy and two girls. Cooley was said to have enjoyed long walks with companions, camping trips to Canada and cooking picnic suppers for his wife. He built a cabin at Crystal Lake in Northern Michigan, where he and his family went swimming and boating. Cooley was also fond of amateur botany and bird watching.

In 1892, Cooley accepted an appointment as an instructor of political economy at the University of Michigan. He soon became an assistant professor of sociology and taught the university’s first sociology course in 1899. Cooley swiftly progressed to associate professor status in 1904 and became a full professor 1907. He was noted to have been invited to positions in other institutions around the country (on one occasion called to Columbia by Giddings), but he never wanted to leave Ann Arbor where his father and wife’s father both taught.

Cooley was fortunate to have had no financial worries in his life. He lived through an age in which the “publish or perish” philosophy had not yet developed, and he was able to enjoy a life of leisurely reflection and study. Cooley spent a great deal of time speculating and contemplating the subject of the self. He observed the development of his own children, which he used to construct his theories.

Cooley was greatly inspired by the writings of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Charles Darwin. In his own works, Cooley sought to highlight the connection between society and the individual and felt that the two could only be understood in relationship to each other. One’s personality comes from one’s influences. He coined the concept of the “looking-glass self”, the social determination of the self, which later influenced George Herbert Mead’s theory of self and symbolic interactionism. Cooley ultimately wanted to show that the facts of social life are mental, and the conduct of persons, groups and institutions are the result of fundamental mental phenomena.

Cooley produced his next work, “Personal Competition” (1899) in which he noted an alarming trend. As the United States was expanding and becoming more industrialized, people seemed to become more individualistic and competitive, exhibiting less concern for traditional family and neighborhood. Cooley asserted that primary groups, a term he described as the foundation of one’s morals, sentiments and ideals, are ethically good because they provoke a sense of safety, belonging, fairness and consideration. He hoped that by calling attention to the significance of primary groups, individuals might revive traditional values and maintain social cohesion.

In Human Nature and the Social Order (1902), Cooley foreshadowed Mead’s discussion of the symbolism of the self, delving into the effects of social responses and social participation. In Social Organization (1909), Cooley expanded his ideas further, accentuating the importance of primary groups. He believed that the impact of one’s primary group was so great that one would cling to primary ideals in more complex associations and even generate new primary groupings within formal organizations.

In 1918 Cooley wrote Social Process. This work emphasized the nonrational, provisional nature of social organization and the impact of social competition. Cooley declared that present troubles were caused by the conflict between primary group values and institutional values. He also produced Life and the Student (1927), a collection of writings accumulated throughout his life, and Sociological Theory and Social Research (1930), pieces on social ecology.

Cooley participated in the founding of the American Sociological Society in 1905. As a member, he presented a paper at a 1907 meeting, “Social Consciousness”, and in 1917 “Social Control in International Relations”. He served as its eighth President in 1918. His Presidential address, delivered at the 1918 Annual Meeting was entitled “A Primary Culture for Democracy.”

Cooley later published various articles in the Society’s journals, including “Reflections Upon the Sociology of Herbert Spencer” (American Journal of Sociology 1920, 26: 129-145), and “Now and Then” originally read at a dinner of the 1923 Annual Meeting (Journal of Applied Sociology 1924, 8: 259-262).

In 1928, Cooley’s health began to fail, and in March of 1929 he was diagnosed with cancer. He died on May 7, 1929.

“Our individual lives cannot, generally, be works of art unless the social order is also.” –Charles Horton Cooley

For more information on Charles Horton Cooley, you may find the following sources useful:

 

Presidential Address

One who looks even a little beneath the surface of things may see that there is no question more timely than that of culture, and none which has more need of fresh and fundamental conceptions. It is by no means a question merely of the decoration of life, or of personal enjoyment; it involves the whole matter of developing large-minded members for that strong and good democracy which we hope we are building up. Without such members such a democracy can never exist, and culture is essential to the power and efficiency, as well as to the beauty, of the social whole.

We may all agree, I imagine, that culture means the development of the human and social, as distinct from the technical, side of life. Our recent growth, so far at least as it is realized in our institutions, has been mainly technical, the creation of an abundant economic system and a marvelous body of natural science, neither of them achievements of a sort to center attention upon what is broadly human.

It is true that along with these has come a growth of humane sentiment and aspiration, of a spirit Christian and democratic in the largest sense of those words; but this remains in great part vague and ineffectual. To give it clearness and power is one of the aims of the culture we need.

There is also, I am sure, a growing demand for culture. In the course of the greatest struggle of history, which is also a struggle for righteous ideals, the people everywhere have learned that the social order needs reconstruction, and that the popular will has power to transform it, as has actually been seen in molding nations to efficiency in war. All this gives rise, especially in the young, to large and radical thinking, which permeates the armies, the press, the labor unions, and other popular associations; and among the first results of this thinking is a demand for a new sort of liberal education, through which. all members of the coming order shall get a wider outlook, a higher and clearer idealism, and so be prepared to create that free, righteous, and joyful system of life to which they aspire.

Indeed our democracy, in spite of its supposed materialism, has long had at heart the ideal of culture. Culture has been a god that we somewhat ignorantly worshiped. We are not satisfied with beholding the multiplication of material things, nor even with the hope of greater justice in their distribution; we want joy, beauty, hope, higher thoughts, a larger life, a fuller participation in the great human and divine whole in which we find ourselves. Even those popular movements w’ rich formulate their aims in material terms are not really materialistic but get their strongest appeal from the belief that these aims are the condition of a fuller spiritual life.

Another reason for turning our thoughts to culture is that the economic outlook demands it. We are apparently entering upon a period of cheap, standardized production upon an enormous scale, which will multiply commodities and perhaps increase leisure but will make little demand upon the intelligence of the majority of producers and offer no scope for mental discipline. Work is becoming less than ever competent to educate the worker, and if we are to escape the torpor, frivolity, and social irresponsibility engendered by this condition, we must offset it by a social and moral culture acquired in the schools and in the community life.

Our culture must be a function of our situation as a whole. just as the arts, like literature, painting, and sculpture, cannot be merely traditional but must spring fresh and creative from the living spirit of the time, so also must culture, which is likewise an expression of the general life. It may be contrasted with, perhaps opposed to, the apparent trend of things; but if so it is only because it is rooted in a deeper trend. If it does not function in the whole it is nothing.

I am in sympathy with those who cling to the great humanistic traditions of the past. There can be no real culture that is altogether new; it can only be a fresh growth out of old stems; but it must be that; it must be new in the sense that it is wholly reanimated by the spirit of our own time. Any attempt to impose an old culture upon us merely because the educated class cherish it, or because it can be supported by general arguments having no reference to our actual needs, must fail. Through control of institutions the classicist, or the scientist, or the religionist may for a time force the forms of an old learning upon a new generation; but before long all that does not vigorously function in the life of the day will slough off and be forgotten.

Certainly no culture can be real for us that is not democratic. This does not mean, however, that it must be superficial, or commonplace, or uniform. These are traits which the enemies of democracy have endeavored to fix upon it, but which do not belong to its essence. Democracy is at bottom a more humane, inclusive, and liberal organization of life, and certainly a democratic culture will be one based on large and kindly conceptions, meeting the needs of the plain people as well as of the privileged classes, and worked out largely through the schools and other popular institutions. Because culture has in the past been inaccessible to the masses and still is so in great part, we must make it our very special business to bring it within their reach; but the idea that such a culture must lack refinement and distinction has no basis in sound theory and will be refuted as fast as we make democracy what it can and should be.

An undemocratic humanism, in our time, is not humanism at all but an academic retreat out of which no living culture can come—just as a dead-level democracy without humane depth and richness of life is not true democracy. Finer achievements get their vitality from the sympathy of a group, and an idealistic democracy, which includes a unique mingling of races, classes, and nationalities, should achieve a culture as rich in human significance as any the world has seen.

We should recognize, however, that such traditional culture as we have is not democratic for the most part, but involves the inheritance, through an upper class, of the conceptions of an out-worn society. The very word “culture” is in somewhat bad odor with people of democratic sympathies, because it suggests a parasitic leisure. Nothing could be more timely than that the plain people should take up the idea, reinterpret it from their point of view, and give it a chief place on the program of reform.

A living culture is not only an organic part of life as a whole, but it is a complex thing in itself. It must embrace, I think, two main aspects: a common or primary culture of knowledge and sentiment diffused through the whole people, and a variety of more elaborate culture processes, informed with the common spirit but developed by small groups in diverse fields of achievement. I mean by the former, to which I shall confine myself in this paper, such elements of culture as American children might get, in the schools or otherwise, before they have passed the age of compulsory attendance, or say sixteen years. This must supply the soil and atmosphere in which all our higher life is to grow, while the more specialized culture will give room for classical studies, sciences, philosophy, fine arts—what you will; nothing human need be lacking.

The aim of a common culture, I should say, must be a humane enlargement of the thought and spirit of ‘the people, including especially primary social knowledge and ideals; inculcated in no merely abstract form but appealing to the imagination and assimilated with experience. The currents of such a culture will flow, in large degree, outside the channels of public guidance and formal institutions, working upon us through newspapers, popular literature, the drama, motion pictures, and the like. They will get much of their form and direction, however, from the common schools and other community institutions, and since these are within our control they call for peculiar attention.

Of the studies now pursued in our primary schools those most plainly suited to be the means of culture are language and history, because they deal directly with the larger human life; but it cannot be assumed that they are actually fulfilling the culture function. They do so in proportion as they impart the higher traditions and ideals of our country and of the world at large, awakening in boys and girls a hearty participation in this greater life.

Language studies should make the individual a member of the continuing organism of thought and enable his spirit to grow by interaction with it. For our people this means self-expression in the English language and a beginning appreciation of its literature. These studies should be disciplinary, requiring precision of under-standing and expression, but they should also be joyous, for culture has no worse enemy than the sort of teaching that makes drudgery of them. Noble sentiment is of their essence, and if that is not imparted nothing worth while is.

Other languages, modern and ancient, belong to the more specialized culture, not to that of the whole people. They are essential to many kinds of higher leadership and production, and children who are believed to be destined for such functions may well begin their study in childhood; to ask more for them would be fanatical.

It might perhaps be thought that history would be a study of the humane development of mankind in the past, bringing home to our knowledge and sympathy the common life and upward struggle of the people, and so leading to an understanding of the social questions of our own day. But it is not that in any great degree at the present time, and there is little prospect that it will be in the near future. Although some teachers of history, perhaps many of them, are striving to reanimate their subject in accordance with modern social conceptions, it is my impression that this movement is only beginning, and that the study of history, as actually practiced in the schools, conduces little, if at all, to understanding of, or interest in, matters of social and economic betterment. I question whether this study can make its full contribution to culture without an almost revolutionary change in its underlying conceptions and in the training of its teachers.

The central thing in a study of the past common to all American children should no doubt be the history of our own country, conceived in a social spirit as our part in the universal struggle for humane ideals of life, political democracy and federation, economic opportunity, social freedom, and higher development of every sort. It should be easy to treat’ American history in this way and to keep it in constant relation to the ideals and endeavors of our own day.

No aspect of history is better suited to the uses of culture than is the economic aspect, the age-long striving for material support, comfort, and leisure, along with the development and mutations of social classes, leading to our own problems of social justice. These are cultural because, on the one hand, they appeal to actual interest and daily observation, while, on the other, they lead directly to the most urgent questions of humane progress. One does not need to be an economic determinist to hold that here is one broad road to participation in the larger currents of life. The fact that history has slighted these things, and that men may pass as experts in it who have made no serious study of them, is itself explicable only by historical causes. Has not the, pursuit of history become a kind of institution which, like many o our institutions, is still ruled by ideas impressed upon it in a former undemocratic state of society?

The very lowliness and homeliness of the daily life of the masses are one cause for its being somewhat neglected by research, and we must reckon also with the unconscious influence of an upper-class point of view unfavorable to studies that call in question the existing social order. I have sometimes fancied that our friends the historians, being for the most part accomplished men of the world, had for that reason a certain predilection for the upper circles of society, both past and present.

However this may be, it is clear that on grounds of culture every child ought to know something of the struggles of the unprivileged masses to gain a share of the opportunity and outlook achieved by a privileged few. Our middle and upper economic classes are still, for the most part, limited to a view of such matters that is both undemocratic and uncultured, and which the schools do little to correct.

It seems then that instruction in sociology and economics, of a simple and concrete kind, must be part of a universal democratic culture. How this should be related to history is perhaps an open question, but certainly the latter, as it is now understood, is wholly inadequate. When all these studies are informed by a common spirit it may be possible to unite them.

So intimate and so animating is our relation to nature that natural science may well claim a place in any scheme for a basic humane culture. I would in fact include enough of this to impress the mind with the rule of law in nature and enable it to understand the experimental method by which man discovers this law and adapts it to his ends.

I must add that any school culture depends for its reality upon the personality of those who impart it. If the teachers and textbook writers were overflowing with those large views and sentiments that are culture, the students would invariably get them. This in turn depends somewhat upon that more adequate recognition by the public of the place of teachers as leaders and exemplars of cultures, from which intelligent selection and support would flow. The whole question is one we cannot solve by any mere change in the curriculum, but is implicated with the spirit and organization of the community.

Indeed our basic culture is likely to come quite as much from the social experiences of the school and community life as from culture studies. Culture is the larger mind that comes from the larger life, and the most direct and universal access to this is through association and co-operation with other people. No movements now going on promise more in this way than do those which aim at a livelier community spirit and expression in all the towns and neighborhoods of the land. When every locality has its center for social intercourse and discussion; its consciousness of its own past and ideals for the future; its communal music, sports, and pageants; its municipal buildings with noble architecture, painting, and sculpture; its local organization ready to take up voluntarily any responsibilities which the state or the nation may impose—then the child who learns to share in these things will not fail to get from them a social and spiritual enlargement.

The school especially can and should provide a group life, ideal, as far as possible, in its forms and spirit, participation in which will involve in the most natural way the elements of social, moral, and even religious culture. As states of the human spirit democracy, righteousness, and faith have much in common and may be cultivated by the same means, namely by the group activities of the school, such as socialized class work, athletics, self-government, plays, and the like, into which the boys and girls eagerly put themselves, and from which they may get training for a larger life. And this larger mind should by no means be allowed to lapse with graduation but should be cherished in the reunions and festivals of the local Alma Mater.

I feel that what I have said deals only with the more immediate and perhaps the more superficial factors in the growth of a primary culture. The studies, the teachers, the social activities of the schools and the community, are all expressions of an underlying current of life which molds their character for better or worse and can only gradually be changed. It would be fatuous not to see that this current is largely unfavorable to the development of any real culture, either primary or secondary. The influence in our society which is organized and dominant is commercialism; the elements of culture are for the most part scattered, demobilized, and impotent. The very idea and spirit of it are starved and crowded out.

If we divide the sources of culture into two parts, those that derive from tradition and those that come to us more directly from participation in life, we shall find that the former especially are deficient. Perhaps the first requisite of progress is to face the fact that we are, as a people, in a state bf semi-barbarism as regards participation in that heritage which comes only by familiarity with literature and the arts. And since this is lacking in the people at large, including the bulk of the educated classes, our schools, which are nothing if not an expression of the people, do not readily supply it. The wealthy and energetic men who have general control of education mean well, but their whole life-history, in most cases, has been such that words like culture, art, and literature can be little more to them than empty sounds, and whatever provision they make for them can hardly fail to be somewhat perfunctory and superficial.

I do not mean that culture is irreconcilable with commercial activities or with technical training in the schools. On the contrary, periods of commercial expansion have usually been those when arts and literature flourished most; and technical training, if moderate in its demands and enlarged by a constant sense of the social whole to which it contributes, may itself involve a most essential kind of culture. But our commercialism has been exorbitant and exclusive; and our technical training is rarely of a sort which makes the student feel his membership in the larger whole. Both must be transformed by a social spirit and philosophy before they can join hands with culture.

These are the underlying reasons for the unsatisfactory state of our schools and for the extreme difficulty of introducing any culture spirit into them. American education, on the culture side, is deadened by formalism from the first grade in the primary schools to and including the graduate departments of our universities. In spite of much sound theory and honest effort on the part of teachers the stifling gases of commercialism have passed from the general atmosphere into academic halls and devitalized almost everything having no obvious economic purpose. I doubt if there has on the whole been any progress in this way, perhaps rather a retrogression, during my own time.

When I contemplate the state of culture in our colleges I cannot wonder that it does not flourish in the elementary schools. Thus, to take only one indication, I have reason to think that serious spontaneous reading is far less common among university students than it was forty years ago. This is my own observation, confirmed by others and corroborated by the evidence of a veteran bookseller, who told me that he sold fewer books of general literature to, say, 5,000 students at the time of our conversation than he did to one-fourth of that number in the Victorian era.

I find the outlook somewhat more cheerful as regards that sort of culture which we get as a by-product of co-operation with our fellows. This is a plant which grows untended in a free and friendly life; and I think that democracy is giving our feelings, our manners, and our social perceptions an enlargement which is truly, in its way, a kind of culture. That consideration, helpfulness, and ready sociability which, it appears, have endeared our soldiers to the villages of France are a part of our civilization and may well prove to be the first fruits of a new sort of culture. Let us cherish and diffuse this spirit in every possible way, especially through that school and community organization of which I have spoken. It is not only a fine thing in itself but will help us to appreciate and acquire that transmitted culture, akin to it in essence, which we now so sadly lack.

On the whole, our present condition as regards a popular culture, though unsatisfactory, is not unpromising. We have energy, good-will, and a sincere though vague idealism. We may expect these to work gradually upon all departments of life, our schools, our communities, our economic institutions, and the general atmosphere of the country, slowly bringing to pass a culture which will certainly be fresh, democratic, and human, and need not be deficient in those things that have to be learned from the past.

If I have not undertaken a discussion of the diversified higher culture, it is not because I doubt that democracy can and will develop in this direction. I say again that our ideal does not allow uniformity or limitation of any kind; but calls for utmost opportunity working out in utmost richness of life. In the way of culture, as in technical training, our higher schools should offer the best that the world has achieved, and should also foster specialized culture groups to kindle and support the individual in his struggle for a larger life.

Originally published: Charles Horton Cooley. “A Primary Culture for Democracy,” Publications of the American Sociological Society 13, (1918): 1-10.

 

Obituary 

It was in September 1910 that I first met Charles Horton Cooley. I had come to the University of Michigan to handle sections of Economics One and upon the chance of sometime “making a contribution to knowledge” and picking up a doctor’s degree. I was one of a changing group of instructors-graduate students, who were, with an exception or two, the property of Freddy Taylor. The conditions of our servitude, far too unremunerative to be called wage slavery, were alike exacting and agreeable. Taylor insisted upon our teaching “Freddy’s economics,” thinking it straight, and getting our students past his dreaded examinations. Our job was to make “marginal utility” in all its ramifications clear to the sophomores; whether or not we made it clear to ourselves was quite another matter. And, as for the rest, we might roam the intellectual universe, argue to our hearts’ content, scribble as we would, and outside of the accepted system “think as we damned pleased.”

At the time there was little rig-a-ma- role to graduate instruction. If any grades were given, I never heard of them. An invitation “to come up” for the doctorate was rare enough; there was much shaking of heads and “the big three,” Taylor, Adams, and Cooley, were quite sure of their man before extending it. But it never occurred to any of them that a counting up of courses was very relevant to the issue. One youth never even bothered to matriculate until an impending degree made a visit to the registrar’s office “‘advisable;” and for ought I know others may have neglected the ritual. But there was only a handful of us and the staff was diligent; our elders knew what we were doing and leaving undone, and something at least of what, if anything, was going on inside our heads.

Our programs included a stint of teaching, informal courses, and our self-directed ventures into understanding. We took Taylor’s course in “theory” year after year; the mythical credit was to be had for three years running. We elected Henry Carter Adams; that is, if he was there, and if he was giving an advanced course, and if his extra-mural duties permitted him to attend it. In seeking an escape from economics, we overlooked history, since we could get that for our- selves and it wasn’t written right anyway, and strayed over into philosophy to “take work to” Wenley and Lloyd. Against sociology we were prejudiced, deeply prejudiced, since there could be nothing to ‘a branch of knowledge which comprehended the universe.” But then Cooley was Cooley, and different, and not a sociologist anyway. So into his seminar we went; in fact we composed it.

How it was later I do not know; in those days it was with groups like ours that Cooley worked. He had few students of his own; if there was a budding sociologist among us I do not recall him. Most of us were, or thought we were, heaven bent for economics. Our majors, if -there such things, were in other fields. Cooley’s work was with cubs who had not committed themselves to his trade; it was complementary to the work of Taylor and of Adams. Taylor was the dominant personality; he drilled us in neo-classical economics, taught us the value of discipline, helped us to be critical of our work, and gave us a God-awful fear of publishing half-baked stuff. Adams now and then had a critical suggestion of an inviting lead to offer, but his distinctive service was in keeping us mindful of the world in which we lived. Cooley was tolerant of our doubts about things generally accepted and gave us encouragement in our half-foolish rides into the winds. We had to live at peace with all of them; yet no two thought the same thoughts, approached a problem in the same way, or would have formulated the same social program. Thus favor was not to be had through conformity; it was perhaps their differences, and the remarkable tolerance each of the others, that helped us to be ourselves.

In a division of labor never consciously planned it was Cooley’s task to help us towards intellectual freedom. No one was ever more honestly cast for, or ever appeared more innocent in the role of corrupter of youth. He was a quiet, shy, unobtrusive person; he was handicapped by an impediment in speech and a partial deafness; in conversation and class-room he was never glib. He had none of the dynamic energy, the flash of colorful speech, the lively quality of hippodrome which marks the superficially good teacher. There was only the intense fire back of his dark eyes to give the show away. He did not attack conventional beliefs, dramatize issues, stage controversies, or attempt to shock the conventionally- minded. He was quietly concerned with that abstract and remote thing “social theory”; his talk was all about assumptions, points of view, concepts, and ideas, all matters a bit hard to get excited about. He did not proclaim his speculations “important,” or even apply them to the questions of the day about which men differed. For the most part it was, ”it seems to me,” “sometimes I think,” and “often I wonder.” He never disposed of the issues we brought him; instead he suggested new ways of looking at the problems or else gave us different questions to worry about. His seminar was always his seminar; the discussion went where he would; yet, unless he had a paper to read, he kept control by mere casual suggestions. His “instruction,” if such it was, of course never got anywhere; that was the reason it was so insidiously effective. Cooley never told us what to do, or how to do it. Our excursions into learning and unlearning were our own-or at least not his. But whatever we thought or wrote, we thought or wrote differently because of his subtle influence.

It was our luck to chance upon him in the flush of his creative work. Like most of us he had begun academic life as an economist. He had gone the way along which we were blundering; that is one reason he understood our problems, doubts, and confusions so well. If for a time he stuck to his craft, his thoughts were straying elsewhere. The titles of his early studies, Personal Competition and A Theory of Transportation were innocent enough; they could cause no worry to the orthodox; yet the first is concerned with an “institution” and the second has a “functional approach.” Their completion left him with fresh leads; he became absorbed in the relation of the individual to society, and embarked upon that adventure of mind which resulted in his great trilogy. Human Nature and the Social Order had been published in 1902, and Social Organization followed in 1909. We found him just beginning the studies which in 1918 were to appear as Social Process. He shared with us the progress of his creative labors; from very faint beginnings we watched that work take shape at his hands.

It is not easy to set down what we got from Cooley. If it could be done, it would not be half so important. How much of the freshness that came into our intellectual outlook was his, how much came from reading and conversation and other exposures, I cannot say. We had been taught an economics made up of principles as neatly articulated as the laws of physics; he helped us to see it as a system of thought, rooted in ideas, a product of a particular time and place. In a short paper, written for our seminar, which later we persuaded him to print, he characterized neo-classical doctrine as “an attempt to tell time by the second hand of the watch.” He helped us to see the industrial system, not as an automatic self-regulating mechanism, but as a complex of institutions in process of development. He may never have said so; but from him we eventually learned that business, as well as the state, is a scheme of arrangements, and that our choice is not between regulation and letting things alone, but between one scheme of control and another. In some way he forced us to give up our common-sense notions, led us away from an atomic individualism, made us see “life as an organic whole,”‘ and revealed to us “the individual” and “‘society” remaking each other in an endless process of change. Underneath it all were a few simple, basic ideas, that made inquiry fruitful whether the study was concerned with the market, marriage, or contract; with freedom, property, or inheritance.

And it was all done so honestly, so quietly, so undisturbingly that we did not look upon him as the author of our corruption. Once Cooley was asked for an opinion upon one of those trumped-up issues which serve for mighty academic controversy. His reply was, “Do you remember the great quarrel over the method of baptism, sprinkling or immersion?” “Yes.” “How was that settled?” A distinct service of his was in making us see that issues may be of the mind and had best be forgotten. A suggestion from him often effected a revolution in the habits of a youngster. A cub once handed to him a dreadfully erudite essay filled with the polysyllabic slang of the academic trade. Cooley pencilled on the back, “This may be self-expression; but it is not communication.'” The writer, after all these years, is still a sorry scribbler; but a great deal of the very little he has learned about writing is due to that casual remark. An idea would come from the blue; Cooley would jot down a note or two. At his first free moment he would attempt to think the matter through; then he wrote it out and filed it away. Later it appeared, more or less rewritten as a section in a chapter. You will find his books full of such units; quite in accord with his own notion of process, they grew. In the face of such a procedure it was hard for us to keep the faith or to pass on a rigid body of knowledge. We, too, must know the zest of inquiry.

As his manner was quiet, so was his life uneventful. He was born at Ann Arbor in I864; he died at Ann Arbor in 1929. His father Thomas M. Cooley was a man of action; he edited Blackstone, was a great judge, helped along the development of American law, created the Michigan law school, agitated for railroad reform, filled public offices, and served as first chairman of the Interstate Commerce Commission. The son, Charles Horton, spent his life quietly as a student. He took his undergraduate work at Michigan; he had his graduate training at Michigan; from Michigan he received his doctor’s degree. After a short period in government work at Washington, where he learned how valuable statistics are and what they cannot be made to do, he re- turned to Michigan to teach, to inquire and to think. In spite of repeated calls to go elsewhere he remained at Michigan. His hours of creative work were given to a single university; the years of his life were tolled off one by one in a single town. Yet he was able to free young men from slavery to the little intellectual systems of time and place. His daily orbit lay between Forest Avenue and the Economics Building; yet out of it there came Life and the Student.

This is not the place to tell off Cooley’s “Contributions” and to pass them in critical review. It will be agreed that he set for himself a heroic and a worthwhile task. An accepted social theory, the ultimate term of which was the individual, was inadequate to explain contemporary society, Individualism, as philosophy, institution, and reform, was outworn. The complex life of the modern world was not to be crowded into mechanical formulas. Cooley set about elaborating concepts of “the individual” and of “society” adequate alike for a study of social organization and the formulation of a social program. It is idle to attempt to record the measure of his success; that is a thing which no person can tell another; yet each may judge the matter for himself. Let me suggest to anyone who will essay it an engaging venture in appraisal. First, read the parts of John Stuart Mill which are most nearly social theory; second, run through the volumes penned by Thomas Hill Green; third, follow again the thread that runs through Cooley’s trilogy; and, finally, turn to left and dip into Cooley’s contemporaries. Such a procedure will not result in assigning Cooley to his rank among social thinkers; but it will throw into sharp perspective his fresh and penetrating approach. It will surely reveal the debt we owe him for invaluable aids towards an understanding of human society.

It is to Cooley’s lasting credit that his own work has already become a bit “old- fashioned.” He could hardly escape the evangelical world in which he was brought up; today many persons are superiorly tolerant of the sweetness and light and betterment to be found in his pages. To- day in many a book concerned with particular problems his social philosophy is to be found; there it is more relevantly full of meaning than in his abstract accounts. The same general social theory is being rewritten by men who come at it later, who have the advantages of the borrower, and who give to it an articulate form which a creator is powerless to impart. Some of us, perhaps ourselves a little craftworn, will continue to prefer the original, distinguished or marred by the marks of the tortuous growth of thought. And surely the books will re- main as evidences that inquiry may result alike in scholarship and in literature.

A good old English word ‘”radical” has of late been abused and has fallen into very low estate. Its real meaning is “a person who persists in getting to the root of the matter.” Cooley was one of the great intellectual radicals of his generation. As to the quality of his radicalism, the content of his contribution, his precedence or subsequence with ideas and doc- trines, we may let academicians dispute. In the decades ahead they are sure to do so, with or without our leave; they have time for such matters. But the Cooley we knew would never bother his head with such questions.