Charles Horton Cooley

Imagining Social Reality
An intellectual biography of a pre-eminent American sociologist.
An intellectual biography of a preeminent American sociologist One of the founders of sociology in the United States, Charles Horton Cooley (1864-1929) is perhaps best known for his concepts of the looking-glass self and the primary group. But according to Glenn Jacobs, he also deserves to be remembered as the first scholar of his generation to develop a viable concept of the social Characterizing Cooley as an “”exceptional exceptionalist,”” Jacobs shows how his unique adaptation of Adam Smith’s liberalism and his rejection of Herbert Spencer resulted in a notion of the social that set him apart from the burgeoning professional social science movements of his time. In surveying Cooley’s thought, Jacobs emphasizes the role that the sociologist’s own “”inner work”” played in the development of his idea of the self. Particularly important in this respe