It is almost impossible now to imagine the prestigious position Charles Horton Cooley (1864-1929) held within the founding generation of American sociologists. His seminal work on human communication, social organization, and public opinion stimulated and guided much of early American sociological thought.
Cooley's work relating self and community is now more relevant than ever to the problems of understanding and directing modern democratic societies. Cooley applied the ideas of pragmatism to developing a systematic way of approaching social action, social change, and social order; he...

This classic text has set a standard for American sociol-ogy. Cooley provides analysis without empiricism, applying psychological insight to his study of the individual and collective self. First published in 1909, this work attempts to motivate man and society to be more responsible to each other.

-The style of his book is clear and attractive, the text abounding in happy quotation.---Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science

This work remains a pioneer sociological treatise on American culture. By understanding the individual not as the product of society but as its mirror image, Cooley concludes that the social order cannot be imposed from outside human nature but that it arises from the self. Cooley stimulated pedagogical inquiry into the dynamics of society with the publication of Human Nature and the Social Order in 1902. Human Nature and the Social Order is something more than an admirable ethical treatise. It is also a classic work on the process of social communication as the "very stuff" of which the self...

Life and the Student (1927), with a new introduction by Jonathan B. Imber, is a compilation of reflections, commentaries, and letters from other scholars that Charles Horton Cooley, accumulated throughout his life. The book includes personal passages on various topics within the realms of reading and writing, thinking, art, science, sociology, academia, religion, and human nature. There is no formal structure to the book, except the literary sense that organizes these thoughts and observations about life. It is impossible to categorize these widely ranging commentaries. They include...