Charles Horton Cooley,Pragmatist or Belletrist? The Complexity of Influence and the Decentering of Intellectual Traditions

This essay treats recent attempts to identify symbolic interaction (SI) founding theorist Charles Horton Cooley as a pragmatist sociologist exemplifying, and even influenced by, the pragmatism of Charles Saunders Peirce, as an example of the American exceptionalist character of SI. Beginning with Cooley's creative approach to conceptualizing the social, these attempts are scrutinized and measured against the contention that Cooley's thought can be equally if not more understood as a product of influence of the literary essay tradition. A close reading is given of the concordance of his personal journal with a selection of his published writings concerning the influence of members of Cooley's essayistic “genre matrix” – Emerson, Montaigne, and Walter Pater – on the development of his intellectual self and thought. Further substantiation is supplied by an analysis of the essayistic influence on Cooley's rigorous treatment of qualitative methodology. It is concluded that a decentered positioning of Cooley's work is preferable to a single‐origin one.