Abstract
Pragmatism and formalism had both raised the self of the observer to a position of special prominence. Not only was the self a source and synthesis of all viable knowledge, it constituted the elemental unit of sociological analysis. It was thus simultaneously an intellectual subject and an intellectual object. The self is taken to be a social construct, emerging from language, which lends order to all interaction. It is man made conscious of himself as a social process, and its basis is a reflexive turning-back of mind on itself. Reflexivity is made possible by the social forms and it advances the evolution of those forms. It is in the self that a fundamental grammar or logic of the forms is allowed to unfold. All social phenomena stem from that logic so that a socially formed mind and the processes of society display a unity.
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Notes
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© 1979 Paul Rock
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Rock, P. (1979). The Self. In: The Making of Symbolic Interactionism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-04084-1_4
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