Abstract
The discussion of Lifeworld as an alternative in the previous chapter rises in a European context, but late in the nineteenth century, an alternative discussion as well was brought to being at the American universities, especially at the University of Chicago.
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Pragmatism can be seen as “truth” understood as a question of capability to practical use. In Mead’s discussion of a theory of value, the value is the character of an object in its capacity of satisfying an interest – it resides neither in the object alone nor in an emotional state of the subject. Stated in ethical terms, in the moral act the motive for action is the impulse itself as directed to a social end. A social self has social impulses that demand expression as imperatively as any other impulses. Moral ends are social ends, because in the first place, the only standard for impulse that impulse makes possible resides in the answer as to whether the impulse in question feeds or dies on its own satisfaction and whether it expands and harmonizes, or narrow and defeats, other impulses and second, because the self, as a social being, must be concerned within and without a social harmony of impulses. Moral action is socially directed actions in which one acts with the interest of others as well as one’s self in mind. What principally characterizes pragmatism is its emphasis on human beings as agents and their practical relations to the world (see also Delanty and Strydom 2003: 277–).
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Both Mead and Blumer are strongly critical towards Husserl’s thoughts of “pure consciousness,” which they mean cannot be connected to a social context where people interact and develop a self. Because of this they refuse (a transcendental) phenomenology as a sociological basis for understanding people.
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Ritzer (1977: 99) thinks that especially the sociology in the USA, before the depression, was inspired by Comte, Spencer, Gumplowicz, Ratzenhofer, and Tarde.
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Mead (1962: 88). Compare this to Husserl’s discussion of the essence of the object.
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See Kant’s discussion of theory of knowledge and recognition.
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See Schutz’s concept of action, in Chap. 4.4.2.
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See also Schutz and “finite provinces of meaning.”
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See Schutz’s typifications.
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See Mead (1962: 13); also compare this to Husserl’s discussion of the essence; there is a similarity of understanding between those two, although Mead refuses Husserl’s phenomenology.
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A little known fact about Blumer was his height of 6 feet 4 inches, which came in handy as a graduate student. In order to pay for his tuition and way through the University of Chicago, Blumer played professional American football as a lineman for the Chicago Bears.
- 15.
Clark was a student of Blumer’s at the University of California, Berkeley, in the mid-1970s. As part of Clark’s doctoral work in anthropology, linguistics, economics, and education (now as Cross-Disciplinary Studies) at Berkeley, he took classes from Blumer in sociology. Critical of his own field (anthropology) for its support of the status quo paradigms and mired in determinism and structuralism, Clark found Blumer’s ideas stimulating and well-founded upon an entirely different philosophical line of thought that Clark had not been exposed heretofore. What also occurred to Clark, who was (and is today) a research associate at the Center for the Study of Social Change (CSSC), University of California, Berkeley, was the need to communicate Blumer’s ideas to a broader academic audience. Scholarly publications in the mid-1970s were primary composed of scholars communicating to one another and to students worldwide. The academic community was aware that there were very few materials published by Blumer. Most considered this a real tragedy, since it meant that only Blumer’s students would benefit from his teaching. In that context, Clark initiated a publication project. He approached the CSSC to support the recording and transcribing of Blumer’s classroom lectures. Blumer agreed and the project continued for one semester. A series of six papers from Blumer’s lectures was transcribed and edited. After the first semester, Blumer (a member of the CSSC himself) agreed to participate in a special seminar for senior faculty and invited graduate students to discuss the ideas presented in his lectures the prior semester. Afterwards, Clark edited the lectures. Later he sought publication for the Blumer lectures and seminar in the late 1970s, especially with the University of California Press. While the press was interested, the concern then was that some of the materials had already been presented by Blumer in his book (Symbolic Interactionism – Perspective and Method, University of California Press, 1969, reissued 1986). There was “nothing new.” In short, the reaction was that there was not enough “new” material to warrant a separately published book on Blumer’s ideas. Clark left academics to pursue entrepreneurial business opportunities throughout the 1980s. He dropped the project, until his Fullbright to Aalborg University in the Winter of 1994–1995. Those lectures will later on be published in a separate volume. Stay tuned now in 2018.
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The term “symbolic interactionism” is what Blumer calls a “somewhat barbaric neologism” that he coined in an offhand way in an article written in “Man and Society” (Schmidt E P (ed.) N.Y., Prentice-Hall, 1937). The term somehow caught on and is now in general use.
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Blumer’s PhD thesis has the title “Method in Social Psychology.”
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Mead (1962) calls the two “the conversation of gestures” and “the use of significant symbols.”
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Clark II, W.W., Fast, M. (2019). Mead and Blumer: Social Theory and Symbolic Interactionism. In: Qualitative Economics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05937-8_5
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