CHARLES HORTON COOLEY CHARLES HORTON COOLEYFrom Charles Horton Cooley, Social Organization: A Study of the Larger Mind. New York:Charles Scribner's Sons, 1909, pp. 25-31.
By primary groups I mean those characterized by intimate face-to-face association andcooperation. They are primary in several senses, but chiefly in that they are fundamental informing the social nature and ideals of the individual. The result of intimate association,psychologically, is a certain fusion of individualities in a common whole, so that one's very self,for many purposes at least, is the common life and purpose of the group. Perhaps the simplestway of describing this wholeness is by saying that it is a "we"; it involves the sort of sympathyand mutual identification for which "we" is the natural expression. One lives in the feeling of thewhole and finds the chief aims of his will in that feeling.
It is not to be supposed that the unity of the primary group is one of mere harmony and love. It isalways a differentiated and usually a competitive unity, admitting of self-assertion and variousappropriative passions; but these passions are socialized by sympathy, and come, or tend tocome, under the discipline of a common spirit. The individual will be ambitious, but the chiefobject of his ambition will be some desired place in the thought of the others, and he will feelallegiance to common standards of service and fair play. So the boy will dispute with his fellowsa place on the team, but above such disputes will place the common glory of his class and school.
The most important spheres of this intimate association and cooperation--though by no means theonly ones--are the family, the play-group of children, and the neighborhood or community groupof elders. These are practically universal, belonging to all times and all stages of development;and are accordingly a chief basis of what is universal in human nature and human ideals. Thebest comparative studies of the family, such as those of Westermarck [1] or Howard, [2] show itto us as not only a universal institution, but as more alike the world over than the exaggeration ofexceptional customs by an earlier school had led us to suppose. Nor can any one doubt thegeneral prevalence of play-groups among children or of informal assemblies of various kindsamong their elders. Such association is clearly the nursery of human nature in the world aboutus, and there is no apparent reason to suppose that the case has anywhere or at any time beenessentially different.
As regards play, I might, were it not a matter of common observation, multiply illustrations ofthe universality and spontaneity of the group discussion and cooperation to which it gives rise.The general fact is that children, especially boys after about their twelfth year, live in fellowshipsin which their sympathy, ambition and honor are engaged even more, often, than they are in thefamily. Most of us can recall examples of the endurance by boys of injustice and even cruelty,rather than appeal from their fellows to parents or teachers--as, for instance, in the hazing soprevalent at schools, and so difficult, for this very reason, to repress. And how elaborate thediscussion, how cogent the public opinion, how hot the ambitions in these fellowships.
Nor is this facility of juvenile association, as is sometimes supposed, a trait peculiar to Englishand American boys; since experience among our immigrant population seems to show that theoffspring of the more restrictive civilizations of the continent of Europe form self-governingplay-groups with almost equal readiness. Thus Miss Jane Addams, after pointing out that the"gang" is almost universal, speaks of the interminable discussion which every detail of the gang'sactivity receives, remarking that "in these social folk-motes, so to speak, the young citizen learnsto act upon his own determination." [3]
Of the neighborhood group it may be said, in general, that from the time men formed permanentsettlements upon the land, down, at least, to the rise of modern industrial cities, it has played amain part in the primary, heart-to-heart life of the people. Among our Teutonic forefathers thevillage community was apparently the chief sphere of sympathy and mutual aid for the commonsall through the "dark" and middle ages, and for many purposes it remains so in rural districts atthe present day. In some countries we still find it with all its ancient vitality, notably in Russia,where the mir, or self-governing village group, is the main theatre of life, along with the family,for perhaps fifty millions of peasants.
In our own life the intimacy of the neighborhood has been broken up by the growth of an intricatemesh of wider contacts which leaves us strangers to people who live in the same house. Andeven in the country the same principle is at work, though less obviously, diminishing oureconomic and spiritual community with our neighbors. How far this change is a healthydevelopment, and how far a disease, is perhaps still uncertain.
Besides these almost universal kinds of primary association, there are many others whose formdepends upon the particular state of civilization; the only essential thing, as I have said, being acertain intimacy and fusion of personalities. In our own society, being little bound by place,people easily form clubs, fraternal societies and the like, based on congeniality, which may giverise to real intimacy. Many such relations are formed at school and college, and among men andwomen brought together in the first instance by their occupations--as workmen in the same trade,or the like. Where there is a little common interest and activity, kindness grows like weeds bythe roadside.
But the fact that the family and neighborhood groups are ascendant in the open and plastic timeof childhood makes them even now incomparably more influential than all the rest.
Primary groups are primary in the sense that they give the individual his earliest and completestexperience of social unity, and also in the sense that they do not change in the same degree asmore elaborate relations, but form a comparatively permanent source out of which the latter areever springing. Of course they are not independent of the larger society, but to some extentreflect its spirit; as the German family and the German school bear somewhat distinctly the printof German militarism. But this, after all, is like the tide setting back into creeks, and does notcommonly go very far. Among the German, and still more among the Russian, peasantry arefound habits of free cooperation and discussion almost uninfluenced by the character of the state;and it is a familiar and well-supported view that the village commune, self-governing as regardslocal affairs and habituated to discussion, is a very widespread institution in settled communities,and the continuator of a similar autonomy previously existing in the clan. "It is man who makesmonarchies and establishes republics, but the commune seems to come directly from the hand ofGod." [4]
In our own cities the crowded tenements and the general economic and social confusion havesorely wounded the family and the neighborhood, but it is remarkable, in view of theseconditions, what vitality they show; and there is nothing upon which the conscience of the time ismore determined than upon restoring them to health.
These groups, then, are springs of life, not only for the individual but for social institutions. They are only in part moulded by special traditions, and, in larger degree, express a universalnature. The religion or government of other civilizations may seem alien to us, but the childrenor the family group wear the common life, and with them we can always make ourselves athome.
By human nature, I suppose, we may understand those sentiments and impulses that are human inbeing superior to those of lower animals, and also in the sense that they belong to mankind atlarge, and not to any particular race or time. It means, particularly, sympathy and theinnumerable sentiments into which sympathy enters, such as love, resentment, ambition, vanity,hero-worship, and the feeling of social right and wrong. [5]
Human nature in this sense is justly regarded as a comparatively permanent element in society.Always and everywhere men seek honor and dread ridicule, defer to public opinion, cherish theirgoods and their children, and admire courage, generosity, and success. It is always safe toassume that people are and have been human.
It is true, no doubt, that there are differences of race capacity, so great that a large part ofmankind are possibly incapable of any high kind of social organization. But these differences,like those among individuals of the same race, are subtle, depending upon some obscureintellectual deficiency, some want of vigor, or slackness of moral fibre, and do not involveunlikeness in the generic impulses of human nature. In these all races are very much alike. Themore insight one gets into the life of savages, even those that are reckoned the lowest, the morehuman, the more like ourselves, they appear. Take for instance the natives of Central Australia,as described by Spencer and Gillen, [6] tribes having no definite government or worship andscarcely able to count to five. They are generous to one another, emulous of virtue as theyunderstand it, kind to their children and to the aged, and by no means harsh to women. Theirfaces as shown in the photographs are wholly human and many of them attractive.
And when we come to a comparison between different stages in the development of the samerace, between ourselves, for instance, and the Teutonic tribes of the time of Caesar, the differenceis neither in human nature nor in capacity, but in organization, in the range and complexity ofrelations, in the diverse expression of powers and passions essentially much the same.
There is no better proof of this generic likeness of human nature than in the ease and joy withwhich the modern man makes himself at home in literature depicting the most remote and variedphases of life--in Homer, in the Nibelung tales, in the Hebrew Scriptures, in the legends of theAmerican Indians, in stories of frontier life, of soldiers and sailors, of criminals and tramps, andso on. The more penetratingly any phase of human life is studied the more an essential likenessto ourselves is revealed.
To return to primary groups: the view here maintained is that human nature is not somethingexisting separately in the individual, but a group-nature or primary phase of society, a relativelysimple and general condition of the social mind. It is something more, on the one hand, than themere instinct that is born in us--though that enters into it--and something less, on the other, thanthe more elaborate development of ideas and sentiments that makes up institutions. It is thenature which is developed and expressed in those simple, face-to-face groups that are somewhatalike in all societies; groups of the family, the playground, and the neighborhood. In the essentialsimilarity of these is to be found the basis, in experience, for similar ideas and sentiments in thehuman mind. In these, everywhere, human nature comes into existence. Man does not have it atbirth; he cannot acquire it except through fellowship, and it decays in isolation.
If this view does not recommend itself to common sense I do not know that elaboration will be ofmuch avail. It simply means the application at this point of the idea that society and individualsare inseparable phases of a common whole, so that wherever we find an individual fact we maylook for a social fact to go with it. If there is a universal nature in persons there must besomething universal in association to correspond to it.
What else can human nature be than a trait of primary groups? Surely not an attribute of theseparate individual--supposing there were any such thing--since its typical characteristics, such asaffection, ambition, vanity, and resentment, are inconceivable apart from society. If it belongs,then, to man in association, what kind or degree of association is required to develop it?Evidently nothing elaborate, because elaborate phases of society are transient and diverse, whilehuman nature is comparatively stable and universal. In short the family and neighborhood life isessential to its genesis and nothing more is.
Here as everywhere in the study of society we must learn to see mankind in psychical wholes,rather than in artificial separation. We must see and feel the communal life of family and localgroups as immediate facts, not as combinations of something else. And perhaps we shall do thisbest by recalling our own experience and extending it through sympathetic observation. What, inour life, is the family and the fellowship; what do we know of the we-feeling? Thought of thiskind may help us to get a concrete perception of that primary group-nature of which everythingsocial is the outgrowth.
1. The History of Human Marriage.
2. A History of Matrimonial Institutions.
3. Newer Ideals of Peace, 177.
4. De Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 1, chap. 5.
5. These matters are expounded at some length in the writer's Human Nature and the SocialOrder.
6. The Native Tribes of Central Australia. Compare also Darwin's views and examples given inchap. 7 of his Descent of Man.
1. Cooley's major works include: Human Nature and the Social Order (1902); SocialOrganization (1909); Social Process (1918); and Life and the Student: Roadside Notes onHuman Nature, Society, and Letters (1927). A collection of his papers was published after hisdeath, entitled Sociological Theory and Social Research (1930).
2. The term was probably first used as the chapter title "The Primary Social Group" by A. W.Small and C. E. Vincent in their Introduction to the Study of Society (1894).
3. For a general survey, see: Edward A. Shils, "The Study Of the Primary Group," in D. Lerner,et al. (eds.), The Policy Sciences (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1951), pp. 44-69.
4. See, for example, A. P. Bates and N. Babchuck, "The Primary Group: A Reappraisal,"Sociological Quarterly, 2 (1961), 181-191; E. Faris, "The Primary Group: Essence andAccident," American Journal of Sociology, 37 (1932), 41-50; and T. D. Eliot, "Group, Primary,"in H. P. Fairchild (ed.), Dictionary of Sociology (New York: Philosophical Library, 1944), p.135.
5. S. C. Lee, "The Primary Group as Cooley Defines It," Sociological Quarterly, 5 (1964),23-34. For an example of modern research emanating from Cooley's work, see: G. E. Swanson, "To Live in Concord with a Society: Two Empirical Studies of Primary Relations," in A. J.Reiss, Jr. (ed.), Cooley and Sociological Analysis (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,1968), pp. 87-150 and 165-172.
6. For a biographical statement and appraisal of Cooley, the reader is referred to: Edward C.Jandy, Charles Horton Cooley: His Life and His Social Theory (New York: Dryden, 1942) .
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