Charles Horton Cooley Quotes
Our individual lives cannot, generally, be works of art unless the social order is also.
Cooley, Charles Horton. Social Process. Charles Scribner's Sons, 1918, p. 392.
Even in democracies, governments sometimes adopt programs or policies which are not those preferred by a majority of the people. Frequently, a program which has initial public support losses that support yet the government “stays the course”. Legislative and Constitutional complexities sometimes will allow minorities to dictate practices and policies that do not have majority support. In pseudo-democracies and authoritarian regimes the people have little to say in government activities. The result is that there is often a distinction between a society and its government. In many cases foreign opinion of a government and its people are different. America is the classic example, where Americans and American society is much more popular in many nations than is the United States government.
Indeed it did make the generation more socially conscious having lived through the Great Depression which had begun under President Herbert Hoover.
Charles Horton Cooley was an American sociologist and the son of Michigan Supreme Court Judge Thomas M. Cooley. He studied and went on to teach economics and sociology at the University of Michigan, was a founding member of the American Sociological Association in 1905 and became its eighth president in 1918. He is perhaps best known for his concept of the looking-glass self, which is the concept that a person's self grows out of society's interpersonal interactions and the perceptions of others. Cooley's health began to deteriorate in 1928. He was diagnosed with an unidentified form of cancer in March 1929 and died two months later.
