The Roots of Symbolic Interactionism

Abstract

Although it seems to be philosophically disinherited, symbolic interactionism is a full heir to the intellectual traditions and positions which were developed in nineteenth-century Europe. Like every other sociology, it offers one strategy for confronting the epistemological problems posed by the unresolved nature of social reality. Kant gave those problems a special clarity and poignancy, and it was Kantian philosophy which served as a basis for the evolution of sociology. Kant distinguished between discrete modes of apprehending the world. One such mode, the synthetic a priori, was adopted by Simmel as the pivot of a novel sociology which emphasised the organising part played by social forms. Formalism transmuted sociology into a viable enterprise, but it also challenged accepted definitions of the legitimate scope and task of social thought. It underscored the tentative and precarious character of knowledge; it emphasised the fluidity of social life; it dismissed analytic a priori reasoning; it reduced the scale of effective analysis; but it also provided some arguments for assuming that there was an identity between sociology and its objects. Those themes were incorporated through a direct process of transmission. They were absorbed to become some of the principal contentions of symbolic interactionism itself. Their origins have been forgotten, but they are an essential element in the reconstruction of the sociology.