The social origins of symbolic interactionism: Corporate capitalism, progressive politics, and the nature/nurture debate. (Volumes I and II)

A dialectical sociology of knowledge model is employed to research the social origins of symbolic interactionism. The thesis is that symbolic interactionism emerged out of the nature/nurture debate and was influenced by the social context of the times and Progressive politics. In post-1865 United States, industrialization, immigration, urbanization, and the rise of graduate research universities were the major social forces transforming America. Along with these transformations arose arguments over the nature of human nature. Social Darwinism, an ideology that justified laissez-faire capitalism, arose. This ideology began to decline in the 1880s when challenged by Lamarckian social thinkers and by the rise of corporate capitalism which sanctioned social intervention directed at achieving social order. Biological and psychological hereditarianism then arose. Many hereditarians had political commitments to the eugenics movement which favored restrictionist immigration and involuntary sterilization. Biological hereditarianism declined when cultural anthropologists and comparative ethnologists separated culture from biology and argued for the cultural interpretation of behavior and when geneticists undermined the claims of the hereditarians by showing the plasticity of heredity to the environment. Psychological hereditarianism continued into the early 1930s with the invention of the IQ test. Psychological hereditarians later recanted their biological interpretation of IQ scores when numerous and persistent anomalies undermined their perspective. Also, by the mid 1930s, the social times had changed in favor of egalitarianism with the rise of the New Deal and federal commitments to equality of opportunity, social security, and social insurance legislation. Beginning with William James and advancing in the work of James Mark Baldwin, Charles Horton Cooley, John Dewey, W. I. Thomas, and George Herbert Mead, anit-determinist arguments against a biological interpretation of human nature and behavior were advanced. Their emphasis on socialization and education was influenced by their Progressive politics. In order to theoretically ground social intervention, a new view of human nature was conceptualized which argued that human beings could determine their environment rather than be determined by either biology or social environment. Self and society became indivisible and social intervention, theoretically justified; for, by changing institutions of socialization and education, one could improve the human condition.