BLS LLB 5 Years Sem 3 Sociology 2023-24 Question Paper with Solutions

Auguste Comte's Law of Three Stages holds that human thought, and with it society, passes through three successive stages in explaining the world:

1. The theological stage. Phenomena are explained by the will of supernatural beings. It has three sub stages: fetishism, in which objects themselves are held to have life; polytheism, in which many gods govern different departments of nature; and monotheism, in which one god governs all. Society in this stage is dominated by priests and by military rule.
2. The metaphysical stage. Supernatural beings are replaced by abstract forces and essences, such as nature, the social contract or natural rights. It is a transitional stage, dominated by lawyers and philosophers.
3. The positive or scientific stage. Explanation is by observation, experiment and the discovery of law. The mind stops asking why and asks how. Society is directed by scientists and industrialists.

Comte held that each science passes through these stages in turn, and that sociology, which he named and placed last in his hierarchy, was the final one to reach the positive stage.

The Purusharthas are the four aims or ends of human life prescribed by Hindu social philosophy:

1. Dharma: righteousness, duty and moral law, the regulating principle of the whole scheme.
2. Artha: wealth, material prosperity and the means of livelihood.
3. Kama: desire, pleasure and the satisfaction of legitimate emotional and aesthetic needs.
4. Moksha: liberation from the cycle of birth and death, the highest and final aim.

Artha and kama are legitimate only within the limits of dharma, and moksha is the goal towards which the other three are preparation.

Kinship is the system of socially recognised relationships based on blood and marriage which binds people together and assigns them rights and duties. Kinship ties are the specific bonds so created.

They are of two kinds:

1. Consanguineous ties, based on blood: parents and children, brothers and sisters.
2. Affinal ties, based on marriage: husband and wife, and the relatives acquired by marriage.

By degree they are primary (the eight direct relations), secondary (the primary kin of one's primary kin, such as father's brother or wife's brother) and tertiary (the secondary kin of one's primary kin).

Culture is the entire social heritage of a people: everything learned as a member of society and transmitted to the next generation.

E. B. Tylor: "Culture is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society."

It has two parts. Material culture is the tangible: tools, machines, buildings, dress. Non material culture is the intangible: beliefs, values, norms, language, morals, law and custom.

Its chief characteristics are that it is learned, social, shared, transmitted, cumulative, dynamic, variable, integrated and normative.

For full marks, cover: the meaning of pluralism in its several senses, its dimensions in India, the conditions on which it depends, the threats to it, the constitutional framework, and an assessment.

Meaning. Pluralism is the principle and the practice by which many distinct groups coexist within one society, retaining their separate identities while sharing a common political and economic life. It is the opposite both of forced assimilation, which erases difference, and of segregation, which isolates it.

The word carries three related senses:

1. Cultural pluralism: the coexistence of many cultures, languages and religions within one state.
2. Political pluralism: the theory that power in a society is and should be dispersed among many competing groups, parties, unions, associations, religious bodies and business groups, rather than concentrated in the state or in a single ruling class. Its exponents include Laski, Figgis and Robert Dahl.
3. Legal pluralism: the coexistence of more than one body of law within one jurisdiction, which in India means the personal laws applying alongside general statute.

Constitutional framework. Articles 14, 15 and 16; Articles 25 to 28 on freedom of religion; Articles 29 and 30, the right of any section of citizens to conserve its language, script and culture and the right of minorities to establish and administer educational institutions; the Eighth Schedule and the language provisions; Article 244 with the Fifth and Sixth Schedules; Article 51A(e) and (f); and secularism as part of the basic structure, S. R. Bommai v. Union of India (1994).

Assessment. India is the largest working experiment in pluralism attempted anywhere. Its record is mixed: the linguistic reorganisation of states in 1956 defused what many predicted would break the country, and the constitutional protection of minority institutions has held; against that stand recurrent communal violence, the persistence of caste, and periodic majoritarian pressure. Pluralism in India is best described as a continuing achievement rather than a settled condition.

Types. Primary socialisation, in the family in early childhood; secondary socialisation, in school, workplace and wider society; anticipatory socialisation, learning the ways of a group one hopes to join; resocialisation, unlearning old roles and learning new ones, as on entering prison, the army or a monastery; and developmental socialisation, building on what is already learned.

Agencies. The family, the primary and most powerful, reaching the child when it is most impressionable; the peer group, the first setting of equality, where cooperation and competition among equals are learned rather than obedience to superiors; the school, which transmits knowledge and, through timetables and rules, trains the child in impersonal authority; religion, supplying values and sanctions; the workplace; and mass and social media, now very powerful and largely unregulated.

Theories of the self.

• Charles Horton Cooley's looking glass self: we come to see ourselves as we imagine others see us, in three steps, our imagination of our appearance to another, our imagination of that person's judgment, and the resulting pride or shame.

For full marks, cover: the definition, what distinguishes a group from an aggregate and a category, the characteristics, the classifications with their criteria, and the importance of group life.

Definition. A social group is a collection of two or more persons who interact with one another, are conscious of belonging together, and share expectations about one another's behaviour. MacIver and Page: "Any collection of human beings who are brought into social relationships with one another."

Characteristics. A plurality of persons; reciprocal interaction; a sense of unity or we feeling; common interests and goals; shared norms; a structure of statuses and roles; relative stability; and control over its members.

What is not a group. An aggregate is people in physical proximity without interaction or we feeling, such as a crowd at a bus stop. A category is a statistical class sharing a characteristic, such as all women aged twenty, with no interaction at all.

Classification.

Importance of group life. The group is the medium of socialisation and of the formation of self and personality; it satisfies the needs for belonging and security; it exercises social control through approval and disapproval; it makes the division of labour, and therefore civilisation, possible; it transmits culture; and it is the unit through which most collective action, economic, political and legal, is actually carried out.

2. Achieved status, earned by effort, choice, ability or competition: advocate, graduate, husband, trade union leader.
3. Master status, the one status that dominates all others in how a person is perceived and treated. In India caste has historically operated as a master status; so may sex, disability or a criminal conviction.

Associated concepts.

• Status set (Merton): the whole collection of statuses a person occupies at one time.
• Role set (Merton): the several relationships that go with a single status. A schoolteacher's role set includes pupils, parents, colleagues, the head and the school board.
• Role conflict: incompatible demands arising from two different statuses held at once.
• Role strain: incompatible demands arising within a single role.

5. In property: daughters relinquishing shares in practice despite the Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act, 2005.
6. In marriage: dowry, child marriage, restrictions on choice of partner, and the burden of the double shift.
7. In public life: low representation in legislatures, the judiciary and senior administration.
8. In safety: sexual harassment, domestic violence, rape, trafficking and acid attack, which is where discrimination becomes crime.

The connection between discrimination and crime. Crimes against women are not separate from discrimination; they are its enforcement mechanism. A society that treats women as subordinate produces both the belief that they may be controlled and the confidence that control will not be punished. Under reporting, hostile investigation and low conviction rates then confirm the belief.

(ii) Recent laws to improve the situation of women

1. The Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005. A civil statute providing protection, residence, monetary and custody orders. It defines domestic violence widely to include physical, sexual, verbal, emotional and economic abuse, and gives a woman the right to reside in the shared household whether or not she owns it.

7. The Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Marriage) Act, 2019, following Shayara Bano v. Union of India (2017), which held instantaneous triple talaq unconstitutional.
8. The Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act, 2005, making daughters coparceners by birth, confirmed in Vineeta Sharma v. Rakesh Sharma (2020).
9. The Maternity Benefit (Amendment) Act, 2017, extending paid maternity leave to 26 weeks.
10. The Dowry Prohibition Act, 1961, with Sections 304B and 498A of the Indian Penal Code, now carried into the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023.
11. The Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques Act, 1994, prohibiting sex determination.
12. Constitutional foundation: Articles 14, 15(1), 15(3), 16, 21, 23, 39(a) and (d), 42 and 51A(e).

1. Agricultural productivity rose faster than he allowed. Mechanisation, chemical fertiliser, irrigation and, in India from the late 1960s, the Green Revolution with high yielding varieties of wheat and rice, multiplied output per hectare. India moved from importing food grain to holding buffer stocks.
2. Fertility fell as societies developed. The demographic transition describes the sequence: high birth and death rates, then falling death rates with rising population, then falling birth rates and stabilisation. India's total fertility rate has fallen to around replacement level, which Malthus did not anticipate because he could not foresee contraception, female education and urbanisation.
3. Trade and storage moved food from surplus regions to deficit ones.

2. Unemployment and low wages, which destroy entitlement even where food is on sale in the market.
3. Inequality in land ownership, leaving cultivators landless or with unviable holdings.
4. Failures of distribution and storage: grain rotting in godowns while people go hungry, leakage from the public distribution system, and poor rural transport.
5. Conflict and displacement, the largest single driver of acute famine conditions worldwide.
6. Natural disaster and climate shock: drought, flood, cyclone and pest.
7. Social discrimination, which is the Indian specific cause and must not be omitted: caste and gender discrimination in the intra household and intra village distribution of food. Women and girls eat last and least in many households, which is why female anaemia and child malnutrition persist in households that are not, by income, the poorest.
8. Lack of awareness and dietary diversity, producing "hidden hunger", micronutrient deficiency alongside adequate calories.

The proposition is correct, and the reasons should be given first. Social inequality is socially produced, not natural, because: the same biological human beings are ranked completely differently in different societies; the criteria of rank vary, by birth in one society, by wealth in another, by ritual purity in a third; the inequality is inherited, passing to children who have had no opportunity to display any innate quality; and it is maintained by institutions, by endogamy, by unequal access to education and by law, which is unnecessary if it were natural. Where a hierarchy has to be enforced, it is not natural.

3. Loss of forest rights. Colonial and post colonial forest law converted customary users into encroachers. The Forest Rights Act, 2006, was enacted to correct what its own preamble calls a "historical injustice"; implementation is uneven.
4. Indebtedness and bonded labour, despite the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act, 1976.
5. Poverty, malnutrition and the worst health indicators of any group, on infant and maternal mortality, anaemia and sickle cell disease.
6. Educational deprivation, worsened by instruction in a language the child does not speak at home and by the distance to schools.
7. Cultural erosion: loss of language, of customary institutions and of traditional knowledge under assimilationist pressure.
8. Exploitation by traders and contractors in the sale of minor forest produce.
9. Insurgency and counter insurgency in some regions, which has made ordinary life and ordinary administration impossible.

(ii) Backward Classes

Other Backward Classes are the socially and educationally backward classes of Articles 15(4) and 16(4), identified by the Mandal Commission (1979 to 1980), whose recommendation of 27 per cent reservation in central services was implemented in 1990 and upheld with conditions in Indra Sawhney v. Union of India (1992). The 102nd Amendment (2018) gave the National Commission for Backward Classes constitutional status through Article 338B; the 105th Amendment (2021) restored the states' power to identify their own backward classes.

Their problems.

1. Educational and economic backwardness, less severe than that of SCs and STs and very unevenly spread within the category.
2. Occupational disadvantage: many are artisan and service castes whose crafts, weaving, pottery, oil pressing, leather work, were destroyed by industrial competition.
3. Ritual subordination in the traditional order, without untouchability.

A balanced opening. The proposition is partly true, and the answer should say what religion legitimately does before describing its misuse. Religion integrates society and renews the collective conscience, as Durkheim showed; it supplies social control through conscience where law cannot reach; it gives meaning and consolation in suffering; and it drives welfare and reform, from langars and mission hospitals to the Bhakti movement's attack on caste. Misuse is the abuse of an institution, not the institution itself. What has grown is the commercialisation of religion and the concentration of unaccountable authority in individuals.

(i) Evil practices of godmen under the garb of religion

1. Sexual exploitation, of devotees and of children in ashrams, using the spiritual authority of the guru to obtain compliance and silence. Several godmen with very large followings have been convicted of rape in India.

Why people are drawn in, which the answer should explain rather than merely condemn. Insecurity and anxiety, particularly about illness, employment, childlessness and litigation; the failure of the state to deliver health care, justice and social security, into which gap the godman steps; the anomie and loneliness of urban migration; low scientific literacy; caste exclusion from established religious institutions, which makes an alternative charismatic figure attractive; and the human susceptibility to charismatic authority, in Weber's sense, where obedience rests on the perceived extraordinary qualities of a person and is therefore subject to no rule.

(ii) Role of society and law in curbing this

Society.

1. Scientific temper, which is a Fundamental Duty under Article 51A(h): to develop the scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of inquiry and reform. Education is the principal instrument.
2. Rationalist movements and the reform tradition, from the Brahmo Samaj and the Arya Samaj to the anti superstition movement led in Maharashtra by Narendra Dabholkar, who was murdered in 2013.
3. Responsible media, which should investigate rather than sell airtime to miracle claims.

5. Financial regulation: income tax, the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act, 2010, and the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, 2002, applied to religious trusts.
6. Regulation of religious endowments and public trusts, with audited accounts and public disclosure.
7. Constitutional limits: Article 25 protects religion subject to public order, morality and health, so a practice that injures health or public order is not saved by calling it religious; Article 17 abolishes untouchability; and the essential religious practices doctrine confines protection to what is integral to the religion.
8. Consumer and criminal remedies for fraudulent cures, and swift prosecution, since impunity is the largest single incentive.

For full marks, cover: Comte's life and context, why he is called the father of sociology, then his main contributions, the naming and founding of the discipline, positivism, the Law of Three Stages, the hierarchy of sciences, social statics and dynamics, his methods, the Religion of Humanity, and finally a critical assessment.

Life and context

Isidore Auguste Marie François Xavier Comte (1798 to 1857), French philosopher, wrote in the aftermath of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars, in a France where the old order of monarchy, aristocracy and church had been destroyed and nothing settled had replaced it. His whole enterprise was an answer to one question: on what basis can social order be reconstructed once religion no longer commands universal assent? His major works are the Course of Positive Philosophy in six volumes (1830 to 1842) and the System of Positive Polity (1851 to 1854).

Why he is called the father of sociology

Main contributions

1. Positivism. The doctrine that the only genuine knowledge is that derived from observation, experiment, comparison and the discovery of invariable laws. Metaphysical speculation about first causes and final purposes is to be abandoned; science asks how, not why. Applied to society, positivism means that social phenomena obey laws as natural phenomena do, and that those laws can be discovered by the same methods.

2. The Law of Three Stages. Human thought, and with it society, passes through three successive stages:

• The theological stage, in which phenomena are explained by the will of supernatural beings, with the sub stages of fetishism, polytheism and monotheism. Society is dominated by priests and military rulers.
• The metaphysical stage, in which supernatural beings are replaced by abstract forces, essences and entities such as nature, the social contract and natural rights. It is transitional, dominated by lawyers and philosophers.
• The positive stage, in which explanation is by observed law. Society is directed by scientists and industrialists.

5. Methods. Comte prescribed observation, experiment, understood as the study of natural or pathological cases rather than laboratory manipulation, comparison, of societies, of classes and of animal societies, and the historical method, which he regarded as the method proper to sociology because social phenomena can only be understood in their development.

6. Consensus universalis. Society is an organic whole whose parts are interdependent, held together by a fundamental consensus of beliefs and sentiments. This idea passes directly into Durkheim's collective conscience and into functionalism.

7. The Religion of Humanity. In his later work Comte proposed a positivist religion with humanity itself as the object of worship, a calendar of secular saints, priests drawn from the sociologists, and prescribed rituals. It attracted few adherents and much ridicule, and it is usually treated as evidence of his decline.

For full marks, cover: Spencer's place and method, the organic analogy, his law of evolution, the stages of social evolution, the militant and industrial types of society which are his actual account of the state, his individualism and Social Darwinism, and an assessment.

Place and method

Herbert Spencer (1820 to 1903), English philosopher and sociologist, was the leading exponent of evolutionary sociology. His major works are The Study of Sociology, First Principles and the three volume Principles of Sociology. He coined the phrase "survival of the fittest", which Darwin subsequently adopted, and he applied evolutionary ideas to society independently of, and partly in advance of, Darwin's Origin of Species.

1. The organic analogy

Spencer's starting point is that society resembles a living organism. The similarities he lists:

1. Both grow in size over time.
2. Both grow more complex in structure as they grow in size.

2. The law of evolution

Spencer's general law, applied to everything from stars to societies: evolution is a change from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent heterogeneity, accompanied by the dissipation of motion and the integration of matter. In plain terms, things move from simple, uniform and loosely connected to complex, differentiated and tightly integrated.

Applied to society this yields three principles: societies grow in size; growth produces structural differentiation, so parts become unlike one another; and differentiation produces functional specialisation, so each part performs a distinct task and the parts become interdependent.

3. The stages of social evolution

Spencer classified societies by their degree of composition:

1. Simple societies, small, without a permanent head, or with a temporary one.
2. Compound societies, formed by the union of simple ones under a common head.

• The individual exists for the benefit of the state; the state does not exist for him.
• Compulsory cooperation: relations are of command and obedience, and status is rigidly hierarchical.
• Centralised, despotic control, extending over economic, religious and private life.
• Regimentation: the whole society is organised on the model of the army.
• Individual initiative, dissent and free enterprise are suppressed.
• Patriotism, loyalty, obedience, courage and faith are the cultivated virtues.
• Economic life is directed by the state and largely self sufficient.

The industrial type of society is organised for peaceful production and exchange.

• The state exists for the benefit of the individual, and its functions are minimal.
• Voluntary cooperation: relations rest on contract freely entered into rather than on status and command.
• Decentralised, limited government, whose proper business is only defence and the enforcement of contracts, the night watchman state.

Assessment

Contributions. He produced the first systematic evolutionary sociology; the organic analogy is the direct ancestor of structural functionalism, and Durkheim's mechanical and organic solidarity, Parsons's systems theory and the whole vocabulary of structure and function descend from it; the militant and industrial distinction anticipates Durkheim's two solidarities and Tonnies's Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft; and his account of the state as emerging gradually from war and compounding is a genuine advance on social contract theory.

Criticisms. The organic analogy is pressed too far, and Spencer himself listed the differences that destroy it. His unilinear evolutionism assumes a single path with Victorian England at the end of it, which comparative evidence does not support. Social Darwinism is ethically indefensible and was used to justify laissez faire indifference, imperialism and worse. His prediction that industrial society would be peaceful was falsified within a generation by the two world wars, fought by the most industrial societies on earth. And his extreme individualism is inconsistent with his own organic analogy, since an organism's parts do not exist for themselves.

Definition and universality

Definition. Sorokin defined social stratification as "the differentiation of a given population into hierarchically superposed classes", manifested in the existence of upper and lower layers, and its basis is "an unequal distribution of rights and privileges, duties and responsibilities, social values and privations, social power and influences among the members of a society."

Universality. His central and most quoted claim: no society has ever been unstratified, and none ever will be. "Any organized social group is always a stratified social body. There has not been and does not exist any permanent social group which is 'flat' and in which all members are equal." Groups that begin by proclaiming equality, revolutionary parties and religious communities among them, develop their own hierarchies within a short time. Even so called primitive societies, on close inspection, show ranking by age, sex, kinship, skill and ritual standing.

The three forms of stratification

Sorokin identified three principal, interrelated but distinct forms:

His conclusions:

1. The height and profile fluctuate over time, in every society.
2. The fluctuation is trendless: there is no constant tendency either towards greater equality or towards greater inequality across history, contrary both to Marx, who predicted increasing polarisation, and to the liberal expectation of steadily increasing equality.
3. There are limits beyond which the pyramid cannot go in either direction. If it grows too tall and steep, the top is cut off by revolution, reform or catastrophe. If it is flattened too far, productivity and initiative collapse and the pyramid begins to rise again. Societies therefore oscillate within a band.
4. In normal conditions the pyramid oscillates within moderate limits; in times of crisis the oscillation becomes violent.

Social mobility

Sorokin's most influential contribution. Social mobility is "the transition of an individual or a social object or value from one social position to another."

Types.

Testing, selecting and distributing agencies. These same institutions do not merely transport people; they test them, select those fit to rise, and distribute them among positions. The school examines and certifies; the army promotes on demonstrated performance; the family and marriage sort people by connection. Sorokin's insight is that a society's mobility depends on how well these agencies actually test what they claim to test.

Openness and closure. No society is completely open or completely closed. Even caste, the most closed system known, permitted some movement, through group mobility of the kind Srinivas later named Sanskritisation. Even the most open modern society transmits advantage from parents to children. What varies is the rate and the ease of movement, and Sorokin's contribution was to make that rate a measurable quantity.

Effects of mobility. He treated mobility as double edged. It promotes the diffusion of ideas, invention and intellectual life, breaks down parochialism, and improves the fit between ability and position. It also produces isolation, loneliness, cynicism, mental strain and a decline of intimate ties, since the mobile person leaves one milieu without fully belonging to the next.

Criticisms. His claim that fluctuation is trendless is difficult to prove and rests on data he assembled selectively. His theory is largely descriptive rather than explanatory: it shows that the pyramid moves without adequately explaining why it moves at any given moment. The principle of immanent change is close to unfalsifiable, since any change can be attributed to internal forces after the event. And his three cultural types are so broad that placing a real society in one of them is a matter of judgment rather than measurement.

2. "Interpretative understanding", deutend verstehen: the sociologist must grasp the subjective meaning the action holds for the actor. This is the decisive break with Comte's and Durkheim's positivism, which treats social facts as things to be observed from outside.
3. "Social action": the unit of study is not society as a whole, nor institutions, but the meaningful action of individuals oriented to others. This is Weber's methodological individualism.
4. "Causal explanation of its course and effects": understanding is not the end point. Weber wants both understanding and causal explanation, and this is what distinguishes him from those who thought interpretation sufficient. He wanted adequacy at the level of meaning and causal adequacy together.

Social action

Definition. Action is social when the subjective meaning the acting individual attaches to it takes account of the behaviour of others and is thereby oriented in its course.

Two conditions must be met: the actor attaches a meaning to what he does, and that meaning is oriented towards other people.

2. Erklärendes Verstehen, explanatory or motivational understanding: grasping the motive behind the act by placing it in a wider context. Understanding why he is chopping wood, whether for wages, for his own fire, or for exercise, requires knowing his situation and his purposes.

Weber's proposal for arriving at motivational understanding is sympathetic introspection combined with comparison: the observer imaginatively places himself in the actor's situation, and then tests the interpretation against evidence, because an interpretation that is plausible is not thereby correct.

The ideal type

Because social reality is infinitely various, Weber constructed ideal types: deliberately built pure models formed by accentuating the essential features of a phenomenon, against which real cases are measured. An ideal type is a yardstick, not a description, and no real case matches it exactly. "Ideal" means logically pure, not desirable. The four types of social action are themselves ideal types, as are bureaucracy, the three types of authority, and the spirit of capitalism.

3. Affective or emotional action. Action determined by the actor's feelings and emotional state: striking someone in anger, embracing a child out of love, panic flight. It lies on the borderline of meaningful action, since a purely uncontrolled reaction has no meaning attached at all.

4. Traditional action. Action determined by ingrained habit and custom, performed because it has always been performed. It too lies on the borderline, since much of it is carried out almost automatically.

The relation between them. The first two are rational, the last two are not. Weber emphasised that these are ideal types and that real action is almost always a mixture: a marriage may be entered into for calculated advantage, out of affection, from duty and because it is customary, all at once. The types are instruments for analysing action, not boxes into which actions fall.

Assessment

Contributions. He founded the interpretative tradition and made meaning a proper object of scientific study; he gave sociology the ideal type; his four types of action remain the standard classification; and he reconciled understanding with causal explanation instead of choosing between them.

Criticisms. Verstehen is difficult to verify, since no second observer can check what meaning the actor attached, and Weber's own remedy, comparison with evidence, does not fully solve this. His methodological individualism sits awkwardly with the vast structures, bureaucracy, capitalism, world religions, that he actually studied, and critics argue he explained structures by starting from individuals whose options those structures had already fixed. Value neutrality has been challenged as unattainable, since the choice of concepts is itself value laden. And the four types are hard to apply to real cases, where motives are mixed and often unknown to the actor himself.

1. The looking glass self

Cooley's most famous contribution, and the foundation of the sociology of the self.

The claim. A person's conception of himself is not formed from inside. It is formed from his perception of how others see him. Others are the mirror in which we see ourselves. "Each to each a looking glass, reflects the other that doth pass."

Its three elements, which must be given in order:

1. The imagination of our appearance to the other person. How do I think I look to him?
2. The imagination of his judgment of that appearance. What do I think he thinks of it?
3. Some sort of self feeling, such as pride or mortification, which results.

Three points that a good answer adds.

• The decisive element is the third, the feeling. Cooley emphasised that the self is a sentiment, not a mere idea. We do not merely calculate what others think; we feel it.

Characteristics. Small size; face to face association; intimacy and personal knowledge of one another; permanence or at least long duration; a community of interest and identification, so that "one lives in the feeling of the whole and finds the chief aims of his will in that feeling"; spontaneity and informality; and relations that are ends in themselves rather than means to some other end.

The three universal primary groups. Cooley named the family, the play group of children and the neighbourhood or community group of elders, and held that these are found "practically universal, belonging to all times and all stages of development", which is why they are the chief basis of what is universal in human nature.

Their function. They are the "nursery of human nature". In them the individual first experiences unity, sympathy and cooperation, and from them derive the primary ideals of loyalty, truth, service, kindness, freedom and lawful conduct. Cooley held that our ideas of right and of the good are learned in the primary group and then extended outwards to larger groups.

Secondary groups, though Cooley did not himself develop the term at length, are its opposite: large, impersonal, formal, contractual, temporary and a means to an end.

4. Social process

In Social Process Cooley treated society as an ongoing process of adjustment rather than a fixed structure, and applied the idea of tentative method, that societies advance by trial, selection and correction rather than by design. He criticised Social Darwinism, arguing that in human society selection is guided by ideals and by intelligence, not merely by brute survival, and that competition is shaped by the values a society holds.

5. Method: sympathetic introspection

Cooley's method follows from his subject. Since the self and social relations are matters of feeling and imagination, they cannot be studied from outside alone. Sympathetic introspection requires the observer to place himself imaginatively into the position of those he studies, drawing on his own experience of similar situations, and then to check the interpretation against observation. This is close to Weber's verstehen, arrived at independently, and it is the ancestor of qualitative and interpretive method in American sociology.

Influence

Assessment

Contributions. He established that the self is social, which is now the settled position of the discipline; he gave sociology the primary group, and with it the framework for understanding socialisation and informal social control; he insisted on the organic unity of individual and society, avoiding both individualism and determinism; and he founded American interpretive method.

Criticisms. His work is impressionistic and unsystematic, rich in insight and thin in evidence, and he conducted almost no empirical research. Sympathetic introspection is not verifiable, since a second observer cannot check another's introspection. He is charged with over emphasising the primary group and neglecting the large impersonal structures, class, state and economy, that shape modern life. His view of society is excessively harmonious, with little place for conflict, power or exploitation, which is the standard criticism from the conflict tradition. And his account of the self makes it look almost entirely passive, a criticism Mead answered by introducing the spontaneous I alongside the socialised me.