Although historians of social psychology and sociology have given considerable attention to the development of symbolic interactionism, they have curiously overlooked the fact that at the turn of the century there was already a well developed American philosophical tradition of social interactionism. It is seriously misleading to say, as Talcott Parsons has, that "[ilt was Cooley who first took seriously the truly indeterminate character of the self as a structure independent of others."l It is also unfortunate that the most comprehensive history of symbolic interactionism to date, written by John W. Petras, contains no discussion of this American philosophical tradition? To be sure, the roles played by James Mark Baldwin, William James and John Dewey have been recognized and described in detail, but the contribution of Josiah Royce, one of George Herbert Mead's teachers, is seldom mentioned, and Charles Sanders Peirce's interactionism has been adequately treated only by philosophers. The pioneering studies of self-consciousness by Chauncey Wright appear to have been ignored altogether in this connection.
Mead's approving reference in 1909 to the social theory of meaning presented by Royce in his "Self-Consciousness, Social Consciousness and Nature" has a significance that has not been fully appre~iated.~ Mead, after all, was exposed to Royce (1887-88) even before he was exposed to Wunut, and Royce's The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885) contained the germ that in the 1890's developed into his full blown social interacti~nism.~ Probably Mead himself is in large part responsible for the neglect of Royce. When discussing explicitly the history of the movement in his well-known essay on Charles Horton Cooley, Mead discusses Baldwin, Tarde and James but never mentions Royce.6 Although he was glad else-'Tdcott Parsons, "Interaction: Social Interaction," in David L. Sills (ed.), International Encyclopedia oftheSociaZSciences (New York: Macmillan and Free Press, 1968), Vol. 7, p. 434. 2John W. Petras, "The Genesis and Development of Symbolic Interactionism in American Sociology" (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Connecticut, 1966). Petras makes only a footnote reference to Royce (p. 151) and no reference at all to Peirce and Wright; his 45-page bibliography includes (p. 242) only James Harry Cotton's Royce m the H u m n Self. That Petras gives so