Comunidad y comunicación en el pragmatismo socialCharles Horton Cooley, George Herbert mead y John Dewey

Resumen

COMMUNITY AND COMMUNICATION: THE SOCIAL PRAGMATISM OF CHARLES HORTON COOLEY, GEORGE HERBERT MEAD AND JOHN DEWEY Mariano Navarro School of Communication, University of Navarra (Spain), 2011 This research explores the idea of community along the works of Charles Cooley, George Mead and John Dewey. Community, as a concept, has been widely used in recent developments in fields as diverse as political science, sociology or marketing. Despite its polysemic uses, the idea of community brings to the discourse resonances of a crucial and fundamental social category, showing the need for a deeper conceptual clarification. A clarification as such is what is attempted in this research, specifically within the tradition of social pragmatism. The social pragmatists deal with most fundamental theoretical issues in the study of society, such as the idea of community. Due to the historic development of the discipline of sociology in America, many of the contributions of the social pragmatists have been considered part of the first important American sociological tradition, the Chicago School of Sociology. This research questions the adequacy of such claim, displaying a historical revision of the beginnings of the social science in North America that ultimately shows how the label ¿Chicago School¿ has been on obstacle in the development of a far reaching social pragmatism. The historical revision serves as the basis for the theoretical core of the research, a conceptual reconstruction of the idea of community along the works of Charles Cooley, George Mead and John Dewey. The conjoint approximation to these authors reveals that the idea of community and primary group is fundamental in Cooley¿s works, despite the fact that Cooley¿s idea of the primary group has been deeply misunderstood. Cooley¿s primary group has been usually considered under a descriptive view, overlooking practical and moral elements which are of utmost relevance to Cooley¿s development of the idea of primary group. This reconsideration of Cooley¿s works prepares for a new reading of the works of Mead and Dewey, to whom the idea of community and primary association was also deeply important. Mead, with a more formal approach, often seems to avoid the material idea of community aiming to escape from social particularism. Mead¿s works, on the other hand, show in a very clear manner the links between communication and community as social fundamental categories. John Dewey, whose most basic and deep theoretical purpose was to renew the philosophical tradition away from individualistic dualisms, provides conceptual tools to reconstruct the pragmatic tradition as a collective practical endeavor in which the ideas of community and communication appear as most basic and fundamental notions. This approach points toward a reconstitution of the social sciences around the ideas of community and communication, and as the same time demands further development of this theoretical proposal.