Cooley, C. H. (1902). Human Nature and the Social Order. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Project Gutenberg edition, https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/75145.
Skimmed: chapters I, III, V, VI and VIII read in full, NOTE-1080. The summary was corrected from them.
Why this is here
The owner’s U39 asked about the phrase “I am whatever you say I am”. A39 placed it beside Cooley’s looking-glass self. Bears on CLAIM-415.
From the reading, 2026-10-22. Cooley holds more of CLAIM-415 than the claim credits. On its first step, the audience in the self is always imagined for him, and may be unreal (“There is no separation between real and imaginary persons”), and a person attributes sentiments to “his countrymen or contemporaries in their collective aspect” (ch. III). What he does not say is that the attributed collective can be a unity its members do not compose; that remains the claim’s. On its second step, chapter VIII’s “contrary suggestion” already makes opposition a way of being steered by what others enjoin (“if others are against him one feels sure they are his own”). The phrase “I am whatever you say I am” is closest to chapter VI’s vanity, “becoming, so far as he can, what any flatterer says he is”, which Cooley treats as the unstable pole of the social self, not its rule. See NOTE-1080.