The Cooley-Elias-Goffman Theory

Abstract

This note concerns one of the most popular books in sociology, Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959). Although widely read, I will argue that it is also widely misunderstood as having no overarching generalisation. A recent article by Michael Dellwing (2016), is entirely favourable, naming Goffman’s work that of a ‘flaneur’, French for ‘stroller’, ‘lounger’, or ‘saunterer’.Dellwing awards high praise to Goffman: he shows how his strolling can be very useful even though ‘uninhibited’ governed by a method of having no method. Goffman the stroller is seen to have hit upon many important concerns, if not a single very general one. Most sociologists also see Goffman’s work as sauntering, but not appreciatively as Dellwing does. They criticise it as an unorganised jumble of examples. Here, I introduce a different view of Goffman, not that of an uninhibited stroller, but a highly organised theorist, perhaps influenced by another theoretician, C. H. Cooley. Independently, Norbert Elias’s historical study of shame seems to support Goffman’s theory: Elias found that in the last hundred years or so, shame has increasingly replaced physical punishment, but at the same time, is also being used less and less frequently in written books and articles.