I am honored and challenged by the invitation to give this talk. 1 have chosen this topic because symbolic interactionism embodies a kind of general theory as to the nature of the causes that produce the complex forms of social behavior with which sociologists are concerned. I am also moved to discuss causality by the recent development of what may be called causal promiscuity by what has been called “The New Causal School.” It seems to have become astonishingly easy to find many causes, even in areas where our ignorance is most profound. This multiplication of causes leads, I think, to the devaluation of the concept just as money is devalued when there is too much of it around. My arguments will be presented by means of an example, which I hope will do a lot of my arguing for me. Before going on to this, however, I’d like to reminisce briefly about my experiences as a graduate student at the University of Chicago that started me along the symbolic interactionist path. It was in the fall of 193 I that I enrolled there. I had courses from such persons as Park, Burgess, Ellsworth Faris, Wirth, Blumer, Ogburn, Stuart Rice, and Radcliffe-Brown. My greatest debt was to Dr. Blumer who introduced me to Meadian social psychology and related lines of thought and who got me started in the study of drugs, which turned out to be a growth industry. My first choice of a thesis topic was homosexuality and I began interviewing in this area. When I consulted my professors on this project they seemed to lack enthusiasm and I sometimes thought that they looked with some suspicion at me as though they might be wondering what kind of a deviant I might be. At any rate, I tired of this project and dropped it in favor of the idea of doing a nice clean library project on German sociology. It was shortly thereafter that Dr. Blumer approached me with the idea that I undertake a study of drug addicts in connection with a project being set up for that purpose. The suggestion that I be asked to do this originated from one Broadway Jones, the professional thief and drug addict who wrote the bulk of Sutherland’s book, The Projessional Thiej’: I had become well acquainted with Jones after he appeared as a guest lecturer in one of Sutherland’s classes. He and I obtained jobs in the Illinois relief program for homeless men and worked in the same office. He suggested to Blumer that I be asked to undertake the drug study.
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Jan 1, 2023
Qi Zhu + 6
Open Access