He used the ideas of Mead and Cooley and this essay urges a sociology that treats human beings as authors of their own lives because they fill their actions with meanings and purpose. He believed that competing theoretical paradigms tend to treat people as the effects or products of social forces and therefore do not take the idea of the self and the work that the self does is constructing its social life through complex processes of interaction. Blumer believed no one had presented a systematic statement of the nature of human group life from the view of symbolic interaction. He attempted to describe the basic premises of symbolic itneractionsim and to develop their methodological consequences for the study of human life. Symbolic interactionism is the peculiar and distinctive character of interaction as it takes place between human beings.
Humans interpret or define each other s actions instead of reacting to each other s actions.
Their response is not made to the actions of one another but based on the meanings they attach to such actions. Human interaction is mediated by the use of symbols, interpretation and by figuring out the meaning of one another s actions. Blumer felt that Mead was the only one that had thought through what the act of interpretation implies for an understanding of the human being, human action and human association. One of Mead s key features is that the human being has a self. By this he means that the human being can be the object of his own actions and that he can act toward himself as he acts towards others.