Sentiments as cultural integrative factors: Park (and Burgess) on emotions and society

Abstract

This article attempts to analyse the role of feelings, emotions and sentiments in the work of Robert Park (both those written alone and those written in collaboration with Ernest Burgess). Although Park did not produce any ante litteram sociological theory of emotions, he made an important contribution to the investigation of the emotional component of social action and of social integration. Emotions are social forces endowed with the capacity to produce social processes, with relevant effects on the micro, meso and macro levels. In this perspective, sentiments are the outcome of the socialization of emotions and may have an important role as an integrative factor. Park combines a subjectivist perspective with a strong awareness of the structural components of society, understood as being capable of taming disruptive individualistic impulses and shaping individual identities at the micro level. At the meso level, Park focuses on the significance of emotions and sentiments in the formation of ‘cultural communities’, where imitation and sympathy play a crucial role. At the macro level, he examines the compositional effect that culturalized emotions have on the constitution of common values. What is relevant to the contemporary sociology of emotions is Park’s conception of sentiments as culturally tempered forms of individual emotionality that play a role as one of the constitutive elements of the social. Park proposes an implicit micro-foundation of the social, where action is not the sole outcome of cognitive reasoning, as it also depends on emotions, which are converted into potentially integrative factors within the process of interaction and communication.