what questions were asked, and the kind of data used, determine its
"scientific" value in this kind of thinking.

In the many hundreds of pages of recent sociological theory there is
scarcely any indication that communication of significant symbols is any-
thing more than some kind of epiphenomenon of a reality "beyond" sym-
bols. Attitudes do not arise in symbolic acts, or in symbolic phases of action
(in which, as heroes, villains, and clowns to each other, we play our parts
in a great social drama of social order) but in "expressive reference" con-
texts, in which attitudes become a "symbolic generalization of cathexis"
which functions to maintain "the pattern integrity" of the symbolic
system. ¹

And while there is much greater concern with the social function of
symbols in Dilthey, Simmel, and Mannheim, and other European students
of society, there is a singular lack of congruence between structure and
function in their models and images of society. Even Mannheim, who
talks at great length about "thought styles"--a concept which he borrows
from the history of art--never makes clear just how the structure of
"existential" thought functions in communication. The Freudian libido,
like the actor in Parsons' system, cathects, but does not communicate.
Simmel's forms of sociation emerge, and continue to exist, in social proc-
esses that are not determined by the use of symbols in communication, but
by social forces that are "like atoms."

Other sociologists find their sociological "facts" in "historical and polit-
ical reality." Just how one gets at this without symbolic theory and method,
or the use of sociological models based on communication, is seldom dis-
cussed. Sentences like "What dramatic vision of hell can compete with
the events of twentieth-century war?" ² assume that the "events" of war
can be known by means other than a dramatic construction of them, or
that they become events in some nonsymbolic realm which does not de-
pend on how they are dramatized by artists in the press, radio, television,
literature, cinema, and other arts. What is the source of C. Wright Mills'
knowledge of events? How can "events" of war in the past or the present
make themselves known to us as social and historical facts, if not through
some kind of symbolic construction? How can sociologists, to say nothing
of historians, think at all about societal events unless they use models,
images, structures--or whatever the forms of our thought are called--of
how men communicate as they act together in society?

Symbols are the directly observable data of sociation, and, since it is

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