This books represents the foundation for a major sociological approach - symbolic interactionism. The essential premise of symbolic interactionism is that all human action is essentially symbolic and that society is to be understood, not as a closed system to be studied in abstraction, but as a network of endless interactions in which human beings symbolically interpret human behavior, speech and thought. Society is the interiorised 'other' or a projected interpretation of societal 'others'. Human self therefore has a free component or I and a bound component or We.

This book is an essential reading for whosoever wants to understand sociology and also the departure of Anglo-American sociology from 'society as a system' approaches. And above all it is a timeless classic that you can enjoy reading for the sheer insights it throws into social behavior.