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Mind, Self, and Society, the posthumously published volume by which George Herbert Mead is primarily known, poses acute problems of interpretation so long as scholarship does not consider the actual process of its construction. This paper utilizes extensive archival correspondence and notes in order to analyze this process in depth. The analysis demonstrates that the published form of the book is the result of a consequential interpretive process in which social actors manipulated textual documents within given practical constraints over a course of time. The paper contributes to scholarship on Mead by indicating how this process made possible certain understandings of his social psychology and by relocating the materials that make up the single published text within the disparate contexts from which they were originally drawn. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT:There have been many readings of Mead's work, and this paper proposes yet another: Mead, theorist of the social act. It is argued that Mead's core theory of the social act has been neglected, and that without this theory, the concept of taking the attitude of the other is inexplicable and the contemporary relevance of the concept of the significant symbol is obfuscated. The paper traces the development of the social act out of Dewey's theory of the act. According to Mead, Dewey's theory does not sufficiently account for consciousness. Grappling with this problematic leads Mead to several key ideas, which culminate in his theory of the social act. The social act and taking the attitude of the other are then illustrated by the analysis of a game of football. The interpretation presented has two novel aspects: first, symbolisation arises not simply through self taking the attitude of the other, but through the pairing of this attitude with the complementary attitude in self; second, self is able to take the attitude of the other to the extent that self has in actuality or in imagination previously been in the social position of the other. From this standpoint the key issue is how the attitude of self and other become integrated. New directions for empirical research, aimed at advancing this question are outlined. Finally, the paper shows how the social act can contribute to our contemporary concerns about the nature of the symbolic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a new approach to the study of sociological classics. This approach is pragmatic in character. It draws upon the social pragmatism of G. H. Mead and the sociology of texts of D. F. McKenzie. Our object of study is Norbert Elias's On the Process of Civilization. The pragmatic genealogy of this book reveals the importance of taking materiality seriously. By documenting the successive entanglements between human agency and nonhuman factors, we discuss the origins of the book in the 1930s, how it was forgotten for 30 years, and how in the mid-1970s it became a sociological classic. We explain canonization as a matter of fusion between book's material form and its content, in the context of the paperback revolution of the 1960s, the events of May 1968, and the demise of Parsons' structural functionalism, and how this provided Elias with an opportunity to advance his model of sociology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The question of agency is central to several important debates in contemporary sociology. Unfortunately, discussions of agency can become embroiled with issues related to free will and determinism. George Herbert Mead developed an approach to agency that avoids unsolvable metaphysical problems about free will and determinism. This paper presents Mead's work relevant to agency, revealing both Mead's method and the details of his theory. First, it shows how Mead followed the basic methods of behavioristic psychology, which require that abstract philosophical and psychological concepts are defined in terms of the actual behaviors involved. A strict focus on behavior helps in avoiding metaphysical impasses when dealing with such complex issues as decision making and choice. Second, the paper presents an overview of Mead's specific theories about awareness, meaning, decision making, choice, creativity, and social responsibility, showing how he analyzed these concepts in terms of the central nervous system, language, inner conversation, taking the role of others, reflective intelligence, the ‘I’ and the ‘me,’ and related concepts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a critical comparison of two leading exponents of the relationship between morality and selfhood: Charles Taylor and George Herbert Mead. Specifically, it seeks to provide an assessment of the contribution each approach is able to make to a social theory of morality that has the self at its heart. Ultimately, it is argued that Taylor's phenomenological account neglects the significance of interaction and social relations in his conceptualisation of the relationship between morality and self, which undermines the capacity of his framework to explain how moral understandings and dialogic moral subjectivity develop in a world of shared meaning. I then argue that Mead's pragmatist interactionist approach overcomes many of the flaws in Taylor's framework, and offers a grounded conceptualisation of the relationship between self and morality that is able to provide a basis for a properly social account of moral subjectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The social psychologist George Herbert Mead and the cognitive linguist Noam Chomsky both investigated the nature of language and mind during the 20th century. They approached the issues broadly, pursuing both philosophical and scientific lines of reasoning and evidence. This comparative analysis of Mead and Chomsky identifies fourteen questions that summarize their collective effort, and which animated much of the debate concerning language and mind in the 20th century. These questions continue to be relevant to 21st century inquiries. This paper identifies which questions have been resolved and which have not, and discusses each in the context of relevant literature. The net result is a set of questions that inform interdisciplinary-minded inquiries today into the nature of language and mind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

George Herbert Mead argues that human society is comprised of six basic institutions—language, family, economics, religion, polity, and science. I do not believe that he can be criticized for making institutions the cornerstones of a society, but he can definitely be criticized for his explanation of how our basic institutions originate, how these institutions operate in society after their inception, and how they later change, modifying society in the process. The problem with Mead's explanation of these three critical matters is that he based them on his principle of “sociality” rather than on the principle of “domination.” If Mead's principle of sociality is replaced by the principle of domination and his notion of the “generalized other” is replaced by the notion of the “phantom community,” then most of these problems can be largely solved. Thus, in this paper, I will not only point out the key problems in Mead's theory of society, but I will also offer solutions to them based on the notions of domination and the “phantom community.” The end product is a “radical interactionism” that surpasses Mead's original interactionism in identifying the part that both domination and the composite “other” play in every known human society—big and small, and past and present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a commentary regarding the depiction of Professor J. H. Turner of the symbolic interactionist position of Talcot Parsons. In his paper, Turner advances two simple and straight forward contentions, Parsons is a symbolic interactionist in the way in which he sees human society but for reasons of methodological strategy Parsons proposes to study human society differently than is done by symbolic interactionists. Turner endeavors to support the first contention by arguing that there are basic similarities between Parsons' view and the symbolic interactionist analysis suffers from several forms of theoretical weakness. This article, discusses these two contentions in the light of the symbolic intearactionist position of George Herbert Mead.

Many thinkers have discussed the possibility of intelligent social reconstruction; but few have examined the nature of such reconstruction as closely as did George Herbert Mead. This paper explores Mead's analysis through his understanding of human nature and intelligence, his discussion of value conflicts cod the possibility of their resolution by means of the community, and his recognition of the need for popular commitment as a necessary condition for any wide-spread success. While pointing to certain problems with his position, this paper concludes that there is a basic soundness to Mead's approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the association of the Chicago tradition of sociology with the name of sociologist George Herbert Mead. Despite his symbolic importance to the tradition developed at the University of Chicago, Mead's thought had only a partial and indirect impact on how Chicago sociology was actually done. The authors in the article proposes to indicate how Mead shared the same general problem with the actual founders of Chicago sociology, how his particular approach and conclusions differed from theirs and how these differences ramified his view of social science. They also shall suggest how Mead's basic argument was picked up in fragmentary form by the sociologists themselves, and what neglected aspects of Mead's arguments might still be of value to the Chicago sociological tradition, or at least help those interested in its potentials to raise leading questions about its basic arguments. In the concluding section of this paper, they suggest a number of questions which their interpretation of Mead's social theory raises for sociology.

The following analysis demonstrates that G.H. Mead's understanding of human speech (what Mead often referred to as 'the vocal gesture') is remarkably consistent with today's interdisciplinary field that studies speech as a natural behavior with an evolutionary history. Mead seems to have captured major empirical and theoretical insights more than half a century before the contemporary field began to take shape. In that field the framework known as 'Tinbergen's Four Questions,' developed in ecology to study naturally occurring behavior in nonhuman animals, has been an effective organizing framework for research on human speech. It is used in this paper to organize the comparison of Mead with contemporary scholars. The analysis concludes that Mead was, in a sense, 'beyond' the Four Questions by recognizing the limitations of reductionist methods in understanding the nature of conscious phenomena, especially language. Mead's socially situated model of the nature of human speech makes him relevant to today's field where some see an undervaluation of the treatment of language as a social process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article comments on the essay written by Randall Collins about George Herbert Mead's sociological theory of mind. The elaborative theory of Mead's publication block by Collins is quite speculative. Dozens of alternative hypothesis could be presented. Mead appears to have been a poor writer at the beginning of his career, though he improved. In a 1910 article, he admitted that his 1903 paper was developed obscurely and ineffectually. It is not uncommon for poor writers to dislike writing and avoid it. However, the elaborate interpretation of Mead's publication block by Collins led him to conclude that Mead was a passive, dutiful member of the pragmatic school. In various places, Collins asserts that Mead's theory had a number of idealist vestiges or was even a secularized version of idealism. However, Mead was very critical of idealism and he advocated the scientific method because it is the only method that allows the complete escape from idealistic thinking. Collins claimed that Mead attempted to present a theoretical system without mechanism. Although Mead was critical of Newtonian types of theories that attempted to explain everything in terms of mechanism, he did not claim that mechanisms were unimportant. His unified theory recognized both mechanism and process.

The article studies George Herbert Mead's theory on the sociology of the mind. Mead published very little during his lifetime, and his reputation rests almost entirely on proselytizing by his students, on transcriptions of his lectures and on posthumous publication of unpublished papers. The way Mead expressed himself tells something about his position in the intellectual field, and it reveals a fundamental tension in his creative stance. John Dewey commented that "while mister Mead was an original thinker, he had no sense of being original. Or if he had such a feeling he kept it under." Mead was fundamentally a philosopher. Virtually all his important publications are in philosophy journals, or addresses to philosophical associations. The U.S. philosophy during Mead's career was undergoing two important transformations, that is the emergence of psychology and the resettling of the place of religion. His career was intimately connected with both. Mead admired the scientific and secular movements, and wished to defend a world consisting entirely of nature rather than spirit. At the same time, he had enough exposure to idealism to react against a mechanistic materialism, a reduction of the world to physics, of the sort that he saw among militant atheists. What has made Mead relevant for sociology is the fact that he elaborated a social theory of mind, but his concern was not to contribute to sociology but to bolstering pragmatism at a vulnerable point. Its seeming inability to account for scientific knowledge of the natural world. Pragmatism made most sense when dealing with issues of ethics and of the social world.

This paper presents George Herbert Mead's work on emotions from the perspective of social behaviorism and compares it with the modern behavioral analysis of emotions. The two positions are strikingly similar. The main difference between modern behaviorism and Mead's social behaviorism is that contemporary behaviorists have access to a larger empirical data base and more refined theoretical models than Mead had. The modern behavioral analysis of emotions confirms most of Mead's basic observations and expands upon them. Empirically oriented symbolic interactionists who identify with Mead's social behaviorism can benefit by drawing upon the extensive behavioral research and theories developed in the decades since Mead worked. In fact, there is an enormous potential for developing productive research and theory at the interface between Mead's social behaviorism and modern behaviorism in the study of emotions and most other social psychological topics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mead's life-long interest in Romanticism is the least studied aspect of his work. As summarized in Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century, Meadian explorations in romantic philosophy and sociology provide a valuable insight into his substantive contributions. The present paper seeks to amplify this insight and explores its relevance to the interactionist tradition in sociology. Special attention is given to the Meadian claim that the modem notion of self first appears in the romantic literature. Mead's emphasis on the interplay between the social structure and the structure of the self is linked to the romantic vision of the self as the microcosm of the social macrocosm. The current controversy over Mead and Chicago sociology is given a new interpretation in light of the dialectical premises inherent in the Meadian and romantic theories of self. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article highlights the role played by the body in the work of George Herbert Mead. For Mead, the social emergence of mind depends on human physiology. This is revealed through a detailed exploration of three thematic domains in his work: the organism–environment dyad, perception, and the manipulatory stage of the act. From this, I argue that Mead saw the body as constitutive of cognition and central to the development of mind and self. Present‐day research supports this view and demonstrates Mead's relevance for understanding embodied cognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The internal conversation has a venerable place in the symbolic interactionist tradition but has been the focus of little empirical research by interactionists. After reviewing selected research on the internal conversation (most by noninteractionist sociologists or nonsociologists), we argue that interactionists ought to conduct research of our own to examine claims we have been making and to better understand social life. We propose some worthy areas and avenues of investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: For decades, actorness has been a much‐debated concept central to the theorization and analysis of the EU's evolution as an international actor. While this concept is often presented as a set of factors, which together shape the EU's capacity to act internationally, the literature displays a surprisingly deficient understanding of how these factors interact in the emergence of actorness. To address this gap, this article theorizes about actorness from an interactionist role theory perspective, which draws on the works of social psychologist George Herbert Mead. In building on this perspective, the article conceptualizes actorness as an entity's capacity to (re)‐imagine and realize roles for its ‘self’ in (specific contexts of) international affairs. This capacity, the approach suggests, emerges in the interplay of (social and material) resources, creative action and (domestic and external) role expectations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay, James Scott Johnston examines Jürgen Habermas's transcendental justification of his discourse theory of morality. According to Johnston, the application of Habermas's theory to educational issues often assumes that this justification is a cogent one. However, if the theory is to provide reasoned and appropriate guidance for educators, the justification of discourse ethics requires closer examination. Johnston argues that Habermas's so-called "weak" transcendental approach is in fact unsustainable because it fails to reconcile two conflicting schools of philosophical thought: Kant's transcendental idealism and George Herbert Mead's social pragmatism. Johnston concludes that a more plausible justification of the discourse ethical project can be achieved by rejecting Habermas's Kantianism and appealing solely to Mead's social pragmatic conception of rationality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research in cognitive science has provided broad empirical support for the model of cognition and self-development formulated by G.H. Mead. This is demonstrated specifically through three distinct cognitive mechanisms: basic-level categories, mirror neurons, and joint-attention schemes. These mechanisms illustrate a form of embodied sociality that underscores the intersubjective foundation of mind and self articulated by Mead. Research on basic-level categories, mirror neurons, and joint-attention schemes further extends Mead's relevance outside standard sociological and social psychological circles to the field of cognitive science and its emerging focus on sociality and social interaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This analysis assesses the factors underlying Charles Horton Cooley's place in the sociological canon as they relate to George Herbert Mead's puzzling diatribe—echoed in secondary accounts—against Cooley's social psychology and view of the self published scarcely a year after his death. The illocutionary act of publishing his critique stands as an effort to project the image of Mead's intellectual self and enhance his standing among sociologists within and outside the orbit of the University of Chicago. It expressed Mead's ambivalence toward his precursor Cooley, whose influence he never fully acknowledged. In addition, it typifies the contending fractal distinctions of the scientifically discursive versus literary styles of Mead and Cooley, who both founded the interpretive sociological tradition. The contrasting styles and attitudes toward writing of the two figures are discussed, and their implications for the problems of scale that have stymied the symbolic interactionist tradition are explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relation between economic behavior and morality remains a live issue within economics and cognate disciplines. The standard view among economists themselves has been that while moral positions (understood broadly) may motivate our behavior, they do not capacitate or enable it. On this view the figure of Homo economicus, representing the how as against the why of our actions, must be understood as resolutely amoral. In this article, we attempt to recover the logic of this position, as well as those of critics who would modify the standard view in some way. Although also critical of the conventional economics-and-ethics divide, we argue that Homo economicus would benefit from a more fundamental rethinking, one that takes account of the theory of the self and its acts, as developed by the social psychologist G. H. Mead. On a Meadian view the economic actor would neither have to grow additional capacities in order to coordinate with his or her fellows, as the evolutionary games theorist's agent has to do, nor depart or deviate from purposeful behavior, as does Homo sociologicus. On a Meadian view, economic capacity has to be more richly endowed than standard Homo economicus in order to do what it is supposed to do, but it is recognizably still a single, purposeful capacity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contributes to the recovery and reconstruction of the educational philosophy of George Herbert Mead. Reasons for the importance and timeliness of such an endeavor; Use of the typescript of Mead's course on the philosophy of education at the Department of Philosophy of the University of Chicago.

German philosopher Jurgen Habermas has had to confront a seemingly endless string of criticisms regarding his various appeals to the notion of universality. And the challenges have come not only from friendly critics who argue that he has failed to justify a quasi-transcendental approach to universality in his discourse ethics, but from those who feel that any appeal to universality is bound to an enlightenment project that can only deny difference. The article comments on Habermas's recent significant article on social scientist George Herbert Mead titled "Individuation through Socialization: On Mead's Theory of Subjectivity." In this piece Habermas asserts that the Western sociological tradition has failed to account for individuation. Habermas has tied his hopes for redressing social theory's failure to understand individuation to Mead's approach. Further, the ante is quickly raised since Habermas argues that modern experiences of individuation, both in terms of autonomy and life history, are inextricably linked to a notion of universality that he believes he shares with Mead.

The article offers the author's insights on the works of philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel on self and other and its relation to self-consciousness. The author states that Hegel believes that self-consciousness sets the struggle between the master and his slave due to its connection with the willingness to negate biological life. He also analyzes Hegel's view on self-consciousness through the works of George Herbert Mead and Sigmund Freud.

In the first quarter of the 20th century, Thorstein Veblen ranked with John Dewey, George H. Mead, and Charles Sanders Peirce among the topmost American original and creative thinkers. In Italy he was the subject of much debate and dialogue but the perception of his scholarly work evolved through several phases. He was seen first as a forerunner of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal. Then as a leading figure in institutional economics. Finally as a social scientist pioneering in the interdisciplinary approach to analysis and to the formulation of public policy, as well as an early Futurologist. But his considerable influence in America contrasts with his lack of influence in Italy, probably because cultural differences hamper understanding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]