THE USE AND ABUSE OF MEAD: A CASE STUDY.

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.