Giddings and the Social Mind.

The idea of a social (or general) mind was prevalent in early American sociology from the 1800s through about the 1910s. As a concept, the social mind served as a proxy for what would later be defined as understood as culture and other collective phenomena such as social movements, crowd behavior, organizational behavior (e.g., ?corporate actors?), and so forth. In order to understand why this is so, it is useful to follow the evolution of the term ?mind? from its earliest religious roots, where it was coextensive with the notion of remembrance and especially spirit (indeed, the German word Geist means both mind and spirit). With the ongoing secularization of society, the term was ripped from its religious mooring and became a central concept in Enlightenment society as well as the burgeoning social sciences. In the early stages of the development of sociology in America, sociologists such as Lester F. Ward and Franklin H. Giddings (1855-1931) were struggling to establish sociology as a legitimate science, and they needed to ground this new science of society in an object or reality that existed above the level of the individual members of society (for not doing so would bring the charge that sociology was nothing more than a watered down version of psychology). In this paper we examine specifically Giddings? writings on the social mind, for his work illustrates especially well how subjectivist or idealist elements can be incorporated into an overtly positivistic or naturalistic theoretical framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]