G.H. Mead

A Critical Introduction

Filipe Carreira da Silva

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780745634586, 9780745634579
• eBook ISBN: 9780745657837
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

G. H. Mead is rightly considered to be one of sociology's founding fathers, yet to date there have been surprisingly few books devoted to his life and work. This book fills the gap by introducing Mead's ideas to a younger generation of social scientists.

Beginning with a biographical account of the main events in Mead's career, Filipe Carreira da Silva provides a thorough examination of Mead's social theory of the self, the reception of his ideas into sociology, and the relevance of his work to the contemporary social sciences.

He focuses in detail on the core ideas associated with Mead's work, including gesture and the significant symbol, the I-me distinction and the 'generalized other', as well as exploring less well-known aspects of his writing.

This comprehensive introduction to Mead's thinking will appeal to students across the social sciences, providing a refreshing perspective on the social nature of the individual self.

1

Introduction and General Overview

A century has passed since George Herbert Mead (1863–1931) started working on the social theory that would grant him a place in the sociological canon, and yet his writings have lost none of their appeal. The reason why Mead’s ideas are after all these years still so engaging is, I argue, that the last two fins de siècle share certain structural similarities. Very much as in Mead’s time, Western modernity is experiencing today a sense of profound crisis, which follows a relatively long period of confidence in the rational mastery of social problems. In such epochs of crisis, the best theoretical instruments are those able to deal with change, uncertainty and hybridism. From this perspective, I think we have a lot to learn from Mead, perhaps the sociological classic who (with Simmel) best responded to the conceptual challenges posed by the first crisis of Western modernity. Rejecting the pessimism one can find in other classics’ writings (just recall Weber’s theses on bureaucratization or on the disenchantment of the modern world), Mead was confident that science and democracy could be reconciled in the form of a naturalistic and evolutionary social science, which conceives of the human mind as an ‘emergent’ from – that is, an entity resulting from – symbolic interaction.

Among the sociological classics, Mead occupies a special position. Although he lived in the same epoch as all the other ‘founding fathers’ of sociology (he was five years younger than Durkheim and one year older than Weber), he is not only one of the few to have exerted a profound and lasting influence on a discipline other than his own, but also the only American to figure in that canonical gallery. In fact, Mead was not a sociologist; he was, by training, a philosopher with a strong interest in social psychology. The brilliance of his ideas on the social nature of the human self, however, ensured that in disciplines such as sociology and social psychology Mead is still seen today as one of the predecessors of their greatest practitioners. Unlike Marx, Weber or Durkheim, Mead was not a prolific writer. It was in the classroom, thinking aloud in the silent presence of his students, that Mead was at his best. This personal preference for the spoken word is very much in accord with the always ‘in-the-making’ nature of his intellectual edifice. Far from being a rigid, all-encompassing philosophical system, Mead’s thinking is best described as a system in a state of flux.

Western modernity, the self, the scientific method and democratic politics are the conceptual reference points to which Mead returned time and time again, from his early short paper on ‘The Working Hypothesis on Social Reform’ (1899) or the important but neglected ‘The Definition of the Psychical’ (1903) to his last written work, the 1930 Carus Lectures, published posthumously in The Philosophy of the Present (1932). Like many others of his generation, Mead crossed the Atlantic to study in Germany, the most reputed academic milieu of the epoch. After a brief period at Ann Arbor, he was eventually offered a position at the University of Chicago, where he arrived in 1894 and would remain until the end of his career. In several ways, Mead was in the right place at the right time. At the turn of the century, the city of Chicago was a great laboratory of social experiences, ranging from large-scale processes of urbanization, industrialization and migration to many other pressing social issues on a smaller scale. Intellectually speaking, Mead could not have wished for a better place to be in than the University of Chicago – this was at the time when the famous ‘Chicago school’ of sociology was created by his colleagues from the sociology department, just a few doors down the corridor. In more general terms, Mead lived in an age of rapid change and growing uncertainty, an epoch of great optimism regarding the possibilities of human reason, yet one of profound distrust concerning the naive positivistic belief in progress. Such an intellectual atmosphere proved to be the perfect environment in which to develop a theoretical solution for a problem that has haunted social thinkers since the dawn of the Western variant of modernity – how to reconcile the seemingly intractable tension between an ever more individualistic self and an increasingly universalistic social order. Mead’s answer to this question, which will be discussed in detail later, still ranks today among the most valuable elements of what could be called ‘the heritage of sociology’.¹

Mead’s confessed difficulties in putting his thoughts into writing also helps to explain why several generations of social scientists were introduced to his ideas through Mind, Self, and Society, an anthology of transcripts of his lectures on social psychology. Although this book does provide an enjoyable and accessible entrée to Mead’s ideas, its editorial quality is questionable and creates an excessively partial image of Mead’s contributions. Of course, one can avoid these difficulties by reading other books by Mead,² as well as the best available secondary literature (I am thinking about the books by Joas and Cook, whose merits will be discussed later), even though in this case the non-specialist reader might find them too difficult and overly focused on Mead’s intellectual biography. While writing the present book I kept this double challenge in mind. I have thus tried to write a critical introduction to Mead’s ideas that is accessible enough for students and the general public, but which is at the same time able to provide food for thought for professional social scientists. I would suggest to the first category that they pay particular attention to chapters 3 to 5, where I discuss Mead’s social psychology in detail; to those already acquainted with Mead’s ideas, I hope the last portion of the book makes a contribution to current debates on the condition of our age, as it clarifies Mead’s contributions to the resolution of the conceptual challenges we currently face.

There are several notions that social practitioners have become accustomed to associate with Mead – the gesture and the significant symbol, the I–me distinction and the ‘generalized other’, or the concept of ‘taking the role of the other’ – but to my mind none encapsulates better the very rationale of his communicative social theory than the idea of dialogue. From thinking, conceived by Mead as a sort of ‘inner conversation’, to the resolution of international conflicts, Mead consistently favoured a dialogical perspective. Of course, this is not to say that he gave every research area the same degree of attention. As I will show, Mead’s version of intersubjectivism is especially developed as far as the inner structure of the human self is concerned – Mead’s account of the social and communicative nature of the self is rightly considered to be his chief contribution to today’s social sciences. Along with figures such as John Dewey, Martin Buber, Mikhail Bakhtin, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jürgen Habermas and Richard Rorty, Mead produced one of the most important dialogical social theories of the twentieth century.

A Summary of Mead’s Ideas

A substantial part of this book (chapters 2 to 5) will be spent clarifying and detailing the ideas that make up Mead’s system of thinking. The first of Mead’s key ideas is the notion of ‘taking the role of the other’. However, unlike authors like Erving Goffman (whose dramaturgical approach, developed in seminal works such as The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life [1959], is one of the most sophisticated models to be developed within the symbolic interactionist paradigm), Mead does not wish to explore the theatrical dimensions of this concept. For this reason, I will use ‘role’ and ‘attitude’ interchangeably. By ‘taking the attitude of the other’ Mead wishes to convey the idea that individuals are able to import into their conduct a behavioural disposition to respond in a similar way to other individuals responding to a given type of stimulus. Consider the example Mead chooses to explain this notion to his students: when a child plays with a friend, he ‘is calling out in him the corresponding activities of the other person involved’;³ the attitude that the child imports into his conduct, say, paying out money, is also the response that this attitude calls out in the other: the child is stimulated by the response he is calling out in his friend. Although this example refers to the simplest form of role-taking, it is not difficult to grasp some of the functions it performs in Mead’s social psychology. Two of these functions should be emphasized at this point. Firstly, the concept of ‘taking the role of the other’ helps Mead to explain thinking as a kind of ‘inner conversation’: by importing the attitudes of others into their conduct, individuals acquire the ability to see the world from the perspective of these others; this sort of reflective intelligence is exactly what distinguishes human thinking. Moreover, since such a reflective intelligence emerges ‘through the internalization by the individual of social processes of experience and behavior’,⁴ that is, through adopting the attitude of other individuals, Mead finds himself in a position from which he can conceive of thinking as a social process. Secondly, and related to the next key idea I wish to present, the concept of ‘taking the role of the other’ helps Mead to clarify the behavioural origins of ‘significant symbols’. It is this particular behavioural mechanism, he argues, that allows the emergence of the consciousness of meaning. In order to understand the implications of the concept of ‘taking the role of the other’, let us now turn to the next central element of Mead’s social psychology, namely the notions of meaning and of the significant symbol.

In brief, what is at stake here is the transformation of a vocal gesture (a sound) into an element of a natural language (a word). Vocal gestures become significant or meaningful, Mead argues, only in the context of a social interaction. In particular, a significant symbol emerges when its carrier provokes, both in the individual uttering it and in the individual listening to it, a stimulus that is simultaneously a response. What does Mead mean by this? Imagine two friends saying farewell at an airport. One of them makes a gesture (let us say he waves), which elicits in the other individual a certain response (she waves back at him). By responding to the gesture of the first individual, the second interprets that gesture – her response brings out the meaning of his gesture. For Mead, the meaning of an object – say, a gesture – is not something intrinsic to it (its ‘essence’); rather, it is an emergent of social interaction – it is an objective element in the behavioural structure that connects organisms to the surrounding environment.

A third central idea put forth by Mead refers to his conception of the structure of the self. Very much as in the case of the previous two ideas, Mead favours here a socially constituted and objectively defined notion. The fact that in this case the notion in question is the very one most closely associated with subjectivity only reaffirms the naturalistic and experimental character of Mead’s ‘scientific social psychology’. It is also, and fundamentally, a processual view of reality that is espoused by Mead (as opposed to a Cartesian, mechanistic and rationalistic one). There are two main components to Mead’s treatment of the self.

On the one hand, Mead discusses it from the perspective of childhood development. In particular, the genesis of the self is explained by means of two developmental stages. The first is the stage of ‘play’, during which children learn how to put themselves in the place of another individual: it is at this time that children acquire a self – they do that by learning to take the role of other individuals. The second developmental stage is that of ‘game’, a more elaborate and demanding social experience. Here children have to take the role not only of a single individual, but of all the individuals involved in the game; moreover, children have to learn how to coordinate their actions according to the rules of the game. Only at this stage do children acquire a fully developed self. The generalized character specific to adult selves is thus the outcome of a two-step developmental process, the success of which depends on the nature of the social experiences we are all exposed to during our childhood. At this juncture, Mead introduces one of his best-known concepts, the notion of the ‘generalized other’. Through this notion he wishes to convey the idea of an internalized set of social attitudes: by learning how to take the role of the ‘generalized other’, children acquire the ability to import the attitudes of the social group into their own selves. They thus begin to see themselves from the perspective of everyone else. One of Mead’s favoured examples to explain the ‘generalized other’ is the baseball game. Each player has to incorporate, besides the rules of the game, the perspectives of everyone else into her own performance: she has to see the game as everyone else sees it. Only in this way will she be able to play baseball, or any other collective game or activity, for that matter – and this is Mead’s point exactly. Cooperative activities such as games are, so to speak, the prelude to social life. By learning how to take the attitude of the ‘generalized other’ while playing baseball children gradually acquire a socio-psychological ability of central importance. This said, it is not difficult to see why Mead grants so crucial an importance to educational matters (even if it is in Dewey rather than Mead that we find the most elaborate classical pragmatist statement on education).

On the other hand, Mead analyses the self from the viewpoint of its internal structure. Following the insights of his fellow pragmatists William James and John Dewey, he conceives of the self as an ongoing social process with two distinct phases: the ‘I’, which is described as the spontaneous response of the individual to the social situation, and the ‘me’, a socially structured, conscious self-image that we build by seeing ourselves through the eyes of the others. The I–me distinction can best be understood by reference to the memory image we have of ourselves. Imagine yourself having breakfast this morning: you can see yourself having milk and cereals, talking to your parents and so on. What I wish to emphasize is the distinction between you, now in the present, remembering yourself this morning having breakfast, and your remembered self-image, located in the past. Mead calls these two aspects (or facets) of the self the ‘I’ and the ‘me’ – the ‘I’ is that phase of the self that remembers while the ‘me’ is the remembered self-image. As we shall see, from this very simple and intuitive beginning, Mead developed a sophisticated account of the inner workings of the human mind. In short, for Mead, the ‘I’ is a source of novelty and creativity, indispensable for the assertion of individuality, while the ‘me’ refers to the set of organized social attitudes within one’s self. The rigid distinction between inner, subjective life and external, objective reality is thus ruled out by Mead; on the contrary, he conceives of the self as a process through which social experiences are permanently being incorporated into the self (through the ‘me’) and reconstructed by the ‘I’. Selves are thus natural, evolving social products.

Mead’s vision of the relation between the individual and society makes it thoroughly naturalistic, evolutionary (though not to be confused with social Darwinism) and cooperative. It also makes it, and fundamentally, a process. The ‘I’ and the ‘me’ are but phases of a larger process, the self, which in turn is but a phase of an even larger process, society. Each phase can only be fully understood by reference not only to the process in which it is located, but also to the larger process in which the former takes place: general changes in societal values and norms can thus be seen to influence transformations at the level of individual consciousness and vice versa. This is why Mead sees religious or intellectual geniuses, such as Jesus or Socrates, as individuals whose ‘Is’ were exceptionally innovative and powerful: the course of history can be profoundly changed by the least probable element, the unconscious and unpredictable ‘I’.

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

These are the contributions that earned Mead his place in the sociological canon. Of course, to paraphrase Newton, Mead is able to see further only because he is standing on the shoulders of giants. In what follows, I examine the sources from which Mead draws throughout his career. His originality and current relevance are, I argue, better appreciated against the backdrop of the figures that most directly influenced his thought. In fact, Mead’s intellectual context can offer an unparalleled opportunity to grasp the logical structure of his social and political thinking. By reconstructing the dialogues in which Mead engages throughout his career I wish to do justice to the dialogical nature of his system of thought. Th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction and General Overview
• 2 Life and Work: 1863–1931
• 3 Mead’s Social Psychology: Basic Concepts
• 4 The Social Self
• 5 Society, Mind and Self
• 6 Mead and Symbolic Interactionism
• 7 Mead and Twentieth-Century Sociology
• 8 Why Read Mead Today?
• Bibliography
• Index