George Herbert Mead

Social psychologist, born in South Hadley, Massachusetts, USA. He studied at Harvard, Leipzig, and Berlin, taught at Michigan University (1891–4), then moved to the philosophy department at Chicago (1894–1931). His main interest lay in the theory of the mind, the notion of the self, and how this is developed through communication with others. His work gave rise to Symbolic Interactionism, a social science approach concerned with the meanings that people give to the world, and how these are worked out through interpersonal interaction. His main works, published shortly after his death, are Mind, Self and Society (1934) and The Philosophy of the Act (1938).

George Herbert Mead (February 27, 1863 – April 26, 1931) was an American philosopher, sociologist and psychologist, primarily affiliated with the University of Chicago, where he was one of several distinguished pragmatists.

Mead was born February 27, 1863 in South Hadley, Massachusetts. At Harvard, Mead studied with Josiah Royce, a major influence upon his thought, and William James, whose children he tutored. In 1888, Mead moved to Germany to study with psychologist Wilhelm Wundt, from whom he learned the concept of "the gesture", a concept central to his latter work. Despite never finishing his dissertation, Mead was able to obtain a post at the University of Michigan in 1891. In 1894 Mead moved, along with John Dewey, to the University of Chicago, where he taught until his death. Mead died of heart failure, April 26, 1931.

Mead is a major American philosopher by virtue of being, along with Charles Peirce, William James, and John Dewey, one of the founders of pragmatism. Mead is also an important figure in 20th century social philosophy. His theory of how the mind and self emerge from the social process of communication by signs founded the symbolic interactionist school of sociology and social psychology. Dewey and Alfred North Whitehead considered Mead a thinker of the first rank.

Mead the social psychologist argued the antipositivistic view that the individual is a product of society, the self arising out of social experience as an object of socially symbolic gestures and interactions.

Mead grounded human perception in an "action-nexus" (Joas 1985: 148), ingraining the individual in a "manipulatory phase of the act" as the fundamental “means of living” (Mead 1982: 120). In this manipulatory sphere “the individual abides with the physical objects” of everyday life (Mead 1938: 267). This is what Mead means by "the social act" as opposed to simply "the act" (the latter being a Deweyan concept). Humans are unique in taking the perspective of other actors towards objects, but this is what enables complex human society and subtle social coordination. In the social act of economic exachange, for example, both buyer and seller must take each other's perspectives towards the object being exchanged.

Mead also rooted the self’s “perception and meaning” deeply and sociologically in "a common praxis of subjects" (Joas 1985: 166) found specifically in social encounters. Understood as a combination of the 'I' and the 'me', Mead’s self proves to be noticeably entwined within a sociological existence: For Mead, existence in community comes before individual consciousness. First one must participate in the different social positions within society and only subsequently can one use that experience to take the perspective of others and thus become self-conscious.

Mead writes in Mind, Self and Society that human beings begin their understanding of the social world through "play" and "game". The child takes different roles he/she observes in "adult" society, and plays them out to gain an understanding of the different social roles. Mead calls this the child's first encounter with "the generalized other", which is one of the main concepts Mead proposes for understanding the emergence of the (social) self in human beings. Through understanding "the generalized other" the individual understands what kind of behaviour is expected, appropriate and so on, in different social settings. The family, the baseball team, school, and society are examples of social settings through which the child develops gradual understanding of norms for behaviour. Mead distinguishes between the "I" and the "me." It is important when reading Mead to remember that he sees the human mind as something that can arise solely through social experience. The thinking process, for instance, is for Mead nothing but internalized comunication. Pragmatic philosophers like Mead focus on the development of the self and the objectivity of the world within the social realm: that "the individual mind can exist only in relation to other minds with shared meanings" (Mead 1982: 5).

In his lifetime, Mead published about 100 scholarly articles, reviews, and incidental pieces. The Mead Project at Brock University in Ontario intends to publish eventually all of Mead's 80-odd remaining unpublished mss.