Person
George Herbert Mead
American philosopher and social psychologist (1863–1931). He showed how the self arises in social interaction; the “I”, the “me” and the generalized other are his concepts.
Biography
George Herbert Mead was born in 1863 and died in 1931. He spent most of his career at the University of Chicago, where he worked from 1894, after a short spell teaching at Michigan. He is counted with Peirce, James and Dewey among the important names of classical pragmatism. He developed his social psychology in a course he taught from 1900, and he lectured without notes.
He argued that the self arises in social interaction. A child first takes the roles of particular others in play, then, in organised games (the example is a baseball team), those of everyone on the team, and finally the standpoint of the organised community, the generalized other. The “me” side of the self carries these organised expectations; the “I” side is the unpredictable response to them.
The book best known for these ideas, Mind, Self, and Society, appeared in 1934, after his death, compiled by Charles W. Morris from student and stenographic notes and manuscripts; so although Mead is its “author”, the shape of the text is the editor’s. The name “symbolic interactionism” was given six years after Mead’s death, in 1937, by his student Blumer; Mead never used it.
In this course
In Functionalism and Symbolic Interactionism he is the philosophical core of the interactionist wing; the self, the “I”/“me” and the generalized other are his concepts.
Key works
- Mead, George Herbert (1934). Mind, self, and society from the standpoint of a social behaviorist (edited, with introduction, by Charles W. Morris). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. — Compiled from lecture notes; the main source for the self, the “I”/“me” and the generalized other.