5.5. george herbert mead

7/21/2019 5.5. George Herbert Mead

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won the presidency. In the wake of this development,McCarthy’s continuing attacks on the White Houseand the executive branch soon became dysfunctionalfor his partisan supporters, and as his utility for theselongstanding allies eroded, so too did their support.

See also : Cold War, The; Communism; CommunistParties; Parties \ Movements: Extreme Right; PoliticalProtest and Civil Disobedience; Social Movements,Sociology of

BibliographyBell D 1964 The Radical Right . Doubleday Anchor Books,

Garden City, NYHofstadter R 1964 The Paranoid Style in American Politics and

Other Essays . Wiley, New York

Lipset S M, Raab E 1970 The Politics of Unreason . Harper andRow, New YorkPolsby N W 1960 Towards an explanation of McCarthyism.

Political Studies 8: 250–71Polsby N W 1974 Political Promises . Oxford University Press,

New YorkReevesT C 1982 The Life and Times of Joe McCarthy . Stein and

Day, New YorkRogin M P 1967 The Intellectuals and McCarthy: The Radical

Specter . MIT Press, Cambridge, MARovere R 1959 Senator Joe McCarthy . University of California

Press, LondonSchrecker E 1998 Many are the Crimes: McCarthyism in

America . Little, Brown, Boston

F. E. Rourke

Mead, George Herbert (1863–1931)

Together with Charles Peirce, William James, andJohn Dewey, George Herbert Mead is considered oneof the classic representatives of American pragmatism.He is most famous for his ideas about the specicitiesof human communication and sociality and about thegenesis of the ‘self’ in infantile development. Bydeveloping these ideas, Mead became one of thefounders of social psychology and—mostly via hisinuence on the school of symbolic interactionism— one of the most respected gures in contemporarysociology. Comparedwith thatenormous status, otherparts of his work like his general approach to actionand his ethics are relatively neglected.

1. Life and Context

Mead was born the son of a Protestant clergyman inMassachusetts (South Hadley, February 27, 1863). Hespent the majority of his childhood and youth atOberlin College, Ohio, where his father was appointedprofessor and where he himself studied. After fouryears of bread-and-butter employment and intenseintellectual struggle with the Darwinian revolution

and Kant’s moral philosophy, Mead entered graduatestudy at Harvard and continued at the universities of Leipzig and Berlin, Germany,specializing in questionsof psychology and philosophy. After teaching at theUniversity of Michigan (1891–94), Mead was broughtby John Dewey to the newly founded University of Chicago where he taught until his death on April 26,1931. Publishingvery little, but increasingly inuentialthrough his teaching and his life as an activist citizenduring the Progressive Era, Mead’s reputation hasgrown since his death. All his major works werepublished posthumously, based partly on studentnotes, partly on unnished manuscripts from hisremaining papers.

2. The Work

In his foundations of social psychology, Mead startsnot from the behavior of the individual organism butfrom a cooperating group of distinctively humanorganisms, from what he called the ‘social act.’

Groups of humans are subject to conditions thatdiffer fundamentally from those of prehuman stages.For human societies, the problem is how individualbehavior not xed by nature can be differentiated yetalso, viamutualexpectations, be integrated into groupactivity. Mead’s anthropological theory of the originsof specically human communication seeks to uncoverthe mechanism that makes such differentiation andreintegration possible.

Charles Darwin’s analysis of expressive animalbehavior and Wilhelm V. Wundt’s concept of gestureswere crucial stimuli for Mead’s own thinking on thismatter. He shares with them the idea that a ‘gesture’ isa ‘syncopated act,’ the incipient phase of an action thatmay be employed for the regulation of social rela-tionships. Such regulation is possible when an animalreacts to another animal’s action during this incipientphase asit would react to the action asa whole. If sucha connection is working properly, the early phase of the action can become the ‘sign’ for the whole actionand serve to replace it.

For a gesture to have the same meaning for bothsides, its originator must be able to trigger in him or

herself the reaction that he or she will excite in thepartner to communication, so that the other’s reactionis already represented inside him or herself. In otherwords, it must be possible for the gesture to beperceived by its actual originator. Among humans,this is the case particularly with a type of gestures thatcan also be most widely varied according to the precisesituation: namely, vocal gestures. For Mead, they area necessary condition for the emergence of self-consciousness in the history of the species, but not asufficient condition (otherwise the path of self-con-sciousness would, for example, have been open tobirds as well).

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Mead also regarded as crucial, the typically humanuncertainty of response, and the hesitancy facilitatedby the structure of the nervous system. These entailthat the originator’s virtual reaction to their owngesture does not just take place simultaneously withthe reaction of their partner, but actually precedes thatreaction. Their own virtual reaction is also registeredin its incipient phase and can be checked by otherreactions, even before it nds expression in behavior.Thus, anticipatory representation of the other’s beha-vior is possible. Perception of one’s own gestures leadsnot to the emergence of signs as substitute stimuli, butto the bursting of the whole stimulus-response schemaof behavior and to the constitution of ‘signicantsymbols.’ It thus becomes possible to gear one’s ownbehavior to the potential reactions of others, andintentionally to associate different actions with oneanother. Action is here oriented to expectations of behavior. And since, in principle, one’scommunicativepartners have the same capacity, a binding pattern of reciprocal behavioral expectations becomes the prem-ise of collective action.

This anthropological analysis, which Mead extendsinto a comparison between human and animal social-ity, provides the key concepts of his social psychology.The concept of ‘role’ designates precisely a pattern of behavioral expectation; ‘taking the role of the other’means to anticipate the other’s behavior, but not toassumethe other’s place in an organizedsocial context.This inner representation of the other’s behaviorentails that different instances take shape within theindividual. The individual makes their own behavior(like their partner’s behavior) the object of theirperception. Alongside the dimension of instinctiveimpulses, there appears an evaluative authority madeup of expectations on how the other will react to anexpression of those impulses.

Meadspeaks of an‘I’ and a ‘me.’ The ‘I’ refersin thetraditional philosophical sense to the principle of creativity and spontaneity, but in Mead it also refersbiologically to the human instinctual make-up. Thisduality in Mead’s use of the term is often experiencedas contradictory, since ‘instinct,’ ‘impulse,’ or ‘drive’are associated with a dull natural compulsion. Mead,however, considers that humans are endowed with aconstitutional surplus of impulses, which—beyond

any question of satisfaction—creates space for itself infantasy andcan be only channeledby normativization.The ‘me’ refers to myidea of how the other sees me or,at a more primal level, to my internalization of whatthe other expects me to do or be. The ‘me,’ quaprecipitation within myself of a reference person, is anevaluative authority for my structuring of spon-taneous impulses anda basic element of my developingself-image. If I encounter several persons who aresignicant references for me, I thus acquire severaldifferent ‘me’s,’ which must be synthesized into aunitary self-image for consistent behavior to be poss-ible. If this synthesization is successful, the ‘self’

comes into being: that is, a unitary self-evaluation andaction-orientation which allows interaction with moreand more communicative partners; and at the sametime, a stable personality structure develops which iscertain of its needs. Mead’s model, more than Freud’s,is oriented to dialogue between instinctual impulsesand social expectations.

Mead’s theory of personality passes into a de-velopmental logic of the formation of the self that isapplicable to both species and individual. Central hereare the two forms of children’s conduct designated bythe terms ‘play’ and ‘game.’ ‘Play’ is interaction withan imagined partner in which the child uses behavioralanticipation to act out both sides; the other’s conductis directly represented and complemented by thechild’s own conduct. The child reaches this stage whenit becomes capable of interacting with different in-dividual reference-persons and adopting the other’sperspective—that is, when the reference-person at whothe child’s instinctual impulses are mainly directed isno longer the only one who counts. The child then alsodevelops a capacity for group ‘game,’ where antici-pation of an individual partner’s behavior is no longerenough and action must be guided by the conduct of all other participants. These others are by no meansdisjointed parts, but occupy functions within groups.The individual actor must orientate himself or herself to a common goal—which Mead calls the ‘generalizedother.’ The behavioral expectations of this generalizedother are, for instance, the rules of a game, or, moregenerally, the norms and values of a group. Orien-tation to a particular ‘generalized other’ reproduces ata new stage the orientation to a particular concreteother. The problem of orienting to ever broadergeneralized others becomes the guiding thought inMead’s ethical theory.

If Mead’s introductory lectures on social psycho-logypublished as Mind , Self , andSociety (Mead 1934),and the great series of essays that developed his basicideas for the rst time between 1908 and 1912, aretaken as his answer to how cooperation and individu-ation are possible, then the much less well-knowncollection of Mead’s remaining papers— The Phil -osophy of the Act (Mead 1938)—represents an evenmore fundamental starting point. The problem thatMead addresses here is how instrumental action itself

is possible. In particular, he considers the essentialprerequisite for any purposive handling of things: thatis, the constitution of permanent objects. His analysisof the ability for role taking as an important precon-dition for the constitution of the ‘physical thing’ is amajor attempt to combine the development of com-municative and instrumental capabilities within atheory of socialization.

In Mead’s model, action is made up of four stages:impulse, perception, manipulation, and (need-satisfy-ing) consummation. The most distinctively human of these is the third, the stage of manipulation, whoseinterposition and independence express the reduced

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importance of the instincts in humans and provide thelink for the emergence of thought. Hand and speechare for Mead the two roots of the development fromape to human. If impressions of distance initiallytrigger a response only in movements of the body, theretardation of response due to distance and theautonomy of the sphere of contact experience thenmake possible a reciprocal relationship between eyeand hand: the two cooperate and control each other.Intelligent perception and the constitution of objectstake place,in Mead’sview,when distance experience isconsciously related to contact experience. But thisbecomes possible, he further argues, only when therole-taking capability develops to the point where itcan be transferred to nonsocial objects.

A thing is perceived as a thing only when weattribute to it an ‘inside’ that exerts pressure on us assoon as we touch it. Mead calls this, ‘taking the role of the thing.’ If I also succeed in doing this by an-ticipation, I will be able to deal with things in acontrolled manner and accumulate experiences of manipulative action. Combined with the cooperationof eye and hand, this means that the body’s distancesenses can and actually do trigger the experience of resistance proper to manipulation. The distant objectis then perceived as an anticipated ‘contact value’; thething looks heavy, hard or hot. Only interactiveexperience allows what stands before me to appear asactive (as‘pressing’). If this is correct, social experienceis the premise upon which sense perception can besynthesized into ‘things.’ Mead thereby also explainswhy at rst—that is, in the consciousness of the infantor of primitive cultures—all things are perceived asliving partners in a schema of interaction, and why it isonly later that social objects are differentiated fromphysical objects. The constitution of permanent objects is, in turn, the precondition for the separation of the organism from other objects and its self-reectivedevelopment as a unitary body. Self-identity is thusformed in the same process whereby ‘things’ takeshape for actors. Mead is thus trying to grasp thesocial constitution of things without falling prey to alinguistically restricted concept of meaning. Meaddevelops a slightly different formulation of the sameideas in those of his works that connect up withphilosophical discussions of relativity theory and

which make central use of the concept of ‘perspective.’Mead’s ethics and moral psychology are as muchgrounded upon his theory of action and his socialpsychology as they set an axiological framework forthese scientic parts of his work. Mead’s approach toethics develops from a critique of both the utilitarianand Kantian positions. He does not regard as sat-isfactory an orientation simply to the results of actionor simply to the intentions of the actor; he wants toovercome both the utilitarian lack of interest inmotives and the Kantian failure to deal adequatelywith the goals and objective results of action. Hecriticizes the psychological basis common to both

ethical theories. Mead argues that the separationbetween motive and object of the will is a consequenceof the empiricist concept of experience, and thatbeneath the surface this also characterizes Kant’sconcept of inclination. For Mead, the value of anobject is associated with the consummatory stage of the action, so that value is experienced as obligation ordesire. According to him the relation expressed in theconcept of value cannot be limited either to subjectiveevaluation or to an objective quality of value; it resultsfrom a relationship between subject and object whichshould not, however, be understood as a relationshipof knowledge. The value relation is thus an objectivelyexisting relation between subject and object, but itdiffers structurally from the perception of primary orsecondary qualities. This difference is not due to ahigher degree of subjective arbitrariness, but to thereference of values to the phase of need satisfactionrather than the phase of manipulation or perception.The claim to objectivity on the part of scienticknowledge bound up with perception or manipulationis, therefore, a matter of course also as far as moralaction is concerned. This does not mean that Meadreduces ethics to one more science among others. Forscience, in his analysis, investigates the relations of ends and means, whereas ethics investigates the re-lationship among ends themselves.

Epigrammatically, one might say that for Mead themoral situation is a personality crisis. It confronts thepersonality with a conict between various of its ownvalues, or between its own values and those of directpartners or the generalized other, or between its ownvalues and impulses. This crisis can be overcome onlyby one’s own creative, and hence ever risky, actions.Mead’s ethics, then, seeks not to prescribe rules of conduct but to elucidate the situation in which ‘moraldiscoveries’ are necessary. Expectations and impulsesmust be restructured, so that it becomes possible torebuild an integral identity and to outline a moralstrategy appropriate to the situation. If this is donesuccessfully, the self is raised to a higher stage, sinceregard for further interests has now been incorporatedinto conduct.

Mead attempts to describe stages of self-formationas stages of moral development and, at the same time,as stagesin thedevelopment of society towardfreedom

from domination. Orientation to a concrete other isfollowed by orientation to organized others within agroup. Beyondthis stage andbeyond conicts betweendifferent generalized others, there is an orientation toever more comprehensive social units, and nally to auniversalist perspective with an ideal of full devel-opment of the human species. We attain this univer-salist perspective by attempting to understand allvalues that appear before us—not relativistically in anonjudgmental juxtaposition, but by assessing them inthe light of a universalist community based uponcommunication and cooperation. Comprehensivecommunication with partners in the moral situation,

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and rational conduct oriented to achievement of theideal community, are thus two rules to be applied insolving the crisis. This perspective lifts us outside anyconcrete community or society and leads to ruthlessquestioning of the legitimacy of all prevailing stan-dards. In each moral decision is a reference to a bettersociety.

The moral value of a given society is shown in thedegree to which it involves rational procedures for thereaching of agreement and an openness of all institu-tions to communicative change. Mead uses the term‘democracy’ for such a society; democracy is for him‘institutionalized revolution.’ Individuals do not ac-quire their identity within it through identicationwith the group or society as such, in its struggle againstinternal or external enemies. Mead investigated thepower-stabilizing and socially integrative functions of punitive justice, and looked at patriotism as an ethicaland psychological problem. He recognized that bothare functionally necessary in a society, which, becausenot everyone can publicly express their needs, requiresan articial unity. For Mead, the generation of auniversalist perspective is by no means just a moraldemand; he is aware that it is achievable only when allhumans share a real context in which to act—some-thing that can come about by means of the worldmarket.

3. Mead’s Inuence in Social Theory

During Mead’s lifetime, his inuence was almostentirely limited to his students and a few colleagues inChicago, and to his friend, the leading pragmatistphilosopher John Dewey. The paths of inuence there joining pragmatist philosophy, functionalist psycho-logy, institutionalist economics, empirical sociology,and progressive social reformism can hardly be disen-tangled from one another. In the history of phil-osophy, Mead’s main service is to have developed apragmatist analysisof social interaction and individualself-reection. This same achievement enabled him, inthe age of classical sociological theory, to clear a wayfor it to escape fruitless oppositions such as thatbetween individualism and collectivism. Mead’s grasp

of the unity of individuation and socialization deneshis place in the history of sociology.After Mead’s death, the school of ‘symbolic interac-

tionism’ played a decisive role in assuring his inuencein sociology. Herbert Blumer, a former student of Mead’s, became the founder and key organizer in theUSA of a rich sociological research tradition whichturned against the dominance of behaviorist psy-chology, quantitative methods of empirical socialresearch, and social theories that abstracted from theaction of members of society. This school, by contrast,emphasized the openness of social structures, thecreativity of social actors, and the need for interpret-

ation of the data of social science. Mead came to beseen as the school’s progenitor and classical reference,although his work was consulted only fragmentarily.In the dominant postwar theory of Talcott Parsons itremained marginal; Mead’s ideas were mentioned,alongside the works of Durkheim, Freud, and Cooley,as important for the understanding of the internali-zation of norms.

An important strand of the reception of his workcan be found in Germany. Ju $rgen Habermas, in hisTheory of Communicati e Action , identied Mead asone of the crucial inspirers of the paradigm shift ‘frompurposive to communicative action.’ By this time atthe latest, Mead was not just considered the originatorof one sociological approach among many but as aclassical theorist of the whole discipline. The prag-matist renaissance that is working itself out in philo-sophy and public life has focused attention more onDewey than on Mead. One can also try to sound thepotential of Mead’s work and American pragmatismin general for a revision of sociological action theory,the theoryof norms and values, and macrosociologicaltheory. The innovative potential of Mead’s pragmaticsocial theory is evident far beyond the narrow eld of qualitative microsociological research, for whichsymbolic interactionism has primarily laid claim to hislegacy.

See also : Groups, Sociology of; Interactionism: Sym-bolic; Phenomenology in Sociology; Phenomenology:Philosophical Aspects; Self-development in Child-hood; Self: History of the Concept; Social Psychology;Socialization in Infancy and Childhood; Socialization,Sociology of; Sociology, History of

BibliographyCook G A 1993 George Herbert Mead: The Making of a Social

Pragmatist . University of Illinois Press, Urbana, ILHabermas J 1984 \ 1987 Theory of Communicati e Action . Beacon

Press, Boston, 2 VolsHamilton P (ed.) 1992 G H Mead. Critical Assessments .

Routledge London \ New York, 4 VolsJoas H 1985 G H Mead. A Contemporary Re-examination of His

Thought , (translated by Raymond Meyer), 2nd edn. 1997.MIT Press, Cambridge, MA

Mead G H 1932 In: Murphy A E (ed.) The Philosophy of thePresent . Open Court, Chicago, London

Mead G H 1934 In: Morris C W (ed.) Mind, Self, and Society .University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL

Mead G H 1936 In: Moore M H (ed.) Mo ements of Thought inthe Nineteenth Century . University of Chicago Press, Chicago,IL

Mead G H 1938 In: Morris C W, Brewster J M, Dunham A M,Miller D L (eds.) The Philosophy of the Act . University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL

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Mead G H 1964 In: Reck A J (ed.) Selected Writings . Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis, IN

Miller D L 1973 G H Mead: Self, Language, and the World .University of Texas Press, Austin, TX

H. Joas

Mead, Margaret (1901–78)Margaret Mead, noted twentieth century Americancultural anthropologist, was born December 16, 1901,in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Emily Fogg Mead,sociologist and social activist, and Edward SherwoodMead, economistand professorat theWharton Schoolof Finance and Commerce at the University of Pennsylvania. She grew up in a household open to newideas and social change. Her mother was an ardentproponent of woman’s suffrage; her grandmother,Martha Ramsay Mead, who lived with them, was,with her mother, interested in experimenting with thelatest ideas in education. Her father, while somewhatprogressive, also acted as devil’s advocate in livelydebates over issues at mealtimes.

Her education was a combination of home school-ing and local schools. She attended BuckinghamFriends School and graduated from Doylestown HighSchool, both in Bucks County, outside of Philadel-phia. She spent her rst year of college at DePauwUniversity in Indiana, but found herself an outsiderthere. She transferred to Barnard, a highly regardedwomen’s college in New York City, where she madelife-long friends and from which she graduated in thespring of 1923.

In the fall of 1923 she married Luther Cressman, ayoung man she had met in Bucks County and beenengaged to since leaving for DePauw. He was a collegegraduate and a graduate of General TheologicalSeminary in New York, which he attended while shewas at Barnard. For both, the ideal marriage was anequal partnership.

They attended graduate school at Columbia Uni-versity in NewYork City together, he in sociology, shereceiving her Master’s degree in psychology, then herPh.D. in anthropology. At Columbia, she was a

student of Franz Boas, the preeminent anthropologistin the US, and part of a distinguished anthropologicalcommunity that included Melville Herskovits, RuthBunzel, Esther Goldfrank, and Ruth Benedict, whobegan as a mentor, and through the graduate schoolyears became a colleague, close friend, and lover. Abisexual, throughout her life Mead would developrelationships with both men and women. During thistime she also met anthropologists from outside NewYork, of whom Edward Sapir would be the mostimportant.

She defended her dissertation, a piece of libraryresearch titled, An Inquiry into the Question of Cultural

Stability in Polynesia , in the spring of 1925 (publishedin 1928). After accepting a position as an assistantcurator at the American Museum of Natural Historyin New York upon her return, that fall she set off forher rst eld trip, to American Samoa in the Pacic.She was gone altogether 9 months, while Lutherstudied in Europe. The result of that eld trip was herbook, Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), which showedAmericans there could be a different system of morality in which premarital sex was accepted, andadolescence itself was not necessarily a time of ‘stormand stress.’ This book became a best-seller and beganthe process which, by the time of her death, wouldmake her the best-known anthropologist in the US.

On the trip home, she met New Zealander ReoFortune, on his way to Britain to study psychology.They fell in love and over the course of 2 years of internal struggle she and Luther decided to divorce. In1928 she married Reo, who had changed his eld of study to anthropology and had already taken his rsteld trip to the Dobu people in the Pacic, and theyembarked on their rst eld trip together, to theManus people of the Admiralty Islands in the Pacic.This resulted in her book, Growing Up in New Guinea(1930), a study of the socialization and education of Manus children.

Two other eld trips with Reo, a summer trip to theAmerican West and a return to the Pacic, this timethe mainland of New Guinea, resulted in her books,The Changing Culture of an Indian Tribe (1932), whichstudied assimilation among the Omaha Indians, andSex and Temperament in Three Primiti e Societies(1935), a comparative study of three New Guineapeoples, the Arapesh, Mundugumor, and Tchambuli,which gave evidence for the rst time of the con-structed nature of gender systems. Prior to this, genderhad been viewed as biologically innate. Problems inthe marriage came to a head on New Guinea, resultingin Mead’s and Reo’s divorce on their return from theeld. She married British anthropologist GregoryBateson, whom she had met in New Guinea, in 1936,and they set out for their rst eld trip to Bali in thePacic, which resulted in their co-authored book,Balinese Character: A Photographic Analysis (1942).After this eld trip their daughter and Mead’s onlychild, Mary Catherine Bateson, was born in 1939.

During World War II Mead served as ExecutiveSecretary of the National Research Council’s Com-mittee on Food Habits which did serious research onnutrition planning and cultural food problems, suchas how to help people used to rice adopt wheat our.She wrote a pioneering popular book, And Keep YourPowder Dry (1942), the rst by an anthropologist toattempt to use anthropological insights and models todeal with a nonnative culture, that of the US as awhole.

After thewar ended, shebecame involved with RuthBenedict in a project studying nonnative culturesaround the world titled Research in Contemporary

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Copyright # 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd.All rights reserved.

International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences ISBN: 0-08-043076-7

5.5. george herbert mead

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