The Timeliness of George Herbert Mead

The Timeliness of George Herbert Mead

The Timeliness of George Herbert Mead

Edited by Hans Joas and Daniel R. Huebner

The University of Chicago Press

CHICAGO & LONDON

HANS JOAS is the Ernst Troeltsch Professor for the Sociology of Religion at the Humboldt University of Berlin and professor of sociology and social thought at the University of Chicago.

DANIEL R. HUEBNER is assistant professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2016 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2016.

Printed in the United States of America

25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-37694-3 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-37713-1 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226377131.001.0001

Chapter 5 originally published as Karl-Siegbert Rehberg, Die Theorie der Intersubjektivität als eine Lehre vom Menschen. George Herbert Mead und die deutsche Tradition der ‘Philosophischen Anthropologie,’ in Das Problem der Intersubjektivität. Neuere Beiträge zum Werk George Herbert Meads, ed. Hans Joas (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1985), 60–92. © Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main 1985. All rights with and maintained by Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin.

Chapter 15 originally published as Timothy J. Gallagher, G.H. Mead’s Understanding of the Nature of Speech in the Light of Contemporary Research, Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 42, no. 1 (2012), 40–62. © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Joas, Hans, 1948– editor. | Huebner, Daniel R., editor.

Title: The timeliness of George Herbert Mead / edited by Hans Joas and Daniel R. Huebner.

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016001712 | ISBN 9780226376943 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226377131 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Mead, George Herbert, 1863–1931. | Pragmatism.

Classification: LCC B945.M464 T56 2016 | DDC 191—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016001712

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Table of Contents

Introduction

Hans Joas and Daniel R. Huebner

Part I:  History, Historiography, Historical Sociology

1.  Changing Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century: Historical Text and Historical Context

Charles Camic

2.  On Mead’s Long Lost History of Science

Daniel R. Huebner

3.  Pragmatism and Historicism: Mead’s Philosophy of Temporality and the Logic of Historiography

Hans Joas

4.  George Herbert Mead and the Promise of Pragmatist Democracy

Robert Westbrook

5.  The Theory of Intersubjectivity as a Theory of the Human Being: George Herbert Mead and the German Tradition of Philosophical Anthropology

Karl-Siegbert Rehberg

Part II:  Nature, Environment, Process

6.  Naturalism and Despair: George Herbert Mead and Evolution in the 1880s

Trevor Pearce

7.  George Herbert Mead as a Socio-Environmental Thinker

Bradley H. Brewster and Antony J. Puddephatt

8.  Social Worlds: The Legacy of Mead’s Social Ecology in Chicago Sociology

Daniel Cefaï

9.  Mead, Whitehead, and the Sociality of Nature

Michael L. Thomas

Part III:  Cognition, Conscience, Language

10.  Mead, the Theory of Mind, and the Problem of Others

Ryan McVeigh

11.  Imitation and Taking the Attitude of the Other

Kelvin Jay Booth

12.  Mead Meets Tomasello: Pragmatism, the Cognitive Sciences, and the Origins of Human Communication and Sociality

Frithjof Nungesser

13.  Conscience as Ecological Participation and the Maintenance of Moral Perplexity

Joshua Daniel

14.  Presentation and Re-Presentation: Language, Content, and the Reconstruction of Experience

Roman Madzia

15.  G. H. Mead’s Understanding of the Nature of Speech in the Light of Contemporary Research

Timothy Gallagher

List of Contributors

Name Index

Subject Index

Introduction

Hans Joas and Daniel R. Huebner

The first philosophical book ever to bear George Herbert Mead’s name on its cover was published in 1932, one year after his death. It presented a series of lectures Mead had given at the meeting of the American Philosophical Association at Berkeley in December 1930. Although of great ambition and apparently planned as a systematic presentation of Mead’s later thought, the lectures were only in a provisional form. The editor of the book, Arthur Murphy, says in his preface that they were written hurriedly, in large part on the journey from Chicago to Berkeley (Murphy 1932, vii). To a large extent, the topic of these lectures is the problem of our understanding of time—and there is some bitter irony in the fact that Mead did not have enough time to complete the text of his lectures and that his lifetime ended before he could return to the task of elaborating what he had presented in California.

The title of this book, The Philosophy of the Present, is deliberately ambiguous. On one level, it simply refers to a statement about contemporary philosophical thinking, its achievements and deficiencies. On another level though, and this is intellectually much more relevant, the title also signals the subject and main thesis of the lectures. Lecture 1 starts with the strong claim: The subject of this lecture is found in the proposition that reality exists in a present. The present of course implies a past and a future, and to these both we deny existence (Mead 1932, 1). In the larger part of the lectures Mead relates this claim to the epistemological problems of the natural sciences, particularly with regard to Darwin and Einstein. But in a fragment incorporated into the text by the editor and considered to be the result of a critical discussion of Mead’s views in Chicago in early 1931, Mead also attempted to explain the relationship of his understanding of temporality to the humanities and the self-understanding of practicing historians. He emphasized that historical research should not be guided by the ideal of approximating the past how it actually was, purified of all traces of the present. What we need instead is a reconstruction of the past as conditioning the present—a reconstruction that enables us to interpret what is arising in the future that belongs to this present (Mead 1932, 30). It is an implication of this view that there is no final past; rather, every reconstruction of the past is a truth which belongs to this present, and a later present would reconstruct it from the standpoint of its own emergent nature (Mead 1932, 31).

It is obvious that this insight—on which Mead put such great emphasis—must also guide our attempts to interpret a thinker of the past such as Mead himself. Every interpretation of a thinker and his or her work has to be guided by the ideal of being final for the time being, for the time in which it is being developed—but it will always be final only for the time being. As Max Weber (1946) argued in his famous address of 1917 Science as a Vocation, all scientific research is part of a process we call scientific progress. What is true for more or less cumulative progress in certain scientific disciplines is even more the case in less cumulative disciplines in which historical change always produces new challenges that guide the striving for knowledge.

There is a certain melancholy in this insight. Authors and writings that were crucial for a particular epoch may radically lose their appeal in the eyes of a younger generation, while others who did not receive great attention during their lifetime may become more attractive after their deaths. George Herbert Mead is a particularly spectacular case in this regard. One of the editors of this volume (Daniel Huebner) recently devoted a whole book to the social processes that turned Mead, a relatively obscure philosopher at the University of Chicago in the first decades of the twentieth century, into one of the great figures of American pragmatist philosophy and a classic of the sociological discipline (Huebner 2014). Both authors of this introduction are deeply convinced that Mead’s writings are so original and profound that he fully deserves this status, but the contingencies of the history of his reception are nevertheless remarkable.

For many years the answer to the question of why Mead’s writings are timely would have been very clear. It was mostly his social psychology and particularly his analysis of the symbolically mediated character of specifically human communication that was mentioned in the literature and taken up in empirical research and theory construction. Mead’s relevance for the developmental psychology of the self and for educational questions was closely related to this interest. Other parts and aspects of Mead’s work were almost completely ignored by sociologists and in the influential interpretation that Jürgen Habermas gave of Mead’s work in his magnum opus The Theory of Communicative Action. Mead’s relevance for moral philosophy was the main area where Habermas stepped beyond the limitations of most previous attempts. Some phenomenological philosophers had demonstrated an interest in other parts of Mead’s work, but they frequently used their phenomenological point of departure as a yardstick for evaluating Mead. Mead the pragmatist was, therefore, often not discussed in a way that took the possible merits of his pragmatism—even in comparison to phenomenology—seriously.

For the present volume the editors have chosen a quasi-inductive approach. We did not prepare a list of Mead’s areas of study and then invite authors to contribute articles on each respective area; rather, we tried to identify those areas of contemporary debate where—frequently younger—authors from different disciplines have shown new and creative ways of making Mead’s thinking fruitful today. If we have succeeded in this endeavor—that is our hope—then the result will also bear witness to the timeliness of George Herbert Mead.

There seem to be three main areas in which Mead’s thinking is currently inspiring contemporary work. The first is the area of history, historiography, and historical sociology (and the possible relevance of Mead’s philosophy of temporality for this area). The second follows from one of the fundamental reorientations of intellectual and political life in recent decades: the turn to a greater awareness of environmental problems, both in an empirical and in a normative sense, and the rethinking of earlier assumptions about man and nature in light of this turn. And the third has to do with the outburst of new research in neurobiology, brain studies, and evolutionary psychology, which has led a considerable number of contemporary writers to see in George Herbert Mead, to put it loosely, an early prefiguration of much-acclaimed contemporary thinkers such as Michael Tomasello. These three areas, therefore, constitute the structure of the present volume.

Part 1, History, Historiography, Historical Sociology, presents five contributions on diverse aspects of Mead’s work. Three of the chapters deal with the potential of Mead’s work for fields of historical research, whereas two others are devoted to new historical contextualizations of Mead’s thinking.

The sociologist Charles Camic, well known for his meticulous research on the intellectual biographies of Talcott Parsons and Thorstein Veblen and a crucial figure in the empirical study of social knowledge making, examines Mead’s neglected posthumously published Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century, a book that is based on notes from a course of the same title, and shows how it relates to the intellectual context of the University of Chicago in its early years. Camic considers several offerings of the course first by John Dewey and then by Mead not so much to contrast the two thinkers as to trace the increasing emphasis on research science and evolution and the diminishing emphasis on nineteenth-century social sciences in Mead’s accounts. Camic’s study applies Mead’s views on the historicity of mind to Mead’s own work and shows how Mead’s own contexts, in this case specifically local contexts, shaped his historical narratives. This study shows that Mead gradually replaced a Hegelian-teleological account of history with a pragmatist account of historical contingency. Further studies on Mead’s interpretations of the history of philosophy and science, particularly on his extensive presentation of French nineteenth-century philosophy in the appendix to the Movements, remain a desideratum.

Daniel Huebner’s chapter deals with Mead’s relevance for the history of science. He utilizes newly discovered student notes from Mead’s courses and other historical data to make the case that Mead was an expert in the history of science, that he contributed self-consciously to the formation of the history of science as a field of inquiry, and that he had a thoroughly social account of the development of scientific knowledge. Mead’s strong interest in ancient Greek philosophy and science and the complex relationship between this area of his work and his social psychology thus become evident. Huebner documents the wide variety of Mead’s courses and papers in this area, his attempts to institute a society and book series for the history of science, and the criticisms leveled at him at the time.

Hans Joas explores the similarities between American pragmatism and (mostly German) historicism in the nineteenth century—similarities that were often ignored because of cultural differences between the United States and Germany and the different status of the natural sciences and humanities in the two cultures. But the main claim of this chapter is that American pragmatism developed ideas that allow us to overcome the dichotomy between objectivism and relativism in historiography. Joas identifies conceptual tools in the works of Josiah Royce, Mead, and Dewey that can account for the intersubjective and the temporal nature of human experience as well as for the processes of the formation of ideals. By bringing Ernst Troeltsch, the most sophisticated thinker from the historicist tradition, into the picture, Joas demonstrates that in the 1920s one could almost speak of the beginning of a convergence of Mead’s temporalized pragmatism and Troeltsch’s existential historicism. For contingent reasons, this convergence never took place, but it remains a challenge to which this paper responds.

The intellectual historian Robert Westbrook, author of a magisterial biography of John Dewey (Westbrook 1991) and other writings on democratic theory, makes the observation that Mead has remained neglected in the renaissance of interest in Dewey. However, Westbrook goes on, Mead was not merely a friend and colleague who shared Dewey’s views, but . . . one who substantially and productively enlarged them. Without going through the whole corpus of Mead’s writings in political theory and rather focusing on just one of the pieces (i.e., Mead’s 1923 Scientific Method and the Moral Sciences), Westbrook argues that Mead pioneered a defense of democratic inclusiveness against the challenge of so-called realist critics—a defense based on demonstrating that more inclusiveness leads to smarter polities that is superior even to Dewey’s attempts. Again, if Westbrook is right, further studies on Mead’s relevance for democratic theory would be useful.

The author of the next chapter is Karl-Siegbert Rehberg, a leading German cultural sociologist and the foremost authority on the work of Arnold Gehlen. Gehlen was, like Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt, deeply involved with Nazism. But while Heidegger and Schmitt are internationally debated today, Gehlen, who many Germans consider to be of equal intellectual significance, has not received much attention in the English-speaking world. In connection with Mead, it is worth mentioning that Gehlen was the first major German author to recognize Mead’s importance and to refer to him in his own creative work. In his chapter Rehberg is driven by an interest in understanding how thinkers of such different attitudes toward democracy can nevertheless show profound affinities in their understanding of human action. In his essay Rehberg provides a novel reevaluation of the relationship between Mead and the broader intellectual tradition that includes Wilhelm Wundt and Wilhelm Dilthey, and he introduces previously unpublished documentation on Gehlen’s study of Mead.

One of the great achievements of the American pragmatists has always been that their understanding of the history of mankind remained part of a wider conception of history—namely, natural history in the sense of both organic evolution and the history of the cosmos. In pragmatism this wider conception of history has never been reductionist; that is, it has never been based on a neglect of the specificities of human action and human sociality. But this wider conception has allowed the pragmatists to see human history as a part of natural history with all the effects and counter-effects that thus come into view.

Part 2 of this volume, Nature, Environment, Process, brings together four innovative studies on Mead’s relevance for the history and philosophy of nature. The philosopher Trevor Pearce, whose research is focused on the history of interactions between philosophy and the life-sciences in nineteenth-century America, concentrates on Mead’s early intellectual development and shows in detail how difficult it was for a young Christian at the time to integrate Darwin into his worldview and explores what a deep existential crisis could result from these difficulties. Based to some extent on new biographical material, Pearce traces the development of Mead’s views through his years in college, in a longer phase of existential reorientation, and as a student of philosophy and psychology. Pearce also shows how Mead’s education with Josiah Royce at Harvard and Wilhelm Dilthey in Berlin—both authors who saw the doctrine of evolution as a means to come to a better understanding of the human being’s spiritual nature—was key to resolving his early intellectual and personal problems and continued to form the center of his later work.

Mead’s deep debt to biology, demonstrated by Pearce, gives additional plausibility to the main thesis of the following chapter. The sociologists Bradley Brewster and Antony Puddephatt see Mead as one of the most thoroughgoing bio-social thinkers in the classical sociological canon and criticize those who lump him together with some of his later followers who indeed showed little interest in the natural world and the relationships between the human organism and its environment. This relationship, according to Mead, can be understood neither as a determinism where all the causality lies on the side of the environment nor as an unfettered construction of environment by organism. Like David Miller, one of Mead’s last students and author of one of the best books ever written on Mead (Miller 1973), Brewster and Puddephatt see Mead in a revolt against dualism and idealism. The authors propose that Mead’s theory of fundamental sociality and the objective location of perspectives in nature provides an avenue for linking the social sciences with environmental studies. There are affinities of Mead’s theory to the thinking of early conservationists. They clearly find anticipated in Mead what is presently debated as a new view of the social—that is, a view that includes nonhumans. Mead’s theory could, therefore, provide the foundation for contemporary claims about the obligation of human communities to multiple forms of ecology.

Terms like environment and ecology are not unambiguous because they can refer to relations between human beings or relations between humans and nonhumans. The French sociologist Daniel Cefaï—who together with Louis Quéré translated and co-edited the 2006 French edition of Mead’s Mind, Self, and Society and is a creative continuator of the Chicago school ethnographic research tradition—deals less with Mead’s own writings than with the research of major and minor figures of the Chicago School. He traces the importance of Mead’s examination of fields of experience organized by universes of discourse to the development of so-called social worlds in that school—for example, in the works of eminent sociologists Tamotsu Shibutani, Anselm Strauss, and Howard S. Becker. Cefaï utilizes the numerous (often unpublished) dissertations of sociologists trained at the University of Chicago in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s to present a novel, detailed analysis of the theoretical complexity of ecologies of social worlds, including their multiplicity, their various forms, and their intersections. He finds in Mead’s understanding of ecology an important counterpoint to the human ecology practiced in Chicago in the 1920s and, like Brewster and Puddephatt, an important contribution to the rethinking of the place of objects in social theory.

The last chapter in this part provides a fresh analysis of the relationship between Mead and the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. The author of this chapter, Michael L. Thomas, has done extensive research on the reception of Whitehead’s philosophy in social theory in general. There can be no doubt that in the last years of his life Mead grappled with Whitehead’s thinking more than with any other philosophy, and John Dewey already made it clear why this was the case. In his prefatory remarks to Mead’s Philosophy of the Present Dewey recognized that Mead shared with Whitehead the effort to include matters usually relegated to an exclusively subjective realm within the constitution of nature itself (Dewey 1932, xxxviii). The expression objective reality of perspectives—the title of one of Mead’s (1927) essays—conveys the basic idea behind his effort very well. Perspective alludes to subjectivity, but every subjectivity is itself part of an objective reality. Instead of yielding to a bifurcation of nature into an objective and a subjective realm, both thinkers view reality as a temporal, constructive process in which the subjectivity of individuals . . . plays a role in its construction. But Thomas—like Gary A. Cook, author of another major book on Mead (Cook 1993), before him—also insists on the differences between the two thinkers. Mead saw himself as being more consistent in this shared effort and better able to prevent any recreation of the bifurcation they were both struggling to overcome. Thomas sees Mead as focusing on the scientific understanding of reality and Whitehead as more interested in an aesthetic project. But these two projects do not necessarily contradict each other, and it is Thomas’s ambition to outline possible avenues of synthesis.

The chapters of part 3, Cognition, Conscience, Language, make substantial contributions to cognitive science and moral philosophy. The authors of these papers each work in different ways to clarify and develop the social and embodied conception of the mind sketched in Mead’s writings and lectures a century ago and to show how this view offers a unique avenue for synthesizing existing research and overcoming persistent problems. Each chapter takes up a unique focal point in these disparate but interconnected literatures, and as a result the reader can trace the ways in which the chapters mutually support one another without being redundant—as, for example, certain authors (e.g., Tomasello), themes (e.g., embodiment), and concepts (e.g., imitation) examined in detail in one paper tie into the argument of others. Together these papers represent a sustained and articulate evaluation of Mead’s relationship to contemporary understandings of the nature of the mind.

Ryan McVeigh, a Canadian sociologist, lays out some of the fundamental philosophical issues at stake with his evaluation of the so-called problem of other minds. In the contemporary cognitive sciences, the dominant views emphasize cognition as a phenomenon internal to the individual organism, and this ontological priority of the individual—hegemonic in theorizing this problem from Descartes to the present day—makes it difficult to explain the reality and necessity of our understanding of others. Even perspectives that draw on research on mirror neurons and other possible neurological mechanisms by which the individual may simulate the behaviors of others ultimately fail to resolve this problem. McVeigh argues that Mead’s perspective, in contrast, dissolves the very problem itself by showing how the self only emerges as the result of the individual developing in a pre-existing world of social others. Instead of taking the individual’s sense of self as a starting premise and asking how we can be logically sure others exist, we can take up the charge from Mead and reorient research to investigate how we personally come to exist as selves among others.

A unique vantage point for considering this relationship between the self and others is found in the critical analysis by Kelvin Booth, a philosopher who has contributed to work on embodied cognition. Booth carefully dissects the findings of research that claims to show the extent to which apes understand the intentions and experiences of others, and he argues that there is no clear evidence of definite imitation or mind-reading abilities in these cases. Research on human infants demonstrates the range of behavioral mimicries they exhibit early in development, but Booth argues that these behaviors develop from a tendency of infants to synchronize activities with others, not to intuitively take the role of others and truly imitate their intentions. In this chapter Booth reaffirms the importance of Mead’s efforts to distinguish the role-taking abilities that humans develop from seemingly analogous behavior of other animals and human infants. And by building on the notion of synchronizing behaviors, Booth contributes an explanation of why humans are the only animals that imitate in a strict sense, which both lends further support for Mead’s overall theory of mind and makes a novel contribution to the literature on comparative behavior.

A key figure working to reorient comparative and developmental research in cognitive science around social and cultural issues is Michael Tomasello, whose work includes references to Mead. German sociologist Frithjof Nungesser takes up a systematic comparison of Tomasello and Mead, focusing especially on the evolutionary development of human-specific features of communication. Both authors agree that the key transition between animal and human communication is in gestural interaction and that humans have developed unique role-taking abilities that transform cognition into internal dialogue. Their differences of emphasis, however, are instructive. They choose different reference species with differing types of social skills to compare with humans, and they place different emphases on verbal and manual communication in evolutionary development. Although Tomasello provides a more up-to-date analysis of the evolutionary development of human communication, Nungesser argues that he ultimately fails to fully incorporate Mead’s pragmatist principles, which both recognize the evolutionary continuity of human and animal sociality and at the same time stress the change of existence as a whole—the emergence of a qualitatively new intersubjective space affecting all human motivations and behaviors—that results from biologically evolved human specific capacities.

Ethicist Joshua Daniel takes up the moral implications of Mead’s anthropology in order to investigate the nature of conscience. Modern conceptions of conscience, Daniel shows, emphasize its function as either the voice of society’s moral conventions or of personal moral discernment, which results in a fundamental tension between the individual and social aspects of conscience. Daniel derives from Mead’s notion of the self, especially the distinction between the I and the me, an ecological view in which the embodied self engages in interactions with various social environments, both performing social roles and responding individually to social demands. The real advance of Mead’s view over current moral philosophy is showing that moral conflicts are not fundamentally between the individual and society but between competing socially funded consciences and that the work of the individual’s conscience is not in punctuated moments of judgment but rather in continually negotiating between multiple ecologies of social roles. On the basis of this formulation Daniel proposes that conscience does not serve simply to resolve moral perplexity once and for all but to allow individuals to rationally maintain perplexity and to participate successfully in a variety of morally ambiguous roles.

A persistent theme of Daniel’s and others’ papers is Mead’s embodied and situated concept of the mind, and Czech philosopher Roman Madzia focuses on this issue in order to examine a central problem for modern thought—specifically, the relationship between experience and language. Madzia argues that modern philosophies—including so-called neo-pragmatists—view language as a necessary mediation through which humans experience the world, but this common view has resulted in fundamental problems. Mead, in contrast, developed a theory in which our primary relation with the world is absorbed skillful coping with an engrossing and unproblematized realm of objects, not an objective world mediated for an actor by propositional content. On this basis, Mead develops a theory of the emergence of linguistic communication in which symbols enable humans to systematically reconstruct their habits in response to practical problems. Thus, Madzia argues, the linguistic mediation of the world is a second-order attitude situated within a larger theory of direct, unmediated action. The apparently problematic features of linguistic representation of the world are resolved into transitory but necessary phases in the action of the body as it attempts to restore the direct unity of experience—to re-present a unified field of action.

Mead’s theory of the nature and development of language is thoroughly evaluated in light of subsequent research in the final chapter by the late sociologist Timothy Gallagher. The chapter is structured as a response to ethologist Niko Tinbergen’s well-known four questions in the explanation of behavior: How does it work (mechanics)? How does it develop in the individual (ontogeny)? How did it emerge in history (phylogeny)? And how is it adaptive for survival (function)? Mead, Gallagher shows, fares well on each of these questions, and his writings exhibit an explicit awareness of features of language that have received confirmation in recent scholarship, including its neuro-physiological apparatus, its complex development that is dependent on features of human biology and social learning, its evolutionary relation to and advance over non-symbolic gestures, and its role in producing flexible and dynamic coordination of social activities. Ultimately Mead goes beyond these questions by developing a non-dualistic theory of the relationship between language and consciousness—a problem not considered by Tinbergen’s reductive questions.

Together, the contributions to The Timeliness of George Herbert Mead attempt to bring scholarship on George Herbert Mead up to date and to introduce new directions in the understanding of this influential author and contemporary scholarship. Perhaps most importantly, the contributions provide detailed analyses of Mead’s importance to innovative fields of scholarship, including cognitive science, environmental studies, democratic epistemology, social ethics, non-teleological historiography, and the history of the natural and social sciences. Through their rigorous analyses the authors of these chapters develop a coherent statement that places Mead in dialogue with current research, pushing these domains of scholarship forward while also revitalizing the growing literature on an author who has already had a major influence on sociology, psychology, and philosophy.

Many of the authors and ideas of this volume were first brought into dialogue at a conference celebrating the 150th anniversary of the birth of George Herbert Mead, organized by Hans Joas, Andrew Abbott, Daniel Huebner, and Christopher Takacs and held at the University of Chicago in April 2013. That conference was generously sponsored by the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought (chaired by Robert Pippin), with supplemental funding from the Franke Institute for the Humanities and the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago. The conference provided a venue in which emerging scholars from several countries and new fields challenged the assumptions of Mead and his legacy, and the striking themes that emerged from that conference provided a major impetus for this collection.

The present volume also provides the unique opportunity to make visible to new audiences updated versions of some important contributions previously published elsewhere. These pieces benefit especially from being paired with the other chapters in this volume that bear on common themes. An earlier version of Timothy Gallagher’s chapter was published as G. H. Mead’s Understanding of the Nature of Speech in the Light of Contemporary Research (Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 41 [2011]: 40–62). Karl-Siegbert Rehberg’s chapter is a revision, translated by Alex Skinner, of a piece that appeared as Die Theorie der Intersubjektivität als eine Lehre vom Menschen. George Herbert Mead und die deutsche Tradition der ‘Philosophischen Anthropologie’ (in Das Problem der Intersubjektivität: Neuere Beiträge zum Werk George Herbert Meads, ed. Hans Joas [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985]).

Finally, the editors would like to thank Christian Scherer for his assistance with proofreading and preparing the index.

References

Cook, Gary A. 1993. George Herbert Mead: The Making of a Social Pragmatist. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.

Dewey, John. 1932. Prefatory Remarks to The Philosophy of the Present, by George H. Mead. Edited by Arthur E. Murphy. Chicago: Open Court Publishing.

Gallagher, Timothy. 2011. G. H. Mead’s Understanding of the Nature of Speech in the Light of Contemporary Research. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 41: 40–62.

Huebner, Daniel R. 2014. Becoming Mead: The Social Process of Academic Knowledge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Mead, George H. 1927. The Objective Reality of Perspectives. In Proceedings of the Sixth International Congress of Philosophy. New York: Longmans, Green, and Company.

———. 1932. The Philosophy of the Present. Edited by Arthur E. Murphy. Chicago: Open Court Publishing.

———. 2006. L'esprit, le soi et la société, edited by Daniel Cefai and Louis Quéré. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

Miller, David L. 1973. George Herbert Mead: Self, Language, and the World. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Murphy, Arthur E. 1932. Preface to The Philosophy of the Present, by George H. Mead. Edited by Arthur E. Murphy. Chicago: Open Court Publishing.

Rehberg, Karl-Siegbert. 1985. Die Theorie der Intersubjektivität als eine Lehre vom Menschen. George Herbert Mead und die deutsche Tradition der ‘Philosophishen Anthropologie.’ In Das Problem der Intersubjektivität: Neuere Beiträge zum Werk George Herbert Meads, edited by Hans Joas. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

Weber, Max. 1946. Science as a Vocation. In From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, edited and translated by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, 129–56. New York: Oxford University Press.

Westbrook, Robert. 1991. John Dewey and American Democracy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Part I

History, Historiography, Historical Sociology

Chapter One

Changing Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century: Historical Text and Historical Context

Charles Camic

That mind—human thought—is a social product is among the core tenets of George Herbert Mead’s work. It has been a central theme in the interpretive literature on Mead going back to the first entries in that literature. To say social is, from Mead’s point of view, also and necessarily to say historical, as students of Mead’s work would unanimously agree. Nonetheless, this aspect of his work—the historicity of mind—has received relatively little attention, in part because of the neglect by Mead scholars of the text most relevant in this regard, Mead’s Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century. Further, Mead’s claims about the historicity of all human thought have rarely been applied reflexively—that is to say, to the development of his own ideas.

Even so, Mead’s position was clear. In his course on Greek philosophy, for example, Mead states: a legitimate method for the history of thought then must first of all determine the movement which any period represents and then find the place of thinkers whose systems it studies in the movement—not treat their systems as independent reactions upon the forces represented in this movement but as moments within that movement. Continuing, he ridiculed the historians of philosophy who viewed the past from the narrow point of view of the present and interpreted the ancients as if they were contemporaries: that is, in terms of "conditions under which we [now] live.¹ As examples we may offer the anachronisms of [Benjamin] Jowett’s English gentleman in the Platonic Academy or [Eduard] Zeller’s German philosopher in the Schools of Miletus or Abdera."²

This chapter is an effort to heed Mead’s call to understand human thought historically, situating it in its social-historical context.³ The chapter pursues this aim by offering a modest historical case study of Mead’s own thinking—or, more accurately, of one aspect of Mead’s thinking, an important aspect that Mead scholars have generally overlooked. Specifically, the chapter examines the text and the context of Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century, a text assembled after Mead’s death from notes taken in a course of lectures that he gave at the University of Chicago in 1928. My analysis has two main parts. The first part attempts to historicize this lecture course itself, while the second part focuses on the immediate historical context of the course. In the first section I describe the transformation of the course from John Dewey’s 1891 version to Mead’s own 1915 version to Mead’s final 1928 version. In the second section I briefly consider this transformation in relation to the specific historical setting—that is, the local discursive context—in which Mead developed and taught the course. I precede these two sections with a short prologue about previous Mead scholarship on these topics.⁴

Prologue: A Lacuna

While books and articles on the thought of George Herbert Mead currently number into the thousands, one searches this literature, almost in vain, for writings that deal with Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century (hereafter, Movements). For this particular text, the relevant items can be counted on two hands.

Among these, there is actually no article or chapter devoted to an explication of Mead’s text or to an analysis of the historical context in which he developed the views he expresses there. The fullest treatments of Movements have used it for more specific purposes: Joas ([1980] 1985) to illuminate Mead’s early philosophical writings (see also Joas 1991) and Shalin (1984) to describe the romantic antecedents of Mead’s social psychology. Cook (1993), Silva (2008), Decker (2008), Fairfield (2010), Pearce (2014), and Shalin (1988) offer remarks that are briefer still. What is more, insofar as there is a common thread in these contributions, it has been the evaluation of the adequacy of Mead’s account of his subjects, with Mead earning high marks for his treatment of Fichte and Bergson (Joas 1991, 68; see also Koopman 2010, 211) but criticism for his characterizations of Hegel, Schelling, and Marx (Decker 2008, 470–71; Joas 1991, 69–73). Aside from these brief commentaries, one must look back to the original reviews of Mead’s volume for discussion of the text as a whole (Barnes 1937; Bugg 1937; Castell 1937; Pape 1936; Randall 1937).

In part, scholars’ reluctance to tackle Movements appears connected with the fact that it is not a text that Mead himself composed as a book but rather a posthumous compilation of notes based on lectures that he gave in a course with the same title, which the philosopher Merritt H. Moore subsequently edited into book form. Since Mind, Self, and Society ([1934] 1962) is likewise the result of edited course notes, however, this particular circumstance would hardly seem enough to relegate Movements to the interpretive sidelines. In the case of Movements, moreover, the existing lecture notes are stenographic notes which, according to Moore, provide a nearly verbatim recording of Mr. Mead’s lectures (Mead 1936, vii–viii). Still further, to the extent that the materials can be compared, Mead’s statements in this text are consistent with statements he makes in his other work.

Uncertainty about the reliability of the text of Movements is not the crux of the matter, however. The larger reason for the virtually nonexistent secondary literature lies in the book’s seemingly small payoff for readers interested in the basic Meadian topics of the self, the inter-subjective foundations of the social self, the role of language in social interaction, and so on. Opening to the book’s table of contents, one notices that more than half of this dense five-hundred-page text deals with subjects that seem remote from these canonical topics.

Chart 1.1. G. H. Mead, Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century (1936), Table of Contents

[Mead-2] Based on spring 1928 lectures

Chapter

1. From Renaissance to Revolution

2. Kant—The Philosopher of the Revolution

3. The Revolution Breaks Down; Romanticism is Born

4. Kant and the Background of Philosophic Romanticism

5. The Romantic Philosophers—Fichte

6. The Romantic Philosophers—Schelling

7. The Romantic Philosophers—Hegel

8. Evolution Becomes a General Idea

9. The Industrial Revolution—The Quest for Markets

10. The Social Renaissance—Utilitarianism

11. The Social Renaissance—Karl Marx and Socialism

12. Industry a Boon to Science—Mechanism the Handmaid of Finality

13. Modern Science is Research Science

14. Science Raises Problems for Philosophy—Vitalism; Henri Bergson

15. Science Raises Problems for Philosophy—Realism and Pragmatism

16. The Problem of Society—How We Become Selves

17. Mind Approached through Behavior—Can its Study be Made Scientific?

18. Individuality in the Nineteenth Century

Further, when one turns to the few chapters (chapters 16 and 17) that, by their titles, seem to be more on topic, one realizes that the titles are not Mead’s but those of his editor, who (perhaps to attract a larger readership) resorted to some deceptive packaging. Given all this, Gary Cook’s judgment that Movements is not . . . particularly useful (1993, xv–xvi) sums up how the volume is perceived by scholars concerned with the standard Meadian subjects but not concerned with considering these subjects in relation to Mead’s claim that human thought is fundamentally historical. As a result, thirty years after Shalin’s characterization of Movements as a much neglected book (1984, 44), virtually nothing has changed in the secondary literature on Mead.

Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century in Historical Motion

It is a familiar rule of research method that one useful way to understand a particular historical case is to locate that case with reference to the larger family of cases of which it is a part. Doing so enables the researcher to determine where the case under consideration resembles and where it diverges from other family members. I mention this practice because it is the procedure that I will use with regard to Mead’s Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century. I am going to consider some of the historical ancestry of the 1928 course from which Mead’s text derives with the objective of identifying what is historically specific about this course and what we can learn by homing in on its historical particularities.

Without going backward too far chronologically, the genealogy that I want to sketch traces back to the 1880s and a philosopher one generation older than Mead: George Sylvester Morris. (This Morris has no known family relation to Mead’s future student, the philosopher Charles W. Morris, editor of Mind, Self, and Society.) At the point when he enters my narrative here, G. S. Morris was one of the major figures in American academic philosophy, a staunch Hegelian idealist whose career marked a shift away from old-time clergymen-philosophers to the new era of philosophers as professional scholars (Kuklick 2001; Wenley 1917).

At the center of this shift was, as John Dewey later wrote, Morris’s emphasis on the history of philosophy. In Dewey’s words: Morris "never surrendered the belief that . . . philosophic conviction must be based upon a knowledge of philosophy in its historic development. [His