Mind Self and Society

George Herbert Mead was an American pragmatist philosopher at the University of Chicago who never published a book during his lifetime. Mind, Self, and Society was compiled posthumously by editor Charles W. Morris from stenographic transcripts and student notes of Mead's "Advanced Social Psychology" course, primarily from 1928 and 1930, supplemented by unpublished manuscripts. Morris acknowledges that the text is not one Mead would have written but argues it represents the most complete synthesis of his social psychology. As Hans Joas notes in his foreword, the book has achieved classical status in social psychology, sociological theory, and pragmatist philosophy, influencing the school of symbolic interactionism, a sociological approach that studies how people create meaning through social interaction, and thinkers such as philosopher Jürgen Habermas.

Mead's argument unfolds across four parts. The first defines social psychology as the study of the individual's experience and conduct from the standpoint of the social group. Mead insists that society is logically prior to the individual: Individual conduct must be explained in terms of organized group conduct, not the reverse. He positions his approach as what Morris terms "social behaviorism," distinguishing it from the narrower behaviorism of psychologist John B. Watson. While both study experience through observable conduct rather than introspection, Mead contends that behaviorism must account for the internal, attitudinal phases of action rather than denying inner experience. Watson's reduction of mental life to conditioned reflexes and vocal cord movements, Mead argues, eliminates the very contents psychology must explain: imagery, consciousness, and meaning. Drawing on the physiological psychology of psychologist Wilhelm Wundt and others, Mead traces how the doctrine of psychophysical parallelism, which holds that mental states run parallel to neurological processes, arose as a practical tool for correlating the conditions of experience with experience itself, rather than as a metaphysical claim about two separate realms of mind and body. Behaviorism, on Mead's account, extends this tendency to its logical conclusion: an effort to state the conditions of experience in objective, behavioral terms.

The second part traces the emergence of mind from the social process of gestural communication. Mead begins with Wundt's concept of the gesture, defined as that phase of one organism's social act which serves as a stimulus to other organisms involved in the same act. In a dog fight, each dog's movements are early stages of acts that call out adjustive responses in the other, forming a "conversation of gestures." Mead criticizes naturalist Charles Darwin's treatment of gestures as mere expressions of prior inner emotions, arguing that gestures are integral components of the social act and that consciousness emerges from such acts rather than preceding them.

Mead rejects imitation as an explanation for the origin of language, arguing that there is no general instinct to reproduce what others do. This leads him to the vocal gesture, which holds a uniquely important position in his theory: The vocal gesture is the one gesture that affects the organism producing it in substantially the same way it affects the organism hearing it, since we hear ourselves speak as others hear us. A gesture becomes a "significant symbol" when it calls out in the individual making it the same response, or tendency toward response, that it calls out in others. This capacity to take the role of the other constitutes the mechanism by which meaning becomes conscious and language emerges. Meaning itself is not a psychical addition to the social act but an objectively existing relation within it: a three-part relation among the gesture of one organism, the adjustive response of another, and the completion of the social act the gesture initiates.

Reflective intelligence is distinguished from the unreflective intelligence of lower animals by the human capacity to indicate to oneself the features of a situation that call out particular responses, isolating and recombining them. This capacity depends on language. Mind, Mead concludes, is the presence in behavior of significant symbols: the internalization of the social process of communication. It is the ability to indicate to oneself what one's gestures indicate to others, and thereby to control one's own conduct.

The third part addresses the self, which Mead distinguishes from the physiological organism. The self is not present at birth but develops through social experience, and its defining trait is that it can be an object to itself. Mead identifies two developmental stages. In play, the child assumes roles in succession, acting as mother, teacher, or police officer, using vocal gestures to call out the associated responses. This is the simplest form of being another to oneself but lacks overall organization. In the game, the child must take the attitudes of all participants simultaneously and understand their interrelations in terms of a common end, as a baseball player must know what every position on the team will do. This requires organizing multiple roles into a coherent whole, which Mead calls the "generalized other," the attitude of the organized community as a whole. The generalized other is the mechanism through which the community exercises control over its members' thinking and behavior. Institutions, Mead argues, are organized forms of group activity that embody these common responses.

The self comprises two analytically distinguishable phases. The "me" is the organized set of attitudes of others that the individual assumes: the social self as known, the conventional and habitual aspect of personality. The "I" is the response of the organism to this organized set of attitudes: the acting, novel, unpredictable phase that can only be known retrospectively, after the act has occurred. The "I" provides freedom and initiative; the "me" provides social structure. Together they constitute the full personality. The self is not a substance but a process, and the "I" is the source of all genuine novelty and social reconstruction. Self-realization necessarily involves others, as the self seeks recognition through functional contribution to the community and identification with broader social groups.

The fourth part extends the analysis to human society. Human society differs from insect societies in its organizing principle: Insect societies rely on physiological differentiation, with specialized forms for reproduction, fighting, and labor, while human society is composed of physiologically similar individuals organized through communication and the development of selves. Mead identifies two fundamental forms of social universality: the religious attitude, rooted in neighborliness and helpfulness, which can extend to any being capable of evoking sympathy; and the economic attitude, based on the exchange of surpluses, which brings individuals into relationship regardless of other differences. Both tend toward universality and serve as organizing principles that build larger communities. Democracy represents the political expression of universal social participation, implying not the elimination of individual differences but the possibility of each person contributing functionally to a cooperative process while recognizing the rights of all others.

The most intense human experiences, Mead argues, arise when the "I" and the "me" fuse in social activities such as religious exaltation, patriotic solidarity, and effective teamwork. Conflict is also inherent in social life, arising from tensions between individual impulses and organized social attitudes and between competing groups. The ideal of human society is one in which all individuals possess sufficiently developed selves to take the attitudes of all those whom they affect, realizing themselves through functional contributions rather than dominance.

In his conclusion, Mead restates that consciousness is best understood not as a separate substance but as an emergent character of the relation between organism and environment. Mind presupposes social organization; language places intelligence at the individual's disposal; and thinking is the internalized conversation between the "I" and the "me." Four supplementary essays elaborate aspects of this framework, addressing the function of imagery in conduct, the distinction between biological and reflective experience, the role of the vocal gesture and human infancy in constructing the self, and an ethical theory that reinterprets philosopher Immanuel Kant's categorical imperative, a principle requiring that moral rules be universalizable, in social terms.