The Construction of Mind, Self, and Society: The Social Process Behind G. H. Mead'S Social Psychology

Abstract

Mind, Self, and Society, the posthumously published volume by which George Herbert Mead is primarily known, poses acute problems of interpretation so long as scholarship does not consider the actual process of its construction. This paper utilizes extensive archival correspondence and notes in order to analyze this process in depth. The analysis demonstrates that the published form of the book is the result of a consequential interpretive process in which social actors manipulated textual documents within given practical constraints over a course of time. The paper contributes to scholarship on Mead by indicating how this process made possible certain understandings of his social psychology and by relocating the materials that make up the single published text within the disparate contexts from which they were originally drawn.

Making the Sociological Canon: The Battle Over George Herbert Mead’s Legacy

“…Mind, Self, andSociety (MSS) is the best known and the most controversial addition to Mead's corpus (Joas 1985: 2-3, 235;Cook 1993: 15-19;Silva 2008: 142-145;Huebner 2012). The problem with this opus and several other posthumous publications based on students' notes is that they raise questions of whether the published texts adhere to Mead's true wording and intent.…”

“…Dan Huebner's painstaking attempt to reconstruct how MSS was put together makes important strides in this direction. Huebner's archival research reveals the limitations of the published work -the problematic choice among alternative sets of student notes, questionable judgment on what constitutes a dispensable repetition or irrelevant aside, errors in rendering certain technical terms (Huebner 2012). The very decision to publish lecture notes that were not intended for publication raises ethical questions.…”

2 A Classic with No Author: G. H. Mead’s Mind, Self, and Society

“…The University of Chicago Press 2015 edition includes an impressive 100page appendix resulting from Huebner's exhaustive archival research on the historical circumstances involving the creation of Mind, Self, and Society in the early 1930s (Huebner 2012(Huebner , 2014. Details such as the identity of W.T.…”

Consolidation of rural municipal communities as a problem of mass consciousness of the population

“…In turn, JG Mead singled out the "institutional" pole in the issue of solidarity, which "is constituted by the reactions of individuals to the identical reactions of other individuals, or to the reactions of organized social groups as a whole, taking into account certain sets of social incentives; these class or group reactions are the sources, basis and content of social institutions". He concluded: "The life of the social whole is completely determined by social interaction" [4].…”