Mind, Self, and Society

Introduction

Mead published no book in his lifetime. Mind, Self, and Society was compiled after his death by Charles W. Morris from students’ notes of Mead’s course in social psychology in Chicago, chiefly from 1927 and 1930, and appeared in 1934. It describes communication as a “conversation of gestures” that becomes language once a gesture calls out the same response in the one who makes it as in the one who receives it. The self develops in children’s play and in organised games, and comprises the spontaneous “I” and the socially formed “me”. Herbert Blumer, who had studied with Mead, later coined the term “symbolic interactionism” for the sociology built on these ideas.

Connections

Builds on

• The Principles of Psychology1890 · William James

Taken up in

• The Social Construction of Reality1966 · Peter L. Berger
• Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method1969 · Herbert Blumer
• The Theory of Communicative Action1981 · Jürgen Habermas
• The Struggle for Recognition1992 · Axel Honneth