George Herbert Mead (1863-1931), American philosopher and social psychologist, is often classed with William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, and John Dewey as one of the most significant figures in classical American pragmatism. Dewey referred to Mead as “a seminal mind of the very first order”

Mead was born in South Hadley, Massachusetts, on February 27, 1863. his father, Hiram mead , was a local Congregational minister; his mother, the former Elizabeth  Storrs  Billings, was well read and cultured and had descended from a prominent New England family.  In 1876, Elizabeth took her two children to Philadelphia. The massive exhibits of new industrial technology were a thrilling experience to a boy of thirteen curious about how the objects of the world worked. In 1879, an intellectually advanced sixteen-year-old George entered Oberlin College. He turned toward a social reformist concern with making life better in this world. He rejected the narrow elitist view of patriotism in favor of a broad, encompassing view of democracy and a concern with the well discussion and hand-on learning.

In 1881, Hiram Mead unexpectedly died. Due to financial constraints , Elizabeth and her children were forced to move from their large house to a number of rented rooms. Choosing a career was difficult for mead. He felt drawn toward a field in which he could serve humanity, but his increasing religious doubts made the ministry or church-sponsored welfare activities unacceptable. He considered careers in politics and newspaper work, but upon graduation from Oberlin in 1883, financially pressed, he took a position as a schoolteacher. He was assigned a class whose rowdy students had caused a number of previous teachers to resign. Mead, who always had a serious orientation to teach the remaining pupils, When the school board told him it was his job to teach all the students, mead resigned after six months. For the next years, he worked alternately as a railroad surveyor and a tutor. While he was still at Oberlin, Mead became close friends with a classmate, Henry Castle, who came from a wealthy landowning family in Hawaii. Inseparable during their college days, Castle and Mead endlessly discussed literature, poetry, and other contememprary writings, and together worked our their rejection of religious dogma in favor of empirical science. Tired of surveying, Mead took Castle’s advice and joined his friend in graduate study at Harvard.    

While at Harvard, Mead continued to work part-time as he diligently applied himself to philosophy and psychology. The teacher who most influenced him was the philosopher Josiah Royce (1855-1916). Royce’s overall thought reflected a strong Hegelian influence, which would also be true of Mead’s writings. Mead also studied Greek, Latin, German, and French. Mead’s quality of final exam so impressed the philosopher and psychologist William James (1842-1910) that James came to Mead’s room on the day after the final to offer him a position as tutor to his children when the family vacationed in New Hampshire for the summer.  Mead’s found time to study works of Kant, Hegel, and Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), as well as those of two then influential British philosophers- the utilitarian Henry Sedgwick (1838-1900) and the Hegelian Thomas Hill Green (1836-1882). Mead also spent long hours of conversation with James. Unfortunately, no record exists of what they talked about.

In 1888, Mead won a scholarship study philosophy and psychology in Germany. The importance of the trip to mead’s later work and activities involved not just the lectures he attended, but also his observation of what he viewed as the successful implementation of governmentally sponsored social reforms.

George married Helen , sister of his friend henry castle, in October 1891. Directly after their marriage, the Meads returned to the United States. George had been appointed a philosophy instructor at the University of Michigan.

Mead’s major influence came through his graduate social psychology course, which he initiated in 1900 and taught regularly for the rest of his life. In that course, Mead developed and presented his basic ideas about mind, self, socialization, and society. Some of his students were so impressed with Mead’s lectures that they hired stenographers to record and transcribe them verbatim. The edited outcome of those recordings, Mind, Self, and society, was published in 1934(three years after Mead’s death) and has remained a standard sociological text.

Helen Castle Mead died on December 25, 1929. George Mead was hit hard by her passing and gradually became ill himself.

In his own lifetime, Mead was best known for his reform activities, his social psychology courser, and his many articles on social and educational questions of the day. Although he wrote numerous papers and articles for academic journals, Mead never produced a written work that would demonstrate the great extent to which his thought formed an innovative, systematic whole. Top a degree, this lack was remedied by the publication of some of Mead’s lectures, other presentations, and articles after his death on April 26, 1931. Together with Mind, Self, and Society, 1934 these publications included The Philosophy of the Present (1932), Movements of thought in the Nineteenth Century (1936), The Philosophy of the Act (1938), and Selected Writings (1964) , The Individual and the Social Self, 1982 and Essays in Social Psychology, 2001.

Infuences

Mead did indeed move away from his earlier religious roots, but the activist spirit remained with him. Mead marched in support of women's suffrage, served as a treasurer for the Settlement House movement, immersed himself in civic matters in Chicago, and generally supported progressive causes. Jane Addams was a close friend. In terms of his transformation into a naturalist, no doubt Darwin played a significant role. As a matter of fact, one can understand much of Mead's work as an attempt to synthesize Darwin, Hegel, Dewey's functionalist turn in psychology, and insights gleaned from James. Mead taught with Dewey at the University of Michigan from 1891-1894, and when Dewey was made chair at the University of Chicago in 1894, he requested that Mead receive an appointment. Mead spent the rest of his career at Chicago. But before he began teaching at Michigan, Mead was directly exposed to major currents of European thought when he studied in Germany from 1888-1891, taking a course from Wilhelm Dilthey and immersing himself in Wilhelm Wundt's research.

Mead became especially interested in the work of Wilhelm Wundt and other physiological psychologists. Wilhelm Wundt’s theories of the gesture also provided Mead with a basic approach to communication that set the stage for his own later work on language, symbolic interaction, and human consciousness. 

Charles Cooley was also at Michigan and Mead clearly adopted and expanded on some of Cooley’s ideas-such as the “looking glass self”- though he rejected other facets of Cooley’s work.  James Hayden Tufts and other scholars at Michigan had their influence on Mead’s intellectual development. In 1905, Dewey left the University of Chicago and went to Columbia University.  Mead continued to develop his theories of symbolic communication and human consciousness. Between 1910 and 1920, Mead worked on integrating Einstein’s theory of relativity with his own thinking, attempting to bring unity to the entire scientific and pragmatic worldview. Gradually he pieced together an evolutionary cosmology that integrated all the sciences and resolved philosophical problems in terms of emergence-beginning with the emergence of the solar system and planets, then dealing with the evolution of life and increasingly higher levels of animal awareness, and culminating in human mind, self, and society. Near the end of his life, Mead was constructing an empirically grounded theory that integrated the central theories of physics, biology, physiology, and sociology dealt with ethics, aesthetics and the philosophy of science, and resolved the problems of metaphysics and epistemology. Charles Morris’s conclusion that Mead was constructing such a system George Herbert Mead was a pragmatist philosopher who developed a unified theoretical system that can integrate an enormous range of information on mind, body, language, intelligence, self, socialization, society, and social change.