George Herbert Mead

George Herbert Mead (February 27, 1863 – April 26, 1931) was an American philosopher, sociologist, and psychologist closely tied to the University of Chicago. He helped shape pragmatism and is considered a founder of symbolic interactionism, a major influence on the Chicago School of Sociology.

Mead was born in South Hadley, Massachusetts, into a Protestant middle-class family. His father, Hiram Mead, came from a line of farmers and clergymen and taught sacred rhetoric and pastoral theology at Oberlin College’s seminary. His mother, Elizabeth Storrs Mead, taught at Oberlin and later served as president of Mount Holyoke College. Mead attended Oberlin Academy and Oberlin College, earning a bachelor’s degree in 1883. After a brief stint teaching grade school, he worked as a surveyor for the Wisconsin Central Railroad Company from late 1883 through summer 1887. In 1891, he married Helen Kingsbury Castle, sister of his Oberlin friend Henry Northrup Castle.

Though he never completed his dissertation, Mead secured a position at the University of Michigan in 1891. There he met Charles Horton Cooley and John Dewey, both of whom deeply influenced him. In 1894, he moved with Dewey to the University of Chicago, where he taught until his death. Dewey’s influence steered Mead toward educational theory, but his thinking soon diverged, leading to his famous theories of mind, self, and society. Mead was active in Chicago’s social and political life, working with the City Club of Chicago, conducting research at a settlement house, and serving as treasurer for Hull House. He collaborated closely with Jane Addams on social justice issues. Mead died of heart failure on April 26, 1931. He had resigned from the University of Chicago three months earlier over the hiring of Mortimer J. Adler and planned to join Columbia University, but died before he could.

Mead’s work centered on the development of the self and the objectivity of the world within the social realm. He argued that the individual mind exists only in relation to other minds with shared meanings. His thinking drew on pragmatism and social behaviorism. Social behaviorism, unlike psychological behaviorism, focused on gestures and social objects with rich meanings rather than bare physical stimuli. Mead criticized John B. Watson’s behaviorism. Pragmatism, a broad philosophical position, informed Mead’s ideas in several ways: reality is actively created as we act in and toward the world; people base knowledge on what has been useful and alter what no longer works; people define objects according to their use; and understanding actors requires focusing on what they actually do. Three of these ideas are central to symbolic interactionism: the interaction between actor and world, the view of both as dynamic processes, and the actor’s ability to interpret the social world. For Mead, consciousness is not separate from action and interaction but integral to both. Symbolic interactionism, as a pragmatic philosophy, preceded transactionalism. Mead’s theories, rooted in pragmatism and behaviorism, were passed on to many University of Chicago graduate students who later established symbolic interactionism.

Mead was a major figure in 20th-century social philosophy. His influential idea—that mind and self emerge from communication between organisms—was outlined in *Mind, Self and Society* (1934), also called social behaviorism. This concept founded the symbolic interactionist school of sociology. Intellectually rooted in Hegelian dialectics and process philosophy, Mead, like Dewey, developed a materialist process philosophy based on human action, especially communicative action. Human activity is the pragmatic criterion of truth, and meaning is made through it. Joint activity, including communication, constitutes our sense of self. Mead’s social behaviorism holds that mind is not a separate substance or merely a series of physiological events. It opposes the traditional view of mind as distinct from the body. The emergence of mind depends on interaction between the human organism and its social environment; it is through participation in social acts of communication that the individual mind arises.