George Herbert Mead 1863 – 1931

George Herbert Mead was an American philosopher, psychologist, and sociologist and one of the central figures of classical American pragmatism. A colleague of John Dewey at Chicago, he developed an influential social theory of mind, self, and society in which all three are constituted in and through symbolic interaction. He published almost nothing in book form during his lifetime; his posthumously edited lectures, especially Mind, Self, and Society, became the founding documents of symbolic interactionism in sociology and social psychology.

George Herbert Mead was born at South Hadley, Massachusetts, in February 1863, the son of a Congregational minister; his mother, Elizabeth Storrs Billings, served as president of Mount Holyoke College from 1890 to 1900. He took his bachelor's at Oberlin in 1883, studied for a year at Harvard with William James and Josiah Royce, and from 1888 spent three years at Leipzig and Berlin in the orbit of Wilhelm Wundt and Wilhelm Dilthey. He taught at the University of Michigan from 1891, where he formed a lasting alliance with John Dewey, and from 1894 until his death held the chair of philosophy at the University of Chicago.

Mead published almost no books in his lifetime; his principal works were assembled posthumously by his students from his lecture notes and unpublished manuscripts as The Philosophy of the Present (1932), Mind, Self, and Society (1934), Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century (1936), and The Philosophy of the Act (1938).

Mead developed a thoroughgoing social and naturalistic account of mind in which selves arise from communication by significant gestures, the self comes to itself by internalising the standpoint of the generalised other, and thinking is a continued conversation between an experimental 'I' and a socially constituted 'me'. His work founded what Herbert Blumer later named symbolic interactionism and is one of the foundational texts of American sociology and social psychology. He died at Chicago in April 1931.