Blackwell Reference Online

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George Herbert Mead was trained as a philosopher, taught in a philosophy department, and published primarily in philosophy journals, but his lasting impact was in the field of sociology. The fact that the science of society was still young at the time helps to explain this anomaly. The borderline separating the fledgling discipline from its academic neighbors was still unclear: sociologists did not have much academic turf to protect and felt free to borrow their insights from neighboring fields. The peculiar blend of Romantic idealism and pragmatic activism accomplished by Mead also had something to do with his popularity among social scientists, who found in his life work a model for balancing scholarship and advocacy at a time when America was awash in reform. Finally, it was the bold manner in which Mead married philosophical and sociological idioms that inspired his contemporaries. Mead labored hard to spell out the sociological significance of contemporary philosophical currents and, along with John Dewey, brought a radically sociological imagination to philosophical discourse. While his role in social science is well recognized, Mead's original contribution to philosophy has only recently begun to be fully appreciated (Habermas, 1984; Joas, 1985 ; Aboulafia, 1986, 1991 ). This chapter explores the interfaces between Mead's philosophical and sociological thought, his effort ... log in or subscribe to read full text