Abstract
As Daniel Huebner writes of George Herbert Mead, “Mead is known in a discipline in which he did not teach for a book he did not write.” This accurate, if paradoxical, phrase provides sufficient warrant for a sociological analysis of the process Charles Camic has termed predecessor selection. How, of all people, did George Herbert Mead, never an ethnographic fieldworker, come to be the icon for a century of sociologists who believed in the messiness of ethnographic observation and the importance of the social negotiation of meaning? How did a philosophical pragmatist and social activist become a sociological authority? The story is worth telling, and Huebner tells it well.
The titles of awards serve as indicators of which figures are worthy of communal notice, and it is significant that several disciplinary honors are named for Mead. The Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction gives the George Herbert Mead Award forLifetime Contributions, and the Social Psychology Section of the American Sociological Association bestows the Cooley-Mead Award for Contributions to Social Psychology. Consider that. When we point to an American icon who defines micro-sociology, it is a philosopher to whom we refer. The recognition is of a scholar who published far more in philosophy, in psychology, in education, and even in theology than in sociology. Mead has been embraced as an icon in ourfield, while remaining marginal in his own.
Daniel Huebner’s Becoming Mead is arguably three monographs between two covers. The first is valuable in itself, but perhaps less directly impactful on the issues of the other two, and it perhaps deserved separate treatment. Huebner begins with a partial intellectual and personal biography of Mead, emphasizing his early years at the University of Chicago and the extended periods that Mead spent in Hawaii. At the newly established Hyde Park school, Huebner demonstrates that Mead, following his friend John Dewey, revealed a researcher’s fascination with laboratory science: he emphasized (and taught) physiological and comparative psychology. While this attraction to research waned over the course of his career, we should recall Mead the scientist, a perspective evident in Mead’s emphasis on the mind. This is a Mead different from his characterization by generations of symbolic interactionists.
Huebner further complicates the image ofMead as social reformer. Despite Mead’sreputation—a justified reputation—as a speaker interested in social betterment in Chicago, Mead was closely connected to Anglo elites in Hawaii and visited the islands on several occasions early in his career. Henry Castle, a member of one of the prominent families of Hawaii (a scion of Castle & Cooke, one of the “Big Five” companies controlling Hawaiian commerce), was an intimate of Mead, as well as his brother-in-law. Mead supported the overthrow of the indigenous Hawaiian government and proclaimed the benefits of annexation, even for the native population, points that he made to civic associations in Chicago.
These accounts deepen our understanding of Mead’s wide intellectual interests and reveal the complexities of his politics, his philosophical overview, and, implicitly, his attitudes to race. Still, this granular attention to Mead’s biography reminds us that Becoming Mead is only a partial, truncated biography. These incisive accounts of Mead’s laboratory visits and island sojourns whet our appetite for a thick biography to which these chapters might contribute. Perhaps this will be Daniel Huebner’s agenda in the future. The chapters remind us of how much of Mead’s life is not being discussed: his marriage, death, childhood, or early years as a journalist. George Herbert Mead was a man of many talents, a professor of many experiences. The brief account of Mead’s public participation is a valuable extension of the powerful argument about Mead’s civic engagement previously published by Dmitri Shalin, but its lacunae make it seem half-hearted in comparison to the rest of the manuscript.
The book becomes more consequential—and more compelling—when Huebner moves from a focus on biography to an emphasis on the sociology of knowledge creation. It is now standard lore that Mead’s and sociology’s classic text, Mind, Self, and Society, was compiled from lecture notes and transcriptions from Mead’s advanced social psychology course at the University of Chicago. But the process through which that compilation occurred has been understudied. A number of individuals in Mead’s circle, notably Charles Morris, were responsible for the title, the contents, and the organization of the book. As Huebner relates, in light of its most important themes, the work—at least for contemporary sociologists—could as well have been labelled Self, Self, and Self (with a little Mind thrown in). The lectures were never intended to be an analysis of society, as the term is generally used by such theorists as Marx, Weber, or Durkheim. The title was not Mead’s, and itreveals Morris’s attempt to create a panoramic work, perhaps “a general theory of action.” This claim, ranging from mind to society, legitimated Charles Morris’s own position as Mead’s successor in the context of Robert Hutchens’ attempt to remake the philosophy department to distance it from the kind of pragmatic analysis that Mead encouraged. Morris wanted an ambitious and muscular pragmatism, and that is what Mead’s lectures provided within the context of academic politics on the Midway. The creation of this scholarly memorial to Mead was a strategic move, linked to what was called the Hutchens Controversy. Indeed, Morris was almost not hired at all,but his appointment was a form of institutional deference by which a complete rupture between the administration and the philosophy department might be avoided.
Huebner delves into the process of text construction, recognizing that although there were stenographic transcriptions available, Morris had to choose among many available sets of lecture notes; and his choices emphasized the most recent versions of the course, operating from the belief that Mead was refining his ideas in the process of lecturing. Morris believed that Mead’s theories were progressing. Without accepting this happy perspective, the book could have taken numerous other forms, especially as Mead did not rely heavily on a set of lecture notes, but rather presented his theory as he worked it out before his audience; but perhaps an earlier iteration was superior to a later one. Further—and significantly, for sociologists who emphasize structural and economic constraints—choices about what would be published were a result of pressures from the University of Chicago Press to produce a manuscript that depended on subscriptions from Mead’s former students. This is a way of saying that Mind, Self, and Society is a strong case of the way in which a variety of external forces, depending on actors with their own interests and resources, created knowledge as we came to know and revere it, erasing the messy history through which it came to be.
But imagine the forces that came to push this venture. There are many scholars who aren’t known for their publication records and who are excellent teachers who do not receive the posthumous attention granted to George Herbert Mead. But Mead was fortunate—at least if he wished fame—in gathering around him a group of devoted students. These students constituted a reputational coterie with Mead in the center as its symbolic lodestar. Given the decline of pragmatism in American philosophy in the decades after Mead’s death, it is hard to say how influential they were; but, as Huebner shows, it is certainly the case that in the early years many of the references to Mead’s work were from colleagues and students who knew him personally.
What is particularly striking in the case of Mead’s standing is the disciplinary shift in his scholarly authority. With the dominance of analytical philosophy, Huebner points out that George Herbert Mead has become a somewhat minor figure in his home discipline of philosophy. Even within the pragmatic tradition, the works of Dewey, Peirce, and James are more consequential.
But not so in our discipline, a field otherwise quite distant from philosophical debates. And here tribute must be paid to Herbert Blumer. Charles Morris and Herbert Blumer were Mead’s primary reputational entrepreneurs. Charles Morris lit the eternal flame of Mead’s writing, but it was Herbert Blumer who kept it burning brightly. For Blumer, surely sincere in his beliefs, the fame of Mead could be translated into his own significance. Although Blumer wrote on empirical topics—movies, labor negotiations, and fashion—it was his theoretical writings that proved the most lasting. As Huebner points out, Blumer was never fastidious with regard to specific citations to Mead. These references were often general and more self-validating than demonstrating a proof. Both Robert Freed Bales and Clark McPhail repeatedly argued that Blumer provided one reading—an idiosyncratic reading—that could readily be challenged. As an intellectual movement, symbolic interactionism could have existed without Mead, excepting the need for a founding father. Despite occasional attempts, Durkheim, Weber, Simmel, or Marx were inadequate for an approach that hoped to emphasize the working together of lines of action and the creation of meaning, for which Mead’s metaphor of a baseball team was both productive and memorable. Much of the rest of Mead could be—and was—forgotten, just as long as the shaping power of the generalized other was recalled.
As Huebner properly emphasizes, Mead was used in a number of intellectual projects. With his decline as an intellectual force within philosophy, his eminence could be used by interactionist sociologists to justify the University of Chicago as the physical site through which their approach was developed. In practice Mead served better for an origin story than did Park, Thomas, Shaw, Burgess, or Faris, although all became supporting players for the intellectual transition from Mead to Blumer.
In his title, Becoming Mead, Daniel Huebner plays off a cunning double meaning. The first is the mantra of the biographer: that a self develops over time. But the second is the more sociologically productive, questioning the very existence of a true Mead. This view sees in its place a set of ideas to which a name is attached. That name is that of George Herbert Mead.