George Herbert Mead reversed the commonsense order of self and society. We ordinarily assume that individuals exist first, complete with minds and personalities, and then come together to form societies. Mead argued the opposite: that mind and self are not the preconditions of social life but its products, emerging in a child only through participation in communication with others.
His central claim is that the self is a social object. I become a self by learning to take the attitude of others towards myself — by becoming, in his formulation, an object to myself. The equipment that makes this possible is the significant symbol, a gesture that arouses in the one who makes it the same response it arouses in the one who receives it. From that single mechanism Mead derived language, thought, self-consciousness, role-taking, moral judgement and the possibility of organised society.
Life and intellectual formation
Mead was born in 1863 in South Hadley, Massachusetts, the son of a Congregationalist minister, and educated at Oberlin College before going to Harvard, where he studied with the idealist philosopher Josiah Royce and lost the religious faith of his upbringing. Like most ambitious American academics of the period he then went to Germany, studying at Leipzig and Berlin, where he encountered the experimental psychology of Wilhelm Wundt — from whom he took the concept of the gesture, though he transformed it — and the currents of German philosophy that included Dilthey.
He never completed his doctorate. He was appointed at the University of Michigan, where he met Charles Horton Cooley and formed the decisive friendship of his life with John Dewey, and in 1894 followed Dewey to the new University of Chicago, where he taught until his death in 1931. Chicago made him one of the founders of American pragmatism, alongside Dewey, William James and Charles Peirce, and placed him beside the sociologists — Thomas, Park, Burgess — who were making the department the centre of American empirical research. He was also a committed reformer, active in settlement work, educational reform and civic causes in Chicago.
Mead published essays but no book of social theory. His major works were assembled after his death by students and editors from lecture notes, stenographic records and manuscripts. Mind, Self and Society (1934), edited by Charles W. Morris largely from student notes of his social psychology course, is the text sociology reads — a fact that matters, since its arguments come to us at one remove from their author.
Gestures and significant symbols
Mead built upwards from the simplest social event. Two dogs circling each other are engaged in a conversation of gestures: the beginning of one animal's act serves as a stimulus to which the other responds, and that response becomes a new stimulus in turn. The exchange is genuinely social and genuinely adjustive, but neither animal intends its snarl as a sign, and neither knows what its own snarl means.
A significant symbol is a gesture that has become meaningful in a precise sense: it calls out in the person making it the same response it calls out in the other. When I shout fire, I hear my own shout as a hearer would, and so I know in advance what I am doing. Vocal gestures are privileged here because we hear ourselves speak as others hear us, which is why language rather than facial expression is the vehicle of mind.
Two consequences follow, and both are large. First, meaning is not a mental entity but a relation within the act — the gesture, the response it calls out and the resulting completion of the social act. Meaning is objective and public before it is subjective and private. Second, thinking is nothing other than an internalised conversation of significant symbols: the mind is imported dialogue. This is why Mead described his position as social behaviourism. He accepted the behaviourist demand that we study observable conduct, but he refused Watson's exclusion of the inner life, insisting instead that the inner life is itself conduct — covert, abbreviated, but continuous with the act.
The genesis of the self: play, game and the generalised other
Because the self consists in taking the attitude of others towards oneself, Mead could describe its development as a sequence of widening role-taking.
In the preparatory phase the infant merely imitates gestures whose meaning it does not grasp. In the play stage the child takes the role of one other at a time, and does so successively: it is the mother, then the shopkeeper, then the doctor, addressing itself and answering in each part. The organisation is loose, and the roles need not fit together.
In the game stage everything changes. To play cricket a child must hold in mind the roles of every other player at once, since what the bowler should do depends simultaneously on the fielders, the batter and the rules. The child must therefore organise the attitudes of all the participants into a single system of expectations. Out of that generalisation arises the generalised other — the attitude of the whole community, the organised set of expectations of the group, internalised as a standpoint from which the individual can view and regulate their own conduct. When conduct is guided by the generalised other, social control becomes self-control, and the individual becomes a member of a community rather than a party to a series of encounters.
The I and the Me
The self so produced is not a unity but a process with two phases in constant conversation. The Me is the self as object: the organised attitudes of others as internalised, the conventional, habitual, socially formed side of the person — what I know myself to be, and what the community expects. The I is the self as subject: the immediate, spontaneous, impulsive response of the organism to the situation, and to the Me itself.
Their relation has three features worth stating exactly. The I is never available in the present; it appears only in memory, so that we know what we have done only after we have done it, and even our own conduct partly surprises us. The I is the seat of novelty, creativity and freedom, and thus of social change — a point Mead illustrated by the innovating artist and the reformer, whose response reorganises the very community whose attitudes formed them. And the two phases are inseparable: without the Me there is no organised self to respond, and without the I the Me would be mere conformity. Mead's self is therefore neither an autonomous individual nor a social imprint, but a continuing dialogue between the two.
The act
Underlying all of this is Mead's pragmatist theory of conduct, set out in The Philosophy of the Act. The unit of analysis is not the stimulus and the response but the whole act, which he analysed into four phases: impulse, the disturbance that sets conduct in motion; perception, in which the environment is selectively defined in relation to that impulse; manipulation, the handling of the object and the trying out of lines of conduct; and consummation, the completion that resolves the impulse. Where several individuals are involved, Mead spoke of the social act, of which each participant's conduct is only a part.
Two implications carried into sociology. Because perception is organised by the impulse, the actor constructs the object rather than merely receiving it, which is the root of the interactionist claim that human beings act towards things on the basis of their meanings. And because manipulation intervenes between perception and consummation, action involves a pause in which conduct is rehearsed — the space in which interpretation, and therefore selfhood, becomes possible.
Criticisms
The most persistent objection is the neglect of power and structure. Mead's community appears as a co-operative system of shared expectations, with little attention to the fact that some participants define situations and others accept the definitions. The generalised other is presented as the attitude of the community, as though communities were not divided by class, caste, race and gender, and as though internalised expectations were not frequently the expectations of the dominant. Critics from Marxist and conflict traditions therefore find in Mead a social psychology without a sociology of domination, capable of illuminating the encounter but not the institution — a charge extended to the interactionist tradition he inspired.
A second objection is the absence of any account of the unconscious. Mead wrote alongside Freud but not with him, and his self, though divided, is divided into two conscious or recoverable phases rather than layered by repression. There is no room in the scheme for motives hidden from the actor, for defence, or for the possibility that internalisation is a coercive rather than a communicative process — the ground on which later writers preferred Freud's superego to the generalised other.
Further criticisms are textual and methodological. Because the major works are posthumous compilations, scholars including Hans Joas have questioned how far Mind, Self and Society represents Mead's own position rather than Morris's reading of it, and how far Blumer's influential interpretation narrowed a philosophy of nature and time into a social psychology. The scheme has also been faulted for cognitive over-emphasis, giving little place to emotion and the body, and for concepts too imprecise to be measured.
Legacy
Mead's ideas became a school in the hands of Herbert Blumer, who named symbolic interactionism and codified its premises. Through that channel he shaped the sociology of deviance and labelling, Erving Goffman's dramaturgy, Berger and Luckmann's account of socialisation, the sociology of the body and emotions, and the whole tradition of qualitative research on identity. Cooley's looking-glass self is his natural companion, and the pairing is standard in examinations. More broadly, Mead is the source of the discipline's working assumption that identity is achieved in interaction rather than possessed at birth.
For the UPSC answer
Mead appears in the syllabus specifically for self and identity, so the safest core of any answer is a precise account of the developmental sequence — play, game, generalised other — followed by the I and the Me. Earn marks above the average by getting three details right that most candidates miss: that play involves taking one role at a time while the game requires all roles simultaneously, that the I is knowable only in retrospect and is therefore the source of novelty and social change, and that meaning for Mead is located in the social act rather than in the mind. Add one illustration of your own, a child's game or a classroom, to show the concepts working. Pair him with Cooley's looking-glass self and with Blumer's three premises to display the lineage, and close with the standard criticisms — the neglect of power and structure and the absence of the unconscious — so the answer ends in evaluation rather than description.
References & further reading
- Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, Self and Society: From the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- Mead, G. H. (1932). The Philosophy of the Present. Chicago: Open Court.
- Mead, G. H. (1938). The Philosophy of the Act. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
- Blumer, H. (1969). Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall.
- Joas, H. (1985). G. H. Mead: A Contemporary Re-examination of His Thought. Cambridge: MIT Press.
- Cook, G. A. (1993). George Herbert Mead: The Making of a Social Pragmatist. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.