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5.0 out of 5 stars
A Theoretical Maverick at his brooding best, January 28, 2010
This review is from: George Herbert Mead: On Social Psychology- Selected Papers (Heritage of Sociology Series) (Paperback)
Although among theorists, George Herbert mead must be considered the "theorists' theorist," he nevertheless remains a towering enigma who marched through life to the cadence in his own head. A pragmatic philosopher by both training and intellectual predilection, and a life-long friend of John Dewey, Mead was also a brooding, pensive, tormented, uncertain craftsman, whose dabbling into Sociology turned out to be more important than the whole of his contributions to his chosen field, philosophy. He is known best for his ambiguity and for his paltry professional output owning in large part to an obsessive need to rewrite, rework, and massage his ideas until either there was nothing left of them, or they had either come full-circle and watered-down to the last precipitate. In the end, his endless massaging amounted to procrastination that left the task of pulling together his large fragments of theoretical papers, to his students and admiring colleagues.
That said, Mead is important not because of these eccentricities, but because until the end of his life he was a deep structure systemic thinker unafraid to embrace "cutting-edge," and sometimes even tentative ideas -- especially those borrowed from the hard sciences which often served as the bedrock of his theoretical enterprises. He is known best for his large ideas, such as that science is the best instrument we have for intelligence control over our environment, for promoting the idea that even discrete interactions are affixed to the larger reality in a holistic way, for fully embracing and then evoking Darwin's Theory of evolution, and for his almost maverick interactionist posture that went against the grain of established structuralist theoreticians. He situated himself somewhere between the American pragmatist school and the European phenomenological school. Thus he was an intellectual Maverick without being intellectually promiscuous. He followed science more closely than he followed theoretical developments in either philosophy or sociology, or on either side of the Atlantic, and was quick to adopt the changing worldviews of the leading scientists, especially that of Darwin and the Quantum Physicists.
Mead believed "intelligence" to be a verb and that "perception" by definition can never be passive: only active. To "perceive" is to be alive in the world and engaged with ones environment. According to Mead's theory, it is this "act" (of perception) and its emergent interactive and communicative properties that define social structure. Therefore interactions are not (as his critiques claim) structure-less: for process always precedes, is prior to, and is instrumental in defining form and shaping structure, Thus, following Berger and Luckmann's seminal "The Construction of Social Reality," fundamental to Mead's theoretical formulation, is the notion that social structure emerges from social process, i.e., from social interactions and communications.
Thus as a result, the "social order" too is an emergent property of communications as that process matures and evolves. This "emergent evolution of communications" definition of the social order implies that the "social order" is perhaps less well defined and has many more degrees of freedom than we might at first want to admit. What is difficult to see at the level of context alone is that the social order is very much a "negotiated reality," one in which the individual is "free" to break the rules of society as well as to help reshape them.
Modern societies then, according to Mead's formulation, are not static, unified, homogeneous, well-defined entities that dictate their rules from the top down. They are in fact congeries of bottom up sub level social worlds, sub-worlds that are continually coming into and going out of existence; sub-worlds that are continually being negotiated with those of competing interests and are being reified in institutions and social organizations.
An enduring feature of these sub-worlds (that eventually becomes the centerpiece of Mead's explorations) is the idea of social movements. Again "social movements" are systemic processes, and not always nationally or culturally dependent or determined. Nations for instance are not (as the common wisdom imagines them to be) monolithic units held together by a core set of values, etc., but are territories in which many interacting sub worlds exist. These emerge, come alive, evolve negotiate and then die. Thus evolution is not just an attribute of these sub worlds, but a larger and higher systemic process that flows within as well as above them and the societal processes and institutions they bring into being.
Undergirding all of these novel ideas was Mead's belief that Intelligence plus symbolization, plus the self-reflexive ability of man, constitutes the ultimate palette for individual self-creation and self-construction. A prominent subtext of this view is the notion that it was Darwin and the quantum physicists who released man from the shackles of determinism.
As a personal note, I worked under the leadership of the renown Professor Charles A. McClelland on the World Interaction Survey (WEIS) at USC., which (without knowing it at the time) was in a real sense a bold attempt to realize in the real world Mead's theoretical approach. We used computerized newspaper clippings of international events from around the world as a basis for measuring international tensions based solely on cross-national communicated interactions. Although at the time, McClelland's "interactionist approach" was fashioned after and grounded in the theoretical frame work of the General Systems theorists such as Ross Ashby, Ludwig von Bertalanffy, et. al. While we were remotely aware of Mead's work, it would have been impossible to see its full power in context at the time. For much of his work appeared as scattered fragments. At the time I had read Mead's "Mind, Self, and Society" missing the deep implications it could have had for our project altogether. The WEIS project did have some success (used as a basis for university research, in the intelligence community and by a few military contractors for a time and is still being maintained by Professor Rodney Tomlison at the U.S. Naval Academy) and then died a normal death. But what a missed opportunity!
Five Stars
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