Daniel R. Huebner

Mind, Self, and Society: The Definitive Edition

George Herbert Mead is widely recognized as one of the most brilliantly original American pragmatists. Although he had a profound influence on the development of social philosophy, he published no books in his lifetime. This makes the lectures collected in Mind, Self, and Society all the more remarkable, as they offer a rare synthesis of his ideas. This collection gets to the heart of Meads meditations on social psychology and social philosophy. Its penetrating, conversational tone transports the reader directly into Meads classroom as he teases out the genesis of the self and the nature of the mind. The book captures his wry humor and shrewd reasoning, showing a man comfortable quoting Aristotle alongside Alice in Wonderland. Included in this edition are an insightful foreword from leading Mead scholar Hans Joas, a revealing set of textual notes by Daniel R. Huebner that detail the texts origins, and a comprehensive bibliography of Meads other published writings. While Meads lectures inspired countless students, much of his brilliance has been lost to time. This definitive edition ensures that Meads ideas will carry on, inspiring a new generation of thinkers.

Becoming Mead: The Social Process of Academic Knowledge

GeorgeHerbertMead is considered one of the founding figures of sociology, a progenitor of symbolic interactionism. But as Daniel Huebner puts it succinctly, this reputation is problematic: “Mead is known in a discipline in which he did not teach for a book he did not write” (Becoming, p. 3). Indeed, Mead’s contemporaries thought of him as a philosopher. He taught classes on a variety of topics, advancing what we now recognize as a sociological perspective in social psychology. At the time he taught, however, the course dealt with philosophy-informed psychological concerns such as what is the nature of consciousness, what is individuality, how is a society possible. Mead also did not write the work most sociologists know him from:Mind, Self, and Society (MSS). That book was put together posthumously from student notes. What do we then make of Mead, the Mead who worked at the University of Chicago from 1894 to his death in 1931, and the Mead whose thinking has become a rite of passage for sociology graduate students? Daniel Huebner and Hans Joas have joined forces to appreciate the contemporary relevance of Mead in a “definitive” reissue of MSS and as editors of The Timeliness of George Herbert Mead, a volume that aims to show the current relevance of Mead’s thinking. First is Huebner’s study in the sociology of knowledge on how the Mead of the past turned intoMead of the present. Huebner’s pragmatist instinct is

The Construction of Mind, Self, and Society: The Social Process Behind G. H. Mead'S Social Psychology

Mind, Self, and Society, the posthumously published volume by which George Herbert Mead is primarily known, poses acute problems of interpretation so long as scholarship does not consider the actual process of its construction. This paper utilizes extensive archival correspondence and notes in order to analyze this process in depth. The analysis demonstrates that the published form of the book is the result of a consequential interpretive process in which social actors manipulated textual documents within given practical constraints over a course of time. The paper contributes to scholarship on Mead by indicating how this process made possible certain understandings of his social psychology and by relocating the materials that make up the single published text within the disparate contexts from which they were originally drawn.

Wilhelm Jerusalem’s sociology of knowledge in the dialogue of ideas

While recent calls have been made for a ‘dialogical’ approach in the study of classical sociology, little empirical work has taken up this charge. This paper seeks to examine an under-appreciated author, Wilhelm Jerusalem, as a case study in the importance of social dialogue to foundational ideas in sociology. Jerusalem developed the first explicit ‘sociology of knowledge’ in 1909 in response to his encounter with William James’ pragmatism, the burgeoning Viennese sociological movement, and his previous psychological studies. In outlining his theory and its development, the paper traces how Jerusalem’s dialogue at different times with Husserl, Mach, James, Durkheim, Scheler, and others was essential to the direction taken by his work. A focus on these dialogic encounters gives us a new understanding of the relations between strands of thought in the early twentieth century, and the changing structure of these connections also helps to explain the relative neglect of Jerusalem’s unique work. The paper utilizes this examination of Jerusalem’s sociology of knowledge in order to put forward propositions for a dialogical approach to the empirical study of the relations among theoretical traditions in the social sciences.

German Speaking Sociology in the Chicago Archives

The most important repository of documents relating to the history of German-speaking sociology in Chicago is the University of Chicago’s Special Collections Research Center. This repository includes collections that document efforts to compile the early history of the social sciences, efforts to aid displaced or emigre German and Austrian scholars, records from individuals in the social sciences and humanities, and the records of international associations and publishers. The University of Chicago’s collections include a large number of personal papers from sociology department members, including materials from people who worked with Georg Simmel and Karl Mannheim, among others. The strengths of Northwestern University and other repositories in the Chicago-area are briefly mentioned for potential researchers’ reference.

Instinct, History of

The concept of ‘instinct’ has served as an influential way to conceptualize the recurrent forms, the ultimate motivations, and the possible heritability of human behaviors. Theories of instinct had a strong influence on nineteenth century psychology and social science. By the 1920s, however, instinct theories were the target of considerable criticism, which questioned whether it represented a single, scientifically valid, and observable phenomenon and whether it was relevant to the explanation of complex human behavior. The notion fell out of favor in the social and behavioral sciences by the 1930s, despite sporadic attempts to defend and rehabilitate it.

Mead, George Herbert (1863–1931)

American pragmatist philosopher George Herbert Mead (1863–1931) has had a major influence in the social sciences through his examinations of the processes of symbolic communication and the genesis of the social self. He developed his philosophy in dialogue with unique influences from empirical science, critical philosophy, and the progressive social reforms in which he was heavily involved during his eventful career. Although his ideas were known to colleagues and students at the University of Chicago in the early twentieth century, his subsequent influence has largely been through volumes compiled from disparate sources and published after his death.