The work of George Herbert Mead, one of the leading figures in pragmatism, profoundly influenced the development of American social science. Mead published no books in his lifetime, and many of the articles he wrote dealt with education, psychology, and sociology. He communicated most effectively in oral discourse, and he developed his ideas in extemporaneous lectures at the University of Chicago, where he taught from 1893 until his death. His style was involved and labored, and even his admirers stated that there were difficulties in deciphering his sentences. Still, his classes were well-attended, and he had considerable influence on his colleagues and his students, especially in sociology and social psychology. His students put together four posthumous volumes of his work based on stenographic notes of his lectures, fragmentary manuscripts, and tentative drafts (Shibutani, 1968, 83-84).
Pragmatism as espoused by Mead represents an attempt to reformulate conceptions of man and his place in the universe in terms of the revolutionary implications of scientific method and evolutionary theory, and Mead considered the process of meeting and solving problems and the scientific method as the evolutionary process grown self-conscious. Various species developed their characteristics as they came to terms with life conditions, and Mead sought to account for the emergent properties in the human being--thinking in abstractions, self-consciousness, and purposive and moral conduct:
He contended that these attributes rest on the development of language, a form of social interaction that evolves among human beings as they meet the exigencies of living in groups (Shibutani, 1968, 84).
George Herbert Mead considered himself a social behaviorist, a term that has since become both obsolete and misleading. He, along with Jean Piaget and Sigmund Freud, was the principal architect of socialization theory. Piaget saw a movement from an...