George Herbert Mead: The Making of a Social Pragmatist (review)

Abstract

508 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 39:3 JULY x994 persons. Indeed, Hegel describes a variety of holistic structures. Self-consciousness separates the unifying principle, in the form of simple individuality, from the unifying principle operating in the organizational dynamic of differences. In some social forms, the members of society serve the whole like slaves serving a master, getting their law not from themselves but from their relation to the whole. In other social forms, the social structure serves individuals as a reflection of their thought, as useful, as the external manifestation of their will or moral intention. In the PhilosophyofRight, Hegel describes social life as a whole in which unity dominates difference in political life and difference dominates unity in economic life. To sum up all these questions in one, if truth is the whole, what kind of whole is it? These, however, are questions posed to a worthy opponent. The Spirit of Hegel makes an excellent case for Hegel's relevance to a broad contemporary context while developing a clear, balanced, plausible reading of Hegel's text. It challenges every alternative analysis of the Hegelian whole to do the same. ARDIS B. COLLINS Loyola Universityof Chicago Gary A. Cook. GeorgeHerbertMead: TheMaking ofa SocialPragmatist. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Pp. xix + ~31. Cloth, $31.95 . Paper, $15.95. Mead's rank in the history of American pragmatism has always been very high, his name linked with Dewey, and placed after Peirce and James. Yet Mead authored no distinctive contribution to the pragmatist conceptions of knowledge, truth, and inquiry , restating instead the formulations of these critical topics expressed by Dewey. Cook shows, however, that Mead's achievement resides in what he (Cook) calls "social pragmatism." Cook develops his interpretation of Mead by detailed examination of the articles and book reviews Mead himself published in his lifetime, although he also considers the posthumously published books based on lecture notes from Mead's students . And for biographical accounts of Mead's intellectual odyssey and career he draws upon unpublished letters, obscure and not readily accessible newspapers, and archival materials. The first two chapters consider Mead's early life, his conversion to philosophy, his studies at Oberlin, Harvard, Leipzig, and Berlin, his teaching at the University of Michigan under Dewey, but, most of all, his friendship with the doomed Henry Casde, whose sister had become his wife. The portrait Cook sketches is of an industrious, committed, idealistic young man, joined with others by bonds of deep affection and yet distinctively cerebral, finding his way through the maze of psychological and philosophical theories that had sprung up in response to evolutionary biology. Chapter 3 traces Mead's move from Hegelian idealism to social psychology during his tenure at the University of Michigan and his early years at the University of Chicago, a move which parallels that of Dewey, his closest colleague and mentor, from "absolutism to experimentalism." Chapters 4, 5, and 6 concentrate on Mead's social psychology. Cook's discussion is BOOK REVIEWS 509 comprehensive and probing; his scholarship is impeccable. He rightly calls attention to the fact that the label "social behaviorism," which has been affixed to Mead's social psychology by Charles Morris, was not Mead's own. Although Mead did indicate that his psychology had evolved into behaviorism, Cook nonetheless shows that Mead retained elements of functionalism and did not subscribe to the stereotypical behaviorism of Watson and his epigoni. Cook's critique of Mead's social psychology--e.g., his discussion of Mead's conception of "taking the attitude or the role of the other" in Chapter 6--is detailed and penetrating, and should stimulate lines of inquiry to reconstruct Mead's social psychology. Chapter 7 treats Mead's forays into social and educational reform in Chicago. Cook has researched Mead's activities extremely well, and provides the reader with an account absent from the secondary literature hht indispensable to any assessment of Mead as an activist social scientist. Chapter 8, in which Cook examines Mead's conceptions of the social self and morality, also engages the reader in reflections on nations, wars, and international peace. Again, Cook researches material authored by Mead in obscure publications andnot...