George Herbert Mead zur Einführung by Harald WenzelReview by: Gary A. CookTransactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Vol. 27, No. 2 (Spring, 1991), pp. 245-250Published by: Indiana University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40320328 .

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Book Reviews

George Herbert Mead zur Einführung Harald Wenzel Hamburg: Junius Verlag, 1990. 158 pp.

It is an interesting fact that some of the most significant recent work on G.H. Mead has been done by German rather than American scholars. Witness, for example, Hans Joas's G.H. Mend: A Contemporary Re-examination of his Thought (translated from the original German in 1985) and the extensive discussion of Mead in the second volume of Jürgen Habermas's The Theory of Communicative Action (translated from the German in 1987). Harald Wenzel's short book on Mead does not offer a strikingly original interpretation of Mead's work in the manner of Joas or Habermas, but then it makes no pretense of doing so. It is in- tended rather as a clear, concise, and coherent introductory over- view of Mead's life and thought for the German reader. And this task it accomplishes very well.

Wenzel, like Joas and Habermas, comes to Mead from a back- ground in sociological or social theory - which explains why all three of these thinkers find in Mead an especially interesting rep- resentative of American pragmatism. Wenzel is particularly inter- ested in those aspects of Mead's thought that have been influen- tial in helping to lay the foundations for the symbolic interactionist tradition in American sociology. Hence he begin his book with a chapter on "Symbolic Interactionism" in which, among other things, he discusses the ongoing controversy (pro- voked in large part by J. David Lewis and Richard L. Smith in their American Sociology and Pragmatism, 1980) concerning the extent of Mead's actual historical influence upon the development of the Chicago School of sociology. At the same time, however, Wenzel wants to avoid the sociologist's temptation to look at

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246 Book Reviews

Mead only, or even primarily, as a forerunner of symbolic interac- tionism. Mead, he stresses, was a philosopher and social theorist, but never a sociologist in the narrow disciplinary sense of this la- bel. To fully appreciate Mead as a thinker, we must see his contri- butions to symbolic interactionism as coherent parts of a larger in- tellectual enterprise, an enterprise including not only original social psychological theorizing, but a commitment to concrete so- cial reform, a philosophy of communicative action, and an at- tempt to sketch out a cosmology incorporating the insights of Einsteinian relativity and Whitehead's philosophy of nature.

In his second chapter, Wenzel draws upon Mead's publications as well as upon the writings of Joas, Dmitri Shalin, and others, to construct a succinct but detailed account of Mead's intellectual development. Especially noteworthy here is his excellent summary of Mead's numerous involvements in Chicago reform activities and organizations during the two decades leading up to the end of the first World War. Wenzel argues that Mead's secular com- mitment to social reform had religious roots in the social gospel movement in protestant Christian theology, particularly as this manifested itself in Mead's education at Oberlin College. And he emphasizes the considerable extent to which Mead's life com- bined the dual vocations of scientific inquirer and social reformer. In his social philosophy, Wenzel notes, Mead advocated a kind of radical democratic socialism that was opposed both to unre- strained liberal capitalism and to "programmatic" or Utopian so- cialism of the marxist variety. Mead argued for an "opportunistic" social philosophy of piecemeal social reform, according to which concrete conflicts of interest were to be resolved through demo- cratic discussion and a search for scientific understanding of shared interests that would provide the foundation for needed so- cial reconstruction. But what guarantee is there that all such con- flicts will be amenable to resolution by democratic procedures? Or what justification is there for the assumption that every such con- flict will involve an underlying basis of shared interests upon which a resolution by democratic consensus can be built? This,

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Book Reviews 247

Wenzel suggests, is the crucial question confronting any social theory of the Meadian sort.

Another way of formulating the question just posed is to ask how human intersubjectivity is possible. I.e., what resources exist in human nature and conduct for the sharing of common endeav- ors, the establishment of mutual interests, and the adjudication of conflicting interests through communication and rational discus- sion? Wenzel regards this as the central question of Mead's social psychology, and in his third chapter he addresses it by tracing the development of Mead's distinctive social psychological ideas. Tak- ing as his point of departure Mead's early work within the frame- work of a Deweyan functionalist psychology (e.g., Mead's 1903 essay on "The Definition of the Psychical"), Wenzel shows in de- tail how Mead went on to enrich this psychological functionalism with an original analysis of the thoroughgoing sociality of human conduct. This line of analysis led Mead to such important con- cepts as "taking the role of the other" and the notion of symboli- cally mediated interaction; these, in turn, made possible his theo- ries concerning the social genesis of language, self-consciousness, and reflective intelligence. Wenzel finds in Mead's social psycholo- gy not only the foundations of a theory of human intersubjectivi- ty, but also the beginnings of a solution to the problem of how rational discussion can make possible the resolution of conflicts of interest. The key to this solution is supplied by Mead's notion of a "universe of discourse," which Wenzel admits is one of the most obscure and difficult of the fundamental concepts in his so- cial psychology. Mead's idea here is that the human capacity to take the role of "generalized others" enables human individuals to communicate and think in terms of widely shared meanings or universals. These shared meanings provide the medium of abstract thought, a medium that satisfies at least one of the necessary con- ditions for the possibility of analyzing social conflicts, discovering shared interests, and bringing these interests intelligently to bear upon problems demanding social reconstruction.

Mead's work in the area of social psychology, Wenzel correctly

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248 Book Reviews

observes, reverberates throughout his philosophy as a whole. In- deed, it gives a distinctively social cast to his pragmatism, which might therefore be characterized as "a philosophy of communica- tive action" (eine Philosophie kommunicativen Handeln). Wenzel makes this philosophy the topic of his fourth chapter, where he focuses in particular upon Mead's philosophical writings in the years following World War I. Here Wenzel begins by attempting to situate Mead's social brand of pragmatism with respect to what Arthur Lovejoy has called "the revolt against dualism" in early twentieth century philosophy. Modern philosophy, according to Wenzel's reading of Mead, fell into a dualism of nature and mind largely because it could not arrive at a unified conceptual scheme that would do justice both to the growth of scientific knowledge and to the creativity of the human individual. Mead, however, sought to offer a non-dualistic solution to this problem by locat- ing both scientific knowledge and creativity within human social conduct, while locating this conduct itself within an evolving na- ture. The key steps in Mead's intellectual journey toward this so- lution can be roughly charted as follows: (1) In his early writings on functionalist psychology he viewed scientific inquiry as a re- constructive, problem-solving, phase of conduct; he looked upon the meaningful objects defined through such inquiry as having an instrumental or action-guiding character. At the same time, he emphasized the creative role of the human individual in this re- constructive process. (2) Later, once he had worked out his foun- dational social psychological concepts, he improved upon his earli- er functionalist ideas by drawing attention to the social dimensions of scientific inquiry and its intellectual products: he explained how the growth of scientific knowledge was grounded in a process of symbolically mediated social interaction, and he presented an account of the social constitution of both perceptual objects and the objects of scientific analysis within human con- duct. Moreover, he showed how the individual human self could be understood as exercising its creativity and reconstructive capac- ities through the medium of a social structure made possible by

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Book Reviews 249

its membership in a larger society. (3) Finally, beginning in the 1920s Mead became intensely interested in Einsteinian relativity and its interpretation in Alfred North Whitehead's works on the philosophy of nature. This interest led Mead to sketch out the contours of his own naturalistic cosmology, one in which nature was construed as an evolving organization of perspectival relation- ships and in which the reconstructive activities of human thought were seen as an instance of this natural process.

The quest for a unified interpretation of nature, scientific knowledge, and human experience, as Wenzel indicates in his short concluding chapter, stimulated Mead to undertake sustained explorations of areas far removed from the familiar terrain of his social psychology. He made persistent efforts, for instance, to ground the spatio-temporal structures of both everyday perceptual experience and relativisti physics in human conduct, deploying for this purpose his concept of "taking the role of the other" and an analysis of the perceptual, manipulatory, and consummatory phases of action. Furthermore, in the years just prior to his death in 1931, Mead made an attempt to generalize the link he had earlier found between sociality and creativity in the case of the human individual. He now boldly hypothesized that there was a connection between sociality and the emergence of novelty in na- ture at large. He sought, in short, to define sociality in such a

way that it could be seen as an ingredient not only in the recon- structive activity of human thought, but in the creative advance of nature itself. Wenzel quite legitimately points out, however, that Mead never really succeeded in working out this suggestion in a manner that was either very clear or very convincing.

Given its rather modest pretensions as an introduction to Mead's thought, Wenzel's book is surprisingly rich in content and

insight. The author takes advantage of the best recent scholarship on Mead while at the same time engaging in some careful and as- tute textual analysis of his own. He does an excellent job of por- traying the development of Mead's central ideas, and of relating this development to its social and intellectual context. His treat-

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250 Book Reviews

ment of Mead is sympathetic, dear, well-informed, and consistent- ly competent. Such flaws as I could discern in his discussion con- cerned only minor matters. I wonder, for example, if Mead's no- tion of "taking the role of the other" doesn't deserve more attention and analysis than Wenzel accords it. Almost every one of Mead's distinctive social psychological theories turns upon this important, but in many respects vague, social psychological con- cept. Further, I am not convinced by Wenzel's suggestion that Mead's analysis of perception as a phase of conduct was influ- enced by Whitehead's discussion in his little book on Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect (1927). I know of no evidence in Mead's writings indicating that his views were significantly shaped by any of Whitehead's works after Science and the Modern World (1925). But such minor criticisms as these in no way detract from the considerable merits of Wenzel's book. Any student of either phi- losophy or sociology who turns to this book for a concise intro- duction to Mead's life and thought will be well served.

Beloit College Gary A. Cook

John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925-1953 Jo Ann Boydston, editor

Volume 15: 1942-1948 Introduction by Lewis S. Feuer xxxiv + 689 pp.

Volume 16: 1949-1952 Introduction by T.Z. Lavine xxxviii + 739 pp.

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