Download George Herbert Mead, Public Philosopher: Fostering the

George Herbert Mead, Public Philosopher:
Fostering the Transformative Potential of Urban Socialities
David W. Woods, Ph.D.
NYU Poly
Education is definitely the process of taking over a certain organized set of
responses to one’s own stimulation; and until one can respond to himself [or
herself] as the community responds to him [or her], he [or she] does not genuinely
belong to the community.
– George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self & Society (1934: 265)
I. Introduction
John Dewey and George Herbert Mead’s public philosophies complemented each other
during their forty-year collaboration to develop big ideas, and more importantly, methods to
implement them. Mead’s public philosophy model offers useful tools and an effective historical
perspective for re-centering the fields of philosophy, sociology, and urban planning to enhance
public transformative engagement. The key aspect of Mead’s social theory this essay analyses is
the concept of sociality, which as I will explain in more detail below, focuses on the changeproducing tension in individual worldviews that comes from participating in a diverse social
group or in more than one social group with differing values and norms.
Mead understood that learning to cultivate community involves processes of recognizing and
influencing sociality through participation in multiple generalized others, as well as individual
creativity and social leadership. Today, Mead’s social theories of community and participatory
democracy can be instrumental in developing leaders for social movements serve as educative1
tools for elected and appointed leaders in new and experienced democracies, and in social
processes for nurturing new norms to change cultures.
1
Refer to John Dewey (1927, 1939), Judith M. Green (1999, 2004, 2008), David W. Woods (2012, 2013)
1
II. George Herbert Mead’s Pragmatist Education: The Importance of Public Engagement
Mead found that the primary sites of democratic social change are the vibrant urban
socialities that he experienced emerging in Chicago during his years living and working there.
Numerous Mead scholars have posited that the fast-changing social environment found in
relatively young, fast-growing, cities like Chicago, including the new University of Chicago,
played an important role in the development of Mead’s theory of urban sociality and urbanism
throughout his life’s work.2 I argue that inseparable from the pragmatist social psychology and
process ontology for which he is once again lauded was Mead’s role as the University of
Chicago’s public philosopher, sociologist, and urban planner, especially after Dewey left in 1905
for Columbia University. It is because he focused so much of his energy into teaching, writing
editorials, and public service that expressed his and the University’s “orientation towards
practical tasks such as … the problems in the local community” (Joas 1997: 22) that he did not
have time to complete the major books that appeared after his too-early death.
It is in this role as public philosopher that Mead made some of his greatest contributions. He
worked tirelessly in the University Settlement House and with Jane Addams at Hull House, and
also through The City Club. Mead developed his theory of progressive urbanism within a
community of pragmatists at the University of Chicago, especially W.I. Thomas, Robert E.
Park,3 Ernest Burgess and Louis Wirth in the sociology department, as well as Charles Merriam,
in the political science department. Merriam was “one of the pioneers of regional study and
planning...[who] points out quite explicitly that the major support for regional studies of Chicago
was derived from the backing of the City Club” that Mead led (Barry 1968: 1977).
2
3
Refer to Barry 1968, Carreria da Silva 2007, Joas 1997, Miller 1977, Strauss 1956.
Park along with Mead and Dewey explored developing a progressive weekly newspaper in Ann Arbor while
Dewey and Mead were teaching at the University of Michigan, and Park was working nearby as a journalist in
Detroit, having been former student of Dewey’s first at the University of Minnesota and then later at the
University of Michigan.
2
Mead’s context-specific, radical transformation-focused insights about how to achieve a
deeper, social urban democracy date from the years before the beginning of his close partnership
with Dewey. In 1890, Mead expressed his early insight that local urban activism is the most
effective way to foster change, in a letter to his close college friend, Henry Castle:
We must get into politics, of course—city politics above all things…because city
politics needs men [and women] more than any other branch—and chiefly
because…the principles of corporate life—of socialism in America—must start from
the city…One doesn’t want too much [ideal] political economy, but he wants a
program for an American city that he can defend at any point, and that is
adaptable…This is in connection with a vigorous spreading of moral development to
the child—the vigorous organizing of movements of physical culture will give the
breath of new ideas where the air is now so thin that it cannot come without
appreciation.4
Mead’s (1934) concept of the “social self,” which grows through interaction among the “I”, the
“me” and the “generalized other,” suggests how individuals can learn through new kinds of
democratic social participation in which they absorb and contribute new ideas and practices
through a process of interactions with others. In Mind, Self, and Society (1934), Mead argues
that through the development of a social self, people form communities of shared understanding.
Mead describes the “generalized other” as encompassing the norms, attitudes, social mores,
language and culture of a community to which the individual belongs. That is, the community
or primary social group within an urban setting to which an individual belongs initially shapes
the social behavior of that individual in order to make her or him part of that community or
social group.
At the same time, individuals can influence the future of various social groups in which they
actively participate in ways that can lead to habitual commitment to the democratic process,
which Mead described in a number of places in his long career. For example, Mead argued that
4
Letter from Mead to Castle, Oct. 21, 1890; quoted in Cook 1993: 23, expansions within brackets are mine.
3
The real assumption of democracy inside the society of a nation and within the
society of different nations is that there is always to be discovered a common social
interest in which can be found a solution of social strife. …Democratic advances,
therefore, have always been in the direction of breaking down the social barriers and
vested interests, which have kept men [and women] from finding the common
denominators of conflicting interests.5
Thereafter, the transactions of these social groups that have been infected with the spirit of
democracy with other social groups that have not previously experienced this value can influence
the future of the world in ways that preserve, enhance and draw upon individual and cultural
diversity. Such diversity is fully compatible with democracy, as Mead argues that:
It is often assumed that democracy is an order of society in which those personalities,
which are sharply differentiated, will be eliminated, that everything will be ironed out
to a situation where everyone will be, as far a possible, like everyone else. But of
course that is not the implication of democracy: the implication of democracy is
rather that the individual can be as highly developed as lies within the possibilities of
his [or her] own inheritance, and still can enter into the attitudes of the others whom
he [or she] affects.6
For Mead, this democratic ethos, which he developed as his key theoretical tool for
understanding urban problems and fostering civic engagement in democratic transformation is
through the process of entering into the differing attitudes of others whom one affects, leads to
experiences of sociality.
In Philosophy of the Present (1932), Mead defines a sociality as a hybrid nexus of experience
stimulated by participating simultaneously in two or more significant groups, or processes in
ways that mutually influence the individual and all the communities to which he or she belongs.
This change-fostering kind of experience increases and diversifies the inputs to the “me,” which
in turn stimulates the “I” to experiment in reconciling conflicts among various generalized others
while including all the values involved in critical and transformative ways that suggest new
5
6
G.H. Mead, “Democracy’s Issues in the World War,” 1917; Shalin 1991: 40.
G.H. Mead, Mind, Self and Society (1934: 326)
4
possibilities for the social whole (1932: 47-97). Such experiences of sociality can lead to
cosmopolitan expansion and integration of individual horizons of experience and new habits,
leading to interest in and concern for diverse others. If other members of one’s communities
take up this influence, this can lead to more cosmopolitan attitudes and behaviors that link and
transform their additional, differing “generalized others.”7 Hans Joas (1997), describes this
concept as “sociality of motivation,” David L. Miller (1973), presents Mead’s concept of
sociality as the “principle by which adjustments are made” (1973: 44-45), and Paul E. Pfuetze
defined this concept as “the capacity for being several things at once or playing several roles
simultaneously.”8 Mead deployed this concept of sociality in his efforts with John Dewey to
transform urban problems.
One Mead’s primary initiatives as a public philosopher focused on recognizing and
influencing new immigrent experiecne of sociality, so understood. Mead focused on issues
relating to immigrants flowing into Chicago, especially from Eastern Europe with other leading
sociologists at the University of Chicago, W.I. Thomas and Florian Znaneicki who studied the
lives of The Polish Peasant (1919). Working with Jane Addams, Mead (and Thomas) focused
on educating the new immigrants, specifically “calling attention to the existence of a social
world that was common to the individuals who shared communication and experience” (Barry
1968: 197).
The Chicago pragmatists, especially Dewey, Mead, Addams and Park, identified and
developed both education and mass media as primary tools for creating new socialities in the
process of raising up democratic publics. Especially during the first twenty years after Mead
7
8
More broadly, Mead theorized that “all living organisms are bound up in a general social environment or
situation, in a complex of social interrelationships and interactions upon which their continued existence
depends” (Mead 1934: 228).
Hans Joas, G.H. Mead: A Contemporary Re-examination of His Thought (1997), David L. Miller, George
Herbert Mead: Self, Language, and the World (1973), Paul E. Pfuetze, The Social Self (1954: 40).
5
came to the University of Chicago, he wrote numerous articles on the importance of education in
the development of the “social self.” Along with Dewey, Mead was very active in the Laboratory
School at the University of Chicago and for many years he chaired the Vocational Training
Committee of The City Club.9 During this same period, Mead published many articles in
professional journals such as “Elementary School Teacher” as well as “City Club Bulletin.”
Mead used the print media as one of his most persuasive means of expanding and communicating
his public philosopher’s role.10
III. Urban Socialities As Sites For Diverse Democratic Social Movements
Mead’s focus as a public philosopher was on influencing urban socialities by processes of
democratically integrating and interconnecting individuals by intentionally incorporating diversity
and change through encouraging their participation in multiple Generalized Others. As Mead
suggests it is neither feasible, nor desirable to achieve change through top-down authority-based
educative processes, because social change happens through individual interaction with diverse
others and mutual adaptions of socialites. The key insight that Mead offers about how inclusive
democratic collaboration in the educative process and even limited public deliberation
opportunities works to educate community participants is this: the “I”, and the “me”, and shared
“generalized others” change in the contexts of diversity-inclusive “sociality.” That is, interactions
across differences in class, race, ethnicity, religion, or social function can effectively influence
participants’ recognition of the needs and perspectives of differently located members of local
communities.
9
Dewey wrote what some consider the manifesto of “learning by experience” philosophy of education in his
1916 book Democracy and Education.
10
Mead’s advocated the role of a public philosopher long before the recent revival of that concept among
philosophers, sociologists, and urban planners, all of the fields in which Mead played an active public role have
returned in recent years to his vision of complementarity – even necessary interconnection – between public
involvement and transformative social theory.
6
Hyde Park, the neighborhood in which the University of Chicago is located, has since its
founding in 1893 been a very diverse neighborhood of European immigrants, African Americans
moving up from the South to find a better life, and highly educated academics connected to the
University, which Dewey, Mead, Park and Addams used Hyde Park as their “living laboratory”
for the purpose of developing the creative, active democratic changes in social capital of the
residents of the neighborhood as the residents experienced changes in their personal,
professional, and public lives. As Mead asks in Philosophy of the Act (1938): “Wherein lies the
creative activity or the reconstructive activity of an individual in a democratic society?” (662).
Mead’s answer is that in the individual act is grounded within the community, and a complex of
diverse individual acts establishes a “community in such a way that what [the individual] does
can be a natural function of that community” (Mead 1938: 663). Robert M. Berry framed
Mead’s pragmatist conception of the importance of growth in social development expressed
within individual socialities through community as follows:
In the settlement house program, groups were created which initially had as their
purpose the fulfillment of the interest of the person involved; and, eventually, “a
reconstruction of [social] situation [so] that different and enlarged and more adequate
personalities could emerge” (S.W., 148). This results in a reconstruction of the social
world for all concerned, for all those whose interests are involved. Those who had
been members of the created groups would not only have their interests sustained as
valuable, but these interests would carry them beyond themselves into the
community.11
In short, as communities come into being and grow change through the contributions of new
individual members who add their new experiences and socialites, making the need for new
habits evident to the whole community, which incorporate “personal interest, social
reconstruction, and a belief in a larger community” (Barry 1968: 185).
11
Quote in Robert M. Berry 1968: 184.
7
Over time—and sometimes suddenly, as Josiah Royce and Martin Luther King, Jr. have
pointed out—this pragmatic education process of constructing new urban socialites allows a
shared, deeply held democratic ethos of the community to emerge, sometimes suddenly. Such a
process of mutual democratic education through social movements, community activism, civic
deliberation, and collaborative social service provide many adults and youth with experiences of
democratic participation and contribute to the growth of their knowledge and their skills in
effective problem solving. In turn, when such democratic social movements, civic deliberation,
and community-based service organizations succeed in “throwing weight” when government and
business leaders learn that they must incorporate lessons taught by various “publics” (Dewey
1927) with their emergent new “generalized others” (Mead 1934) that characterize that
community. Mead (1934) explained how changes in ways of governing and doing business
respond eventually to the views and values of an active and effective public, stating “I want to
indicate this dividing line between an organization depending what the community wants to
accomplish through its government and the direction of the government from the point of view of
personal relations.”12 With continued public pressure as well as intelligent inquiries toward
feasible and desirable long-term plans like those Dewey and Mead called for, the institutions to
create and sustain more deeply democratic habits can be experimentally developed and creatively
financed. This is a long and expensive time process in terms of direct economic costs as well as
opportunity costs; it is not even possible for a single philosopher or an interdisciplinary think tank
to complete this work alone. The people and the plans must be developed together.
12
G.H. Mead, Mind, Self & Society, 1934: 314.
8
IV. Deepening Twenty-First Century Democracy through Urban Socialites
A deeper level of impact and interconnection among individual and group socialities occurs
through participatory democratic experience with others, which focuses on developing
opportunities to build what Dewey called developing a “social goal based on an inclusive plan”
(Bernstein 2010: 87). Many citizen participation opportunities in the United States today are
responses in part to existing federal, state, and local legal mandates to involve citizens in public
decision processes, especially concerning projects that involve federal or state funding. In
today’s world, all large-scale development projects, by necessity, will include some element of
government funding, either directly or for infrastructure. Those large-scale projects that
incorporate and embrace citizen participation from the beginning of the decision process usually
encounter little opposition from citizens or elected officials charged with adopting and
implementing the final plan. The inverse is also true: those large-scale development projects that
tried to go forward with only pro forma citizen participation, perhaps just meeting the letter of
the law by holding a public hearing, almost always meet with failure due to citizen opposition or
practical problems of feasibility that could have been avoided.
Effective democratic citizen participation processes are unavoidably complex, contentious,
lengthy, and costly. As Mead and Dewey, and their contemporary successors, such as Jürgen
Habermas (communicative action) and Judith M. Green (deep democracy) argue, the purpose of
organizing and implementing democratic citizen participation processes is to recognize and
influence urban socialities by empowering citizens to share their collective insider knowledge,
facts, and with their values about a specific urban community with each other and their elected
and appointed officials (those with the power to make decisions on behalf of the public). Given
their real-world meaning as disruptions in existing social habits within America’s and the
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world’s power-charged history, which includes real inter-group pain and distancing, deep
democratic citizen participation processes that include diverse publics, influence public policy,
and effect long-term cultural change are difficult to organize and sustain. However, Mead’s
account of how urban socialities develop and change show that they are possible if the right
combination of education, communication, funding, and leadership are available. Mead’s theory
and personal example show how this crucial combination can be achieved.
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