G.H. Mead

G.H. Mead (1863-1931) oriented much of his intellectual efforts around three unavoidable questions to anyone living in a modern society: how are selfhood, knowledge, and politics understood and organized in such a society? Modern individuals continually seek to find answers to questions such as these although no one has ever come up with a definitive answer to them. Modernity, in other words, confronts us with inevitable problematics that fundamentally shape the way in which we think about certain topics. For the purposes of my discussion of Mead, I focus upon three of these modern problematics: science, selfhood, and democratic politics. But before I discuss Mead’s treatment of these problem-areas, let me briefly situate Mead as a pragmatist, and in relation to Dewey and James within pragmatism.