Mead as a Pathsetter

Mead's work abounds in suggestive leads for the sociology of knowledge. He prepared the ground for consideration of the concrete sociological links between social and thought processes, to the extent that he stressed, along with his pragmatist co-thinkers, the organic process by which every act of thought is linked to human conduct and to interactive relationships, thus re- jecting the radical distinction between thinking and acting that had informed most classical philosophy. When Mead advanced the idea that consciousness is an inner discourse carried on by public means--that is, a private experience made possible by the use of significant social symbols and hence organized from the standpoint of the "generalized other"--he paved the way for detailed investigations linking styles of thought to social structures. Mead provided valuable indications for future inquiries linking individual modes of discourse to the "universe of discourse" of total epochs or of special strata or groupings within a particular society. Insofar as he stressed that thought is in its very nature bound to the social situation in which it arises, he set the stage for efforts to ascertain the relations between a thinker and his audience.

As in the sociology of knowledge, Mead also provided rich leads for future disciplined inquiry in other spheres of sociological inquiry though only through hypotheses and illustrations. His notion of role-taking, that is, of tak- ing the attitudes of others toward oneself, is not to be confused with what modern sociologists call role performance, or living up to the expectations en- tailed by a specific position. However, it is hardly a subject of dispute that modern role theory from Linton and Parsons to Newcomb and Merton has been enriched by freely borrowing from Mead. Although reference-group theory has gone beyond Mead in considering not only those groups to which a person belongs but also groups to which he aspires or which he takes as a point of reference while not aspiring to be a member, it owes a good deal to Mead's insistence that individuals always be considered under the angle of their relations to groups of significant others.

More generally, Mead's work has led to the final demise, at least within sociology, of what Simmel once called the "fallacy of separateness," which considers actors without reference to the interactions in which they are vari- ously engaged. For Mead, no monads without windows ever exist in the social world; there is never an I without a Thou, to use Martin Buber's terminology. An ego is inconceivable without an alter, and the self is best visualized as a vivid nodal point in a field of social interaction. This perspective on human action has by now become an essential characteristic of all thinking that wishes to be called sociological. Although Mead was by no means alone in having prepared it, he surely was one of its major sources.

Little need be said in regard to Mead's contributions to the methodology of the social sciences since the essential points have already been made in the previous chapter on Cooley. Mead must be credited alongside Cooley and other pragmatists with having been instrumental in stressing the need for always considering situations from the point of view of the actor. For him, just as for Weber, when the sociologist refers to meaning, it is to the subjective meaning actors impute to their actions.

While Cooley's theories veered perilously close to a subjectivist and solipsis- tic view of society, Mead remained steadfast in his social objectivism. The world of organized social relationships was to him as solidly given in inter- subjective evidence as the physical world. He did not attempt to reconstruct the world through introspection in the manner of Cooley. He took as funda- mental datum that an "objective life of society" exists, which it behooves the scientist to study. To Mead society is not a mental phenomenon but belongs to an "objective phase of experience." The extent to which the differences be- tween these two otherwise closely related thinkers can be accounted for by their differing life situations and existential conditions will become clear later in this chapter.

From Coser, 1977:339-341.