George Herbert Mead - Writings

Writings

In a career spanning more than 40 years, Mead wrote almost constantly and published numerous articles and book reviews in both philosophy and psychology. However, he did not publish any books. Following his death, several of his students put together and edited four volumes from records of Mead's social psychology course at the University of Chicago, his lecture notes, and his numerous unpublished papers. The four volumes are: Mead's 1930 Carus Lectures, The Philosophy of the Present (1932), edited by Arthur E. Murphy; Mind, Self, and Society (1934), edited by Charles W. Morris; Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century (1936), edited by Merritt H. Moore; and The Philosophy of the Act (1938), Mead's 1930 Carus Lectures, edited by Charles W. Morris.

Most notable among Mead's published papers are “Suggestions Towards a Theory of the Philosophical Disciplines” (1900); “Social Consciousness and the Consciousness of Meaning” (1910); “What Social Objects Must Psychology Presuppose” (1910); “The Mechanism of Social Consciousness” (1912); “The Social Self” (1913); “Scientific Method and the Individual Thinker”(1917); “A Behavioristic Account of the Significant Symbol” (1922); “The Genesis of Self and Social Control” (1925); “The Objective Reality of Perspectives” (1926);”The Nature of the Past” (1929); and “The Philosophies of Royce, James, and Dewey in Their American Setting” (1929).

In his lifetime,Mead published about 100 scholarly articles, reviews, and incidental pieces. Given its diversified nature, access to these writings is difficult. The first editorial efforts to change this situation date from the 1960s. In 1964, Andrew J. Reck collected twenty-five of Mead’s published articles in Selected Writings: George Herbert Mead. Bobbs-Merrill, The Liberal Arts Press. 1964. Four years later, John W. Petras published George Herbert Mead. Essays on his Social Psychology, a collection of fifteen articles that included previously unpublished manuscripts.

More recently, Mary Jo Deegan published Essays in Social Psychology (2001), a book project originally abandoned by Mead in the early 1910s. In 2010, Filipe Carreira da Silva edited the G.H. Mead. A Reader, the most comprehensive collection to date. It includes thirty of Mead’s most important articles, ten of which previously unpublished.

The Mead Project at Brock University in Ontario intends to publish all of Mead's 80-odd remaining unpublished manuscripts.