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G.H. Mead and Relational Sociology: The Case of Concepts

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The Palgrave Handbook of Relational Sociology

Abstract

George Herbert Mead’s works serve as a reference for relational sociology for several authors. Yet the perspective adopted by those authors is often derived form Herbert Blumer’s reading of Mead, which has been contested for decades even in the field of symbolic interactionism. This chapter examines the way Mead’s works can be used in relational sociology, according to the relational content of the main concepts that he developed. It is argued that only from the point of view of the relational content of those concepts can Mead be of some help in defining relational sociology’s project. While focusing on the ontogenetic and phylogenetic processes at work in social life, Mead’s perspective proposed to locate the analysis on the symbols that are constitutive of both individuals and society, in their mutual and respective dialectical relations. If relational sociology can learn something from Mead’s works, it is by using the concepts he developed in a proper fashion.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    I am using capital letters here, in this paragraph and the next one, to indicate the main concepts that structure the topological view reconstructed in Mead’s concept of Society, in their reciprocal and dialectical positions and oppositions that compose their relations—see Côté (2015a, Chs. 2 and 3). I also include the Generalized Other on the side of the phylogenetic process, even though we can recognize its participation in the ontogenetic process, particularly as a point of junction between Other(s) Individual(s) and Institutions.

  2. 2.

    I am using here a capital letter to indicate that Communication has to be understood not only in its usual sense—although it includes the latter—but as a fundamental concept that determines the entire symbolic process at work—both in society and in nature (more on this below).

  3. 3.

    The use of the term “environment” to refer to both natural and human (or social) realities can be somehow confusing in Mead’s works; this is due to the ambiguity of his epistemological standpoint, which claims to be rooted in some form of “naturalism.” In adopting such a position, Mead wanted to avoid the classical modern dualism between nature and human culture, or between body and mind, and he seemed to equate those terms when referring to environment in its natural or social destinations. However, the introduction of a distinction between unconscious communication in nature and conscious communication in human societies that we also find in his works clarifies the possible confusion of these two different horizons.

  4. 4.

    Even though Mead and Dewey shared for a good deal of their respective and mutual conceptions (particularly between 1891, when they met at the University of Michigan, through their common passage and collaborative work at the University of Chicago—which Dewey left in 1906—and up until Mead’s death in 1931), they also had their oppositions, particularly in the field of social psychology (on this, see Mead’s previously unpublished critical review of Dewey’s Human Nature and Conduct (1922) in Cook (1994)). On this basis, it is unlikely that the definition of “transaction,” a late development in Dewey’s thought of the 1940s, would have met Mead’s own perspective, because of the former’s restricted views on the symbolic dimension of interactions.

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  1. Université du Québec à Montréal, Montreal, QC, Canada

    Jean-François Côté

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  1. Laurentian University, Sudbury, Ontario, Canada

    François Dépelteau

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Côté, JF. (2018). G.H. Mead and Relational Sociology: The Case of Concepts. In: Dépelteau, F. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Relational Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66005-9_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66005-9_5

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