SOURCE: "George Herbert Mead and the Paradox of Prediction," in Sociological Analysis, Vol. 38, No. 2, Summer, 1977, pp. 91-105.

It has been stated and reiterated that George Herbert Mead has become the captive of his interpreters (Natanson, 1956:2; Douglas, 1970:17). The purpose of this essay is to initiate a metaphorical liberation of Mead from his social psychological captivity. However, this is not another attempt to unearth what Mead "really meant" when he speaks of the social self, the "I," the "me," the "generalized other" or the like. This has already been done repeatedly with the net result of establishing two schools of interpreters, the determinists and the non-determinists (Kuhn, 1964; Abbott, et al., 1973; Singlemann, 1973). I wish instead to employ an approach which attempts to understand Mead's "social psychology" in the context of his work considered as a whole. The need for such an approach has been noted indirectly by Nisbet (1974: 110-13) and more directly by Friedrichs (1970:185) in stating that "American sociologists, although acknowledging Mead as perhaps their most creative theorist, appeared to extract from his larger pragmatic humanism only those portions that would fit into the mold of an epistemology borrowed from natural science."

Friedrichs does not, however, explicitly develop what this "larger pragmatic humanism" entails, nor does he trace its implications for sociological thought. It is my purpose, then, to examine this remaining problem by attempting to grasp the pragmatic significance of Mead's thought for anyone, but particularly any sociologist, who seriously considers this thought in its entirety.

One way to grasp the problem at hand is by employing Friedrich's (1970:177-89) notion of the "paradox of prediction." This concept is not entirely original as it is closely connected with Thomas' "definition of the situation" (Thomas, 1920:584; McHugh, 1968) and Merton's "self-fulfilling prophecy" (Merton, 1948). The paradox of prediction adds a new twist, however, in that it selfconsciously focuses its meaning on social scientific research and is encapsulated in the dictum, "All social research is in principle action research" (Friedrichs, 1970:181). More specifically, it holds that

The social scientist's perception of uniformities represents a new and unique event that by its very appearance must to some degree in the shorter or longer run operate to deny the full validity of the perceived sequence when he seeks to reconfirm at a later time the order apprehended earlier (Friedrichs, 1970:180).

The relation of the paradox of prediction to the work of George H. Mead is both striking and ironic. Mead was well aware of the power of language to influence, indeed to form, the minds and behavior of men, and, as I will now attempt to show, he was equally well aware (or at least convinced) that his own scientifically-oriented system of thought, his own truth as it were, contained the means within itself to bring itself to full realization. To put this hypothesis more plainly, the main contention of this essay is that Mead's thought exhibits all the earmarks of a grand scale, self-fulfilling prophency; that his view of social and psychological man contains the potential, once it has been communicated, internalized and acted upon, to bring itself into being in an ongoing, processual manner. The irony contained in this view of Mead will also be brought out by suggesting how Mead's better known interpreters have perhaps unwittingly stood in the way of what can be aptly described as Mead's self-fulfillment as a thinker and agent of social change.

MEAD'S PROJECT

The first point to be established is that Mead's so-called social psychology loses its importance as a self-fulfilling prophecy or program of action when it is extracted from the setting of his larger philosophical concerns. The means I have devised to accomplish this utilizes his best known, most widely quoted and read book, Mind, Self, and Society. Although this work was compiled posthumously on the basis of students' notes, it is still largely consistent with articles and books which Mead did write. This is at least true at the general level of analysis I intend to pursue. Moreover, given my concern with the effect Mead had on his sociologically-oriented contemporaries and subsequent generations of students, the great popularity of the book—seventeen printings as of 1970—is a point in favor of using it as a general reflection of Mead's thought. The importance of this book as an accurate and inclusive summary of Mead's thought has been duly noted by the book's knowledgeable editor, Charles W. Morris. He informs us in the Preface that the work is based on Mead's famous course called "Social Psychology" which "gave the foundation of Mead's thought. It was in effect Mead as scientist; it was upon this foundation that his philosophical elaboration and social participation rested" (Mead, 1934:5).

The truth of this assessment can be confirmed through a careful and thorough reading of the book and by comparison with Mead's other published works though as Natanson's cogent analysis shows, Mead's more sophisticated philosophical analyses are to be located elsewhere (Natanson, 1956). The fact that Mind, Self, and Society is essentially the transcript of a lecture course invites one to adopt something of a student's attitude toward its analysis, and for heuristic purposes this is precisely the approach I shall employ. "Let us pretend," as they say, that we are taking Mead's course in "Social Psychology" and let us further pretend that, as students, we wish to understand the course as one which states its premises, develops them and gets "somewhere" in the sense that it contains conclusions. I believe it is quite common for those of us who teach to have a "point" or "set of points" to our courses. It is considered good form to develop a course in such a way that we deliver our most general and most important and meaningful points toward the end. If this principle can be accepted, and I think it applies particularly well to Mead's course, then the final lectures should represent the culmination of Mead's thought on his given topic of inquiry. I believe this principle holds especially true for introductory or survey courses and Mead's "Social Psychology" appears to have been just this. It makes little sense, then, to follow the lead of others and lift the middle section of Mead's course, that on "Self," and consider this the "guts" of the course or the most important body of thought contained in the integrated set of lectures. On the contrary, one should prefer to look at the midsection as a means to the end, or the way toward the more important conclusions. Moreover, Mead's final lectures show this to be the case, for it is there that he brings home the lessons to be derived from his theory of the social self. In fact, in order to demonstrate partially that the conventional interpretational emphasis on self is misleading, I will deliberately omit any reference to the "self part of the course which the editors block off as lectures 18-29 (Mead, 1934:135-226). In a certain sense, what Mead has to say is more clearly understood without these refinements.

However, before analyzing the final lectures of Mead's course on Social Psychology I feel it is necessary to at least make some reference to a central theme developed in the opening lectures. This theme is Mead's unequivocal insistence on the "reflexive" character of "mind" or intelligence:

The evolutionary appearance of mind or intelligence takes place when the whole social process of experience and behavior is brought within the experience of any one of the separate individuals implicated therein, and when the individual's adjustment to the process is modified and refined by the awareness or consciousness which he thus has of it. It is by means of reflexiveness—the turning-back of the experience of the individual upon himself—that the whole social process is thus brought into the experience of the individuals involved in it, it is by such means, which enable the individual to take the attitude of the other toward himself, that the individual is able consciously to adjust himself to that process in any given social act in terms of his adjustment to it. Reflexiveness, then, is the essential condition, within the social process, for the development of mind (Mead, 1934:134).¹

Consideration of reflexiveness is an "essential condition" for any thorough understanding of Mead, for reflexiveness constitutes the key mechanism through which his prophecies are to be fulfilled. Without reflexiveness man becomes incapable of voluntary action which for Mead is largely synonymous with intelligence (Mead, 1934:95).

This theme of voluntarism is central to Mead's prophetic thought in that it permits social evolution toward "higher" or "better" forms of social organization through intelligence. Intelligence in this sense finds its origins in that most basic social institution of language as clearly indicated in these quotations drawn from lecture 13:

Language is a process of indicating certain stimuli and changing the response to them in the system of behavior. Language as a social process has made it possible for us to pick out responses and hold them in the organism of the individual, so that they are there in relation to that which we indicate. . . . Ideas as distinct from acts, or as failing to issue in over behavior, are simply what we do not do; they are possibilities of overt responses which we test out implicitly in the central nervous system and then reject in favor of those which we do in fact act upon or carry into effect. The process of intelligent conduct is essentially a process of selection from among various alternatives; intelligence is largely a matter of selectivity (Mead, 1934:97, 99).

In lecture 16, entitled "Mind and the Symbol," Mead reiterates the theme of voluntarism and gives it biological grounding by positing it as a feature of the human being's central nervous system. In this way he makes freedom, in the sense of being able to form and actively choose from a number of linguistically organized alternatives, a biological potential which is realizable through the social process.

Having expressed Mead's position on the issue of voluntary action I now wish to move directly to his concluding lectures on "Society" where he develops this Romantic theme of freedom in social context into a prophetic vision. In the concluding thought of lecture 32 called "Organism, Community, and Environment," Mead finally makes perfectly clear where his views on the social process lead: ". . . human society presents an end of the process of organic development. It is needless to say that, so far as the development of human society is concerned, the process itself is a long way from its goal" (Mead, 1934:252). From here Mead presents a series of lectures which serve to elucidate the components of his developmental or evolutionary view of human society, the goal of this process and finally, how this goal is continuously being realized. Lecture 34 or, "The Community and the Institution" gives schematic attention to these matters and the remaining lectures serve to fill in the details. Mead starts this lecture by introducing one of his most significant units of social structure or what he calls the "institution." Its importance can be seen in that it represents the social embodiment, as it were, of both self and mind, or, to use Mead's words:

There are what we have termed "generalized social attitudes" which make an organized self possible. In the community there are certain ways of acting under situations which are essentially identical, and these ways of acting on the part of anyone are those which we excite in others when we take certain steps. . . . There are then, whole series of such common responses in the community in which we live, and such responses are what we term "institutions." The institution represents a common response on the part of all members of the community to a particular situation. . . . Without social institutions of some sort, without the organized social attitudes and activities by which social institutions are constituted, there could be no fully mature individual selves or personalities at all. . . . Social institutions, like individual selves, are developments within, or particular and formalized manifestations of, the social life-process at its human evolutionary level (Mead, 1934: 260-62).

And then Mead follows this with a clear statement as to how reflexiveness or voluntarism fits into this dialectic of self and society.²

Human society, we have insisted, does not merely stamp the pattern of its organized social behavior upon any one of its individual numbers, so that this pattern becomes likewise the pattern of the individual's self; it also, at the same time, gives him a mind, as the means or ability of consciously conversing with himself in terms of the social attitudes which constitute the structure of his self and which embody the pattern of human society's organized behavior as reflected in that structure. And his mind enables him in turn to stamp the pattern of his further developing self (further developing through his mental activity) upon the structure or organization of human society, and thus in a degree to reconstruct and modify in terms of his self the general pattern of social group behavior in terms of which his self was originally constituted (Mead, 1934:263n).

What this shows above all else is that Mead's view of society (perhaps more properly called the social process) was open-ended. Mead was against dogmatism both in the context of religious beliefs in particular, and social values in general. The questioning and ongoing reconstruction of values through reflective intelligence was an essential aspect of Mead's view of social process. Moreover, he saw this continual reconstructive process moving in a predictable direction, that of the universal. That is, he believed that attitudes changed as institutions changed and believed as well that both were moving, historically and "rationally," toward the realization of ever larger communities.

Barry (1968) has noted this orientation in Mead's practical involvement with the multi-ethnic sociopolitical realities of Chicago but Mead's larger view prophesied a more or less inevitable evolution toward a universal social order. It was also Mead's position that reflective intelligence as an interactional process would simultaneously become ever more fully realized and developed. One could even say that Mead looked upon human history as one long and collective socialization process wherein the mind set he labeled the generalized other and the mean human capacity for reflective intelligence were continually expanding in a way which reflexively constructed and embraced increasingly larger collectivities of social actors.

It is part and parcel of conventional sociological knowledge about Mead to state the following: "Primary socialization ends with the formation of the generalized other within the mind of the child. With this formation the child has internalized both a sense of society, identity and reality, etc . . ." (P. Berger and B. Berger, 1972: 55-65). Any such view, however, represents a funneling or narrowing of Mead, for if we closely examine Mind, Self, and Society, we find that in Mead's view primary socialization in the above sense was a process which should never stop if society was to achieve its goal. All of this can be seen in the following passage which derogatorily likens anything less than an internationally oriented conception of the generalized other to the sense of community possessed by a juvenile delinquent.

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 as the community responds to him, he does not genuinely belong to the community, as the small boy belongs to a gang rather than to the city in which he lives. We all belong to small cliques and we may remain simply inside of them. The "organized other" present in ourselves is then a community of narrow diameter. We are struggling now to get a certain amount of international mindedness. We are realizing ourselves as members of a larger community. The situation is analogous to that of the boy and the gang; the boy gets a larger self in proportion as he enters into this larger community. In general, the self has answered definitely to that organization of the social response which constitutes the community as such; the degree to which the self is developed depends upon the community, upon the degree to which the individual calls out that institutionalized group of responses in himself (Mead, 1934:265).

To understand the implications of what Mead is getting at here, it is necessary to refer to a point brought out in the early lectures, the idea of the "universal." Lecture 12 centers about this concept and Mead's fundamental definition locates the universal as an essential and inescapable aspect of language:

Thinking takes place in terms of universals, and a universal is an entity that is distinguishable from the object by means of which we think it. When we think of a spade we are not confined in our thought to any particular spade. Now if we think of the universal spade there must be something that we think about, and that is confessedly not given in the particular occurrence which is the occasion of the thought. The thought transcends all occurrences (Mead, 1934:88).

Without much distortion one can equate this concept with what we now think of as the generic, or, with that kind of concept which is of prime importance in scientific research. Mead does not pay further direct attention to universals until lecture 34, the point at which we left off, but here the term re-enters the discussion as an essential component of his prophecy. It may well be that Mead's lack of attention to universals in the "Self part of Mind, Self, and Society has had a deleterious effect on the fate of his intellectual legacy. In any event, lecture 34 shows Mead paying extended and detailed attention to the idea of universal communities, particularly those involving linguistic discourse. The following passage clearly and unequivocally gives Mead's views on the subject:

We are apt to assume that our estimate of the value of the community should depend upon its size. The American worships bigness as over against qualitative social content. A little community such as that of Athens produced some of the greatest spiritual products which the world has ever seen. . . . I wish to bring out the implicit universality of the highly developed, highly organized community. Now, Athens as the home of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, the seat of a great metaphysical development in the same period, the birthplace of political theorists and great dramatists, actually belongs to the whole world. The qualitative achievements which we ascribe to a little community belong to it only in so far as it has the organization that makes it universal. The Athenian community rested upon slave labor and upon a political situation which was narrow and contracted, and that part of its social organization was not universal and could not be made the basis for a large community. The Roman Empire disintegrated very largely because its whole economic structure was laid on the basis of slave labor. It was not organized on a universal basis. From the legal standpoint and administrative organization it was universal, and just as Greek philosophy has come down to us so has Roman law. To the degree that any achievement of organization of a community is successful it is universal, and makes possible a bigger community. In one sense there cannot be a community which is larger than that represented by rationality, and the Greek brought rationality to its self-conscious expression. In that same sense the gospel of Jesus brought definitely to expression the attitude of neighborliness to which anyone would appeal, and provided the soil out of which could arise a universal religion. That which is fine and admirable is universal—although it may be true that the actual society in which the universality can get its expression has not arisen (Mead, 1934:266-67).

Here we have it: "That which is fine and admirable is universal" and "To the degree that any achievement or organization of a community is successful it is universal and makes possible a bigger community." Thus, that which is social organization or community is universal and therefore fine and admirable, with rationality forming the largest of all possible communities. At this point one is tempted to call Mead an American prophet of world community and as we continue on, Mead gives us even more reason to do so. When Mead looks about him to find evidence that universal communities are being formed out of the evolutionary social process, he finds and discusses at length the significant examples of international economic relations, universal religious movements of a missionary nature, and the social phenomenon of sympathy (Mead, 1934:282-310).

In these final or culminating lectures Mead frequently draws from the more properly social psychological sections of his course, most particularly his discussions of reflective intelligence in the context of self-other relations. But what comes through most clearly is his eloquent and extended insistence that the reflective and reflexive social selves, characterizing all socialized members of the human species, act in historical concert, as it were, to achieve the "inevitable" goal of human progress: a universal brotherhood of man engaged in ongoing communication. He speaks, for example, of how nationalism is but a transitional stage toward the achievement of international-mindedness and discusses some surmountable obstacles that remain in the path of the "Ideal Society." For the sake of brevity, however, I would like to quote just one further passage from lecture 41 which I believe summarizes Mead's pragmatic vision:

The ideal of human society is one which does bring people so closely together in their interrelationships, so fully develops the necessary system of communication, that the individuals who exercise their own peculiar functions can take the attitude of those whom they affect. The development of communication is not simply a matter of abstract ideas, but is a process of putting one's self in the place of the other person's attitude, communicating through significant symbols. Remember that what is essential to a significant symbol is that the gesture which affects others should affect the individual himself in the same way. It is only when the stimulus which one gives another arouses in himself the same or like response that the symbol is a significant symbol. Human communication takes place through such significant symbols, and the problem is one of organizing a community which makes this possible. If that system of communication could be made theoretically perfect, the individual would affect himself as he affects others in every way. That would be the ideal of communication, an ideal attained in logical discourse wherever it is understood. The meaning of that which is said is here the same to one as it is to everybody else. Universal discourse is then the formal ideal of communication. If communication can be carried through and made perfect, then there would exist that kind of democracy to which we have referred, in which each individual would carry just the response in himself that he knows he calls out in the community (Mead, 1934: 327).

What remains to be seen, however, is how this social ideal is to be realized at the level of practice as opposed to theory. It is at this point that we believe the paradox of prediction alluded to above takes on importance. If one, that is any one, looks upon mind, self and society in the manner of Mead—i.e., if one adopts Mead's scientifically-oriented view of social process—then one's own self has been automatically opened to the possibility of consciously realizing universal communities of discourse. That is, if a social actor conceives of his own self as a process which develops or grows or realizes itself only in so far as it reflexively enlarges its notion of the generalized other to incorporate all of mankind, then it follows that this same self tends toward achieving Mead's social ideal. The paradox of prediction is thus implicitly contained in Mead's social philosophy: Realization of the social ideal of universal selfhood is dependent upon the internalization of a rational (i.e., scientific) view of self as a relative, emergent,³ and dynamic product of social process in the manner described by Mead.

MEAD'S SOCIOLOGY

At this point the reader may ask what does all this have to do with the alleged narrowing of Mead's thought by his sociological interpreters? How, for example, have they deflected the prophetic element of Mead's thought? Several possible answers exist but the most important can be discovered by examining a frequently reiterated sociological criticism of Mead to the effect that he developed no extended theory of social structures and their relations. Herbert Blumer, for example, as Mead's best known sociological student and interpreter, has lauded Mead for reversing "the traditional assumptions underlying philosophical, psychological, and sociological thought to the effect that human beings possess minds and consciousness as original givens . . . ," but he goes on to say that, "in making his brilliant contributions along this line he did not map out a theoretical scheme of human society" (Blumer, 1969:61-62). This apparently apt criticism of Mead, however, serves as a significant factor in the "sociological retardation" of Mead's predictive thought and may quite possibly stem from an "occupational myopia" common to many sociologists. This is the sociologist's tendency to reify his own categorical depictions of social structure. What I mean by this is that many sociologists possess, or at least sometimes write as if they possess, something of a vested interest in the existence and perpetuation of group divisions. Is it not true, for instance, that class, caste, political party, sex and religious affiliation constitute but a few of the sociologist's most treasured and useful independent variables for the purposes of description and analysis? We tend to take such "things" very seriously and many of us would be professionally lost, in a cognitive sense, without them. But as Blumer states above, a problem arises in the sociological use of Mead's thought in that he pays little close attention to such variables as significant social entities. It is my opposing belief, however, that it has done and continues to do serious damage to the prophetic nature of the Meadian system for the sociologist (usually from the standpoint of symbolic interactionism) to attempt to affix his preferred collection of social structural realities as an appendage to Mead's thought. I do not think the sociologist's perceived need to do this can be legitimated by pointing to an oversight, or lack of concern for such structures, on the part of Mead. I believe instead that Mead looked upon such group categories as historically transient impediments to the realization of his formulated social ideal. Evidence for this can be gleaned from Mind, Self, and Society, by examining his comments on caste divisions in lecture 41 (Mead, 1934:318-19), but more directly applicable statements can be found elsewhere in his published writings. For instance, in a remarkable essay written near the end of his career under the title, "National-Mindedness and International Mindedness" (Mead, 1929), Mead showed direct concern for the divisive nature which group divisions—particularly those associated with nationalism—tend to create. In expressing this concern Mead spells out why he did not place what can be called long-range, positive significance on such "variables" in his scientific and philosophical description of evolutionary social process. In this article Mead rightly discerns how there is nothing quite as effective as a "just war" to create moral unity and communal solidarity in a given society. A common enemy serves as a wondrous remedy for waning societal morale. But he could not conclude that war was a moral good because of its apparent functionality. Instead, Mead speaks from the perspective of his own thought to suggest that the problem of nationalism, i.e., the ceaseless bellicosity and recurrence of wars, be replaced with international-mindedness as an ethically more desirable functional equivalent.

In explaining this position Mead clearly elaborates the conclusions to be drawn from his course on social psychology, and he does so with considerable eloquence and passion. Mead continually points to components of social structure in a manner which underscores their immanently social nature, describes their contribution to our apperceived individuality as social actors, and most importantly, demonstrates their existence as historically produced obstacles in the way of attaining his evolutionary social ideal of universal selfhood. He writes, for example, that:

Civilization is not an affair of reasonableness; it is an affair of social organization. The selfhood of a community depends upon such an organization that common goods do become the ends of the individuals of the community. . . . But there are still great gaps in our social organization, notably between our. producers and the social service which they perform. Here there are groups that have to assure themselves of their self-respect by fighting on occasions. The labor unions and the employers as well preserve their solidarity, that is their sense of common selfhood, by the mechanisms of hostility, that is by the threats of strikes and lockouts. Back of it lies the inability of the laborer to realize himself in the social process in which he is engaged. Where such a situation becomes acute, men, if they can, will always bind themselves together by hostile organizations to realize their common purposes and ends and thus assure themselves the selfhood which society denies them. Men will always jealously maintain and guard this mechanism to assure themselves to themselves. We will get rid of the mechanism of warfare only as our common life permits the individual to identify his own ends and purposes with those of the community of which he is a part and which has endowed him with a self (Mead, 1929:406-507).

This last quotation should give clear indication of the role our more conventional notions of social structure were to play in Mead's visionary system. Group affiliations were important in the short run but in evolutionary historical perspective they were to be viewed as temporary and transitional associations of incomplete selves, much as adolescent peer groups, or the "near groups" which delinquent gangs have been observed to form (Yablonsky, 1966), serve as stepping stones to membership in the larger adult community. In Mead's mind most of us remain socially and personally incomplete because of our various gang-like allegiances. To possess a fully realized self in the Meadian sense means to affirm and actively strengthen one's membership in the ideal community; where selves exist in an ever expanding nexus of isomorphic discourse; where international-mindedness is involved in the reflexive consciousness of all, and where "moral advance consists not in adapting individual natures to the fixed realities of a moral universe, but in constantly reconstructing and re-creating the world as the individuals evolve" (Mead, 1908:318).

One justifiable interpretation of the sociological import of Mead's message is that social progress is to go handin-hand with the disappearance of subject matter for a good deal of the "sociological enterprise" as it is presently constituted. Mead would have it that group divisions and interests would give way, through greater selfrealization, to more universal collectivities and patterns of thought. Thus, elaborate theories of social structures and their influence are neither necessary nor actually compatible with Mead's action-centered social philosophy. Mead urged that men seek, embrace and further that which they had in common; that men make themselves more fully human by transcending that which divided them through the creative and reconstructive process of reflective intelligence. But this is not to say that Mead's thought is therefore useless for contemporary sociology. On the contrary, Mead's vision is profoundly sociological and deserves conscious and due consideration by sociologists for its uncommon success in handling the problem of reification. But this is not all, for the direction and purpose of Mead's thought demonstrates striking similarity to the later work and legacy of the acknowledged master of sociological thought, Emile Durkheim. I am not referring here to the Durkheim of the "social facts" fame but to the Durkheim who wrote The Elementary Forms . . . and founded the Année Sociologique School of French sociology. This is not the place to explicate the commonalities between Durkheim and Mead⁴ except to say that the mature views of both thinkers converged on the idea that the scientifically-oriented student of human (i.e., social) behavior could not escape the revelation that, to quote Mead once more, "the isolated man is the one who belongs to a whole that he yet fails to realize" (Mead, 1926:389).

A somewhat indirect indication of this convergence can be gleaned from the work of Louis Dumont, a prominent French anthropologist who writes in the latter Durkheimian tradition. Dumont's apparent ability to represent this tradition is probably due to the fact that his mentor was Durkheim's famous nephew and chief collaborator in the Année Sociologique studies, Professor Marcel Mauss.⁵ Dumont has encapsulated this tradition in what he calls the "sociological apperception," a phrase which he describes in this manner:

. . . While sociology as such is found in egalitarian society (e.g., society ideologically based on doctrines of individualism), while it is immersed in it, while it even expresses it—in a sense to be seen—it has its roots in something quite different: the apperception of the social nature of man. To the self-sufficient individual it opposes man as a social being; it considers each man no longer as a particular incarnation of abstract humanity, but as a more or less autonomous point of emergence of a particular collective humanity, of a society. To be real, this way of seeing things must, in the individualistic universe, take the form of a revelation, and this is why I speak of "sociological apperception" (Dumont, 1970:5).

I believe there can be little doubt that the work of George Herbert Mead is deeply imbued with "sociological apperception." Indeed, I believe he carried it one step further in a philosophic sense and urged us to actively extend this apperception to include all mankind. If Mead can be faulted for anything it is for being overly optimistic about contemporary man's capacity for reflective intelligence. He may also have been unrealistic or naive in regard to the tenacity with which divisive categories and habits of thought hold and constrain the self-realization process of the ordinary man. We live in a world of racism, sexism, nationalism and a hundred other "isms" which serve to retard Mead's apocalyptic prophecy. Yet, to return to where we began, to the paradox of prediction, we, as sociologists, teachers and as proselytizers of the sociological apperception, could aid the prophetic legacy of Mead by internalizing and communicating the whole of his work and not just those segments which lend themselves to the research interests of a specialized group of social psychologists.

The discipline of sociology has done admirably well in meeting Weber's criterion that a properly scientific study of society must limit itself to the empirical investigation of the "Is," and leave all consideration of the "Ought" to theologians, metaphysicians and moral philosophers. To this end, sociologists have constructed an intellectual edifice which chronicles, catalogues and analyzes the social structural objectivations of man's past and present, cultural activity. Sociologists have traditionally devoted the bulk of their efforts to the explication of social structures and their interrelationships. Were one to count, for example, the number of empirical studies which sociologists have done on the purely structural aspects of stratification, kinship systems and organizations of varying size and complexity, I am sure the total would be quite impressive. The irony of this approach, however, is that it has served to create a body of knowledge which has diverted sociology from another of its traditionally received goals: the ascertainment of basic commonalities, or recurrent patterns in human behavior. Sociology's emphasis on extant social structures describes a world order composed of antagonistic collectivities of people which behave and interact in ways which make them appear singularly different from one another, at least when considered on a group level. Sociologists tend to speak and write quite objectively about categorical and statistically significant separations between groups of people. The irony manifests itself in a corpus of knowledge which purports to be the study of mankind but appears, on closer examination, to be the study of mankinds.

It is because of this, that I find the prophetic, indeed the teleologica!, elements in Mead's work so potentially important for the discipline of sociology. A more complete understanding of Mead by sociologists would aid in reorienting sociological inquiry and the dissemination of sociological knowledge, toward an examination and strengthening of the ties that bind as opposed to describing those social relations which presently divide. I wish to suggest that the view of social process (as opposed to structure) advocated by Mead poses a challenge which should direct at least some of our efforts beyond the sober and objective analysis of contemporary, social structural realities. In a qualified sense, Mead imparted a mystical vision to us, but one which emerged from a context of precise, empirical observation and analysis. Mead began from, and continually returned to, a scientific consideration of man's biologic nature. Upon this substratum he built a scientifically informed theory of the superorganic; of how the social structural realities of language, mind, self and society emerge, sustain themselves and change, in a context of historical evolution. The mystical element in Mead's thought tells us that man can use his reflective intelligence to transcend the antagonisms, animosities and open hostilities which presently characterize his collectively organized existence. Mead's position even goes beyond this, for he posits a personal faith in the inevitable nature of this transcendence toward achieving the mystical ideal of universal selfhood. Putting aside questions concerning the efficacy and validity of Mead's faith in the inevitability of this process, it must be emphasized in his favor that he describes how his prophecy shall come to pass by making continual reference to the scientific reality of man's biologically given capacity to symbolize. Socialized human beings possess the ability to create and employ symbols in a manner which far surpasses even the most remarkable feats of communication accomplished by those chimpanzees having had the dubious privilege of being raised in the homes of various psychologists and linguists. Man's exceptional ability to symbolize has meant that he lives in a world of linguistically formed values, ideas, intentions, motives, goals, alternatives and the like. Man, in effect, resides in a symbolic universe which is collectively maintained and changed through everyday discourse. In this sense, Mead was very much a "constructivist" in the manner described by Sampson (1975:8-20), for his mysticism emerged through a contemplation of how man's power to symbolize has increased through historical time. Mead observed that certain clusters of symbols, most notably those associated with scientific rationality, logic and the forms of economic and religious activity mentioned above, served the purpose of making the modern world an increasingly smaller place. Simultaneously, Mead observed that man possessed the potential to push this process to its logical conclusion; to transcend the multitude of symbol-encrusted identities which have historically divided the world's people by creating everwidening, universal communities of discourse; to achieve the mystical ideal of a universal community of human kind, an ideal which in itself could not exist were it not for man's potent ability to symbolize.

Once the larger contours of Mead's thought are viewed from this perspective, it is possible to conclude that his work contains two important messages for the creators and communicators of sociological knowledge. In the first instance he urges us to retain our scientific approach to the study of social phenomena. Mead strongly believed in the merits of scientific rationality as a truth-seeking, self-correcting mode of inquiry. But he also exhorts us to utilize our scientifically produced knowledge in a manner which draws us beyond the traditional limits of empirical inquiry and bring us into the value-ladened realm of everyday, practical activity as willing participants and symbolizers. Mead demonstrates, by the example of his own work, how we should examine and actively communicate those products of our researches which promise to facilitate the human reconstruction of a more desirable world order. Mead tells us to actively discover and promote these traits, attributes, ideas and capabilities which all socialized human beings do have, or can have, in common. He instructs us to appreciate the historical transience of the bulk of our myriad cultural differences, and to see how we can become a unified species on a social level in a manner which parallels our biological unity. In this way, Mead asks us to engage in a ceaseless process of self-development, both to our own selves and the selves of others—to make maximal and optimal use of the non-polluting, human resource called symbolic communication—in an effort to realize an international community where each person's generalized other incorporates the rest of mankind.

SOCIOLOGY OF RELIGION

Mead's intellectual legacy possesses particular relevance for the sociology of religion. His potential contributions to this specialty exist as implications contained in much of what has been stated above. The more important of these implications can be explicated and discussed by dividing them into two categories. One set of Mead's insights can be grouped and characterized as a boldly empirical view of religious phenomena, and another second set is describable as a humanistic and Christian-derived vision of the future society.

As an empiricist, or more specifically as a radical empiricist of the school established by William James (Wild, 1969), Mead offers many valuable insights into the nature of religious experience which make no appeal to metaphysical entities for their intelligibility. For example, in Mind, Self, and Society, he explained religious exaltation in this-worldly terms by describing it as a fusion of the "I" and the "Me" (Mead, 1934:273-81). Elsewhere, he described aesthetic experience in a manner which cast it as an interaction between selves and concrete physical objects (Mead, 1926; Miller, 1973:218-27). Mead's investigations, regardless of whether they tended more toward the social psychological or the philosophical, always began and ended with the concrete. This was true whether his topic was baseball, democracy or religion, and it is this fact which constitutes Mead's basic utility for the scientifically-minded student of religion.

Simultaneously, and more importantly within the context of this paper, Mead offers the more humanisticallyminded student of religious phenomena an empirically grounded vision of how the Kingdom of God—the idea which Niebuhr (1959) holds to be central to American religion—can be established through action. T. V. Smith made the comment that "Mead was more Christian than he intended" (1932:206), for he kept Royce's ideal of the "Blessed Community" before his mind's eye in whatever he said, did or wrote (Barry, 1968:188). At the risk of coining a potentially discrediting phrase, this aspect of Mead offers us a nascent "sociology for religion." This may seem a contradiction in terms to some, or a dangerous or perhaps pompous suggestion to others. Yet Mead's scientific social psychology is conducive to an ethics that is compatible with a core value common to most, if not all, of the world's religions.

In a remarkable little essay entitled "Science and Religion" (1938:466-74), Mead states that a basic assumption of Christianity "is that all men should belong to a universal society in which the interests of each would be the interest of all. This assumption Christianity has in common with the other universal religions" (1938:466). But Mead possessed little faith that the organized religions of his day were capable of accomplishing much toward this end. He chided the churches on more than one occasion, either for their tendency to emphasize preaching at the expense of practice or for having reduced universal ideals to dogmatic beliefs and cultic rituals (Mead, 1908a; 1908b; 1934:296). Mead's faith resposed elsewhere, for he sincerely believed that science and the social process could provide the "salvation of the self as a social being" (1938:476).

Mead exhorts us to act as scientists with a religiously informed mission. This does not mean, however, that accepting his invitation will cause us to be unscientific. Mead, like Weber (1958), saw science as an open-ended means for the clarification of given ends or values; neither conceived of science as a source of such values. What Mead asks is that we utilize the scientific method to continually redefine the means by which the universal value of world community can be organized. Moreover, he urges us to consider his social psychology, particularly the ideas of role-taking and the social self, as seriously as possible by actively seeking their ongoing realization toward the final end of universal brotherhood; an end contained within Mead's social psychology as an implicit self-fulfilling prophecy.

And who would seem better suited to take up Mead's invitation than those whose chosen profession is the scientific investigation of religious phenomena in societal context? Given his special interests and expertise, the sociologist of religion would seem a likely candidate for Mead's call to sociology for, or in behalf of, a scientifically informed religion.

Yet, as was argued above, the sociologists of religion need not stand alone, for all sociologists and all of humankind would have much to gain by rediscovering and embracing the whole Mead. As the philosopher T. V. Smith put it: ". . . . Mead's philosophy of prescriptions, of ideals, renders them always ingratiating candidates for actuality. Man can if he will; and he will if he knows; but he can know only through the concrete technique called science" (Smith, 1932:213). The only remaining question is are we, as human beings and as social scientists, willing?

NOTES

¹ An explanation may be in order for the relatively extravagant use of quotations in this essay. My reason for doing so is that I believe the common practice of quoting just a phrase or sentence from Mead has done much to obscure his thought. Mead's concepts and ideas are complex and interrelated and when a sentence or two are lifted out of context for the purpose of establishing a concise definition, it becomes quite easy to lose sight of the important intricacies and qualifications normally involved. An example would be the recurrent practice of defining Mead's "I " by quoting Mead's dictum, "The 'I' is the response of the organism to the attitude of the others" (Mead, 1934:175), but such a short definition is open to varying interpretations going far afield from what Mead intended. A prime illustration of this is given in Arnold Rose's (1962) depiction of Mead's "I " as an ordered and all-inclusive set of "me's"; a far cry from anything my investigations of Mead's thought on the subject have turned up. It is my hope that the generous use of quotations will alleviate the tendency to distort Mead's ideas by letting him speak for himself as much as possible.

² It is of some interest to ask in passing, why this superb passage was relegated to the status of a footnote by the editor of Mind, Self, and Society? It is surely not a minor digression on the part of Mead.

³ The meanings of relativity and emergence are given in the final lecture of Mind, Self, and Society. These terms are important to and consistent with the interpretation of Mead presented here but I have omitted discussing them because of the amount of space required. See Mead (1938:1934) or Natanson (1956) for explication.

⁴ This has already been done to a certain extent by Robert Nisbet (1974).

⁵ A brief but excellent account of the work of the Année Sociologique school and of Mauss' intellectual indebtedness to Durkheim is given in Mauss (1968).

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