ABSTRACT

It can be argued that the ability to state a problem is as important as the capacity to solve it. To that extent, Mead's conviction that the processes of socialization and reflexivity (which he called ‘inner conversation’) were necessarily intertwined was a breakthrough. It promised to provide leverage upon inescapable issues: how were ‘individual’ and ‘society’ connected? How did the social order enter into the constitution of the human being? How was the tension between singular impulses and social normativity resolved? In his responses, Mead never relinquished his belief that the process of socialization also entailed processes of reflexive reception and reflexive reasoning on the part of young subjects. This I consider to be his great achievement, despite serious doubts that his key linking mechanism between socialization and reflexivity, the ‘generalized other’ remains responsible today, as he himself came to question after the First World War. 1 Therefore, it seems a squandering of his patrimony that those forming the line of Mead's successors — Parsons, Habermas and Beck — should all have abandoned reflexivity in their accounts of socialization.