Mead’s Conception of the Social Act: A Radical Interactionist’s Critique

During a eulogy for his former protégé George Herbert Mead, John Dewey stated that “his mind was deeply original . . . the most original mind in philosophy in the America of the last generation.” ¹ Dewey underscored this point with his admission, “I dislike to think what my own thinking might have been were it not for the seminal ideas I derived from him.” A few years later, Alfred North Whitehead concurred with Dewey’s opinion, stating, “I regard . . . the late George Herbert Mead’s researches as of the highest importance for philosophy” and adding, “I entirely agree with John Dewey’s estimate, a seminal mind of the first order.” ² Herbert Blumer, a former Mead protégé, goes further than Dewey or Whitehead, remarking to me over forty years later that Mead, along with Darwin and Einstein, was one of the three greatest minds in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. ³