ABSTRACT
Habermas’s mature work argues that the most promising attempt to grasp the significance of social individualization is to be found in the work of George Herbert Mead. According to Habermas, Mead’s social psychology takes up the program of the philosophy of consciousness under naturalistic presuppositions and, in doing so, develops a materialist solution to problems concerning the self-reflexive access to consciousness and the genesis of selfconsciousness.1 Habermas’s reading of Mead, found most succinctly in his essay “Individuation through Socialization” (1988), modifies his early discussion of Hegel’s dialectic of labor and interaction (1968) in light of the ongoing developments in his critical social theory.2 Although the basic aim of his analysis remains the same in both essays, his later argument is a more nuanced account with a richly developed array of psychological and sociological concepts absent in his earlier interactive reading of Hegel.
