Becoming Mead by Daniel R. Huebner;

Author:Daniel R. Huebner; [Huebner, Daniel R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2014-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 7.2. Citations by year separated by relation of author to Mead.

Source: Data compiled by author.

As in previous periods there is a large body of informal citations (107 during this decade), which make no reference to Mead’s published work. Part of this group of citations comes from Blumer, Young, Morris, and the like, who promoted Mead in their reviews, but that particular strategy remained almost exclusively the practice of a small group of Mead’s students. In reviews written by authors who were not his students or colleagues, Mead was mentioned almost exclusively because he was discussed already in the book under review. The books that caused individuals without a direct connection to Mead to refer to him were themselves primarily authored by Mead’s former students, including Fay B. Karpf’s American Social Psychology (1932), Charles Morris’s Six Theories of Mind (1932), T. V. Smith’s Beyond Conscience (1934) and Ellsworth Faris’s The Nature of Human Nature (1937c).21 This indicates that in addition to the proliferation of literature commenting on Mead there was an emerging body of commentary upon the commentary on Mead—an additional degree of separation of the discourse from the personal social relationships that had defined it before. However, there was not merely a “disembedding” of Mead’s work from the context of his personal relations; rather a mediated relationship developed whereby his philosophy was available to the general intellectual public through the interpretation of those who knew him personally.

Mead’s students and colleagues continued to occupy a particular position in this ecology of published references to him. One remarkable aspect of this is that those individuals who personally knew Mead were more likely to refer to Mind, Self, and Society in this period immediately after its publication than were those without direct relationship to him. This fact seems rather counterintuitive given that as former students many of them would not have had a need to rely on the volume for substantive knowledge of Mead’s philosophy. But these posthumous volumes, especially Mind, Self, and Society, did give a definite textual warrant for their claims about Mead. Where previously Ellsworth Faris (1926b) and Charles Morris (1927) could ascribe the notion of “taking the role of the other” only to Mead as a person, for example, they and many others could later cite chapter and verse of Mind, Self, and Society for the concept.

The prevalence of citations to Mind, Self, and Society by former colleagues and students is probably driven in large part by the fact that those who had known Mead personally made up the largest single group of purchasers of the volume in its initial release, a fact verifiable in extant records. In order to ensure the financial viability of the publication of Mind, Self, and Society the University of Chicago Press had solicited advanced subscriptions to the book and kept complete records of all those subscriptions, a topic discussed in chapter 5.22 Of the 243 subscriptions pledged, only 44 are not directly identifiable as a library collection (52), a bookseller (20), a colleague, close friend, or relative of Mead (13), or one of his students (111).

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