Mead, George Herbert (1863–1931)

George Herbert Mead was an American social psychologist whose ideas on the social nature of the human self exerted a profound influence on sociology, especially on the American sociological strand known as symbolic interactionism. Mead did his graduate training first at Harvard, and later in Germany (Leipzig and Berlin). After a brief experience in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Mead joined the department of philosophy of the University of Chicago in 1894, where he remained until the end of his career. Much like Berlin for Georg Simmel and Paris for Walter Benjamin, fin de siècle Chicago became a crucial context for Mead's intellectual life and an enduring object of his radical democratic civic engagement. Chicago was primarily for Mead a production site of manufactured goods and a ...