This page introduces the outline of Tokugawa Naohito's book

徳川直人、2006、『G・H・ミードの社会理論: 再帰的な市民実践に向けて』、東北大学出版会。

   Mead's theory is not a theory of "child socialization" in the primary group that makes the social order possible, but a theory of alternative identification of oneself with some problem, or finding one’s position in the secondary activity of construction.

   Published in 2006, after epoch-making studies in 1980s and 90s by Hans Joas, Mary Jo Deegan, and Gary A. Cook, this book had to start from textual investigation on Mead's writings and their social and historical context, though there were a lot of limits here in Japan. Relying on the academic articles written by Mead himself, other essays as an editor of an educational journal, reports as a member of some citizen committees, and some personal memorandums or letters contained in the George Herbert Mead Papers of the University of Chicago Library, I tried to read Mead from three angles: 1)Mead and contemporary social theory, especially in Japan, 2)Mead and American sociology and psychology in those days, and 3)Mead in American history from progressive era via the World War to the problematic of overlap of welfare state and warfare state.

   The result of this investigation has showed that Mead stood against, a) cultural conservatism in essentialist anthropology on human nature as well as in social philosophy on learned and uncontrollable mores and habit, b) the lack of the object world in the dyad model in pedagogy and moral education that results one-sided flow of, and therefore an implication of the monopoly of, the knowledge, c) that is, the dystopia world of technocracy implied by teleological social evolutionism, especially by reform Darwinian concept of history, or by the mind-body dualism in the social organic theory. His social psychology around 1910 was a resolution of these problems and an attempt of synthesis of the conflict between the instinct theory and copy theory, mind and body, and rationalism and empiricism. In 1920s, however, Mead, in his reconstructed social theory of the genesis of the self, the objective reality of perspectives, and international mindedness, fought against, d) the social psychological mechanism of the cohesion of in-group through the hostility to out-group, or through labeling to the other, e) mobilization of national soul in social control that transforms the social self into the media of narrow patriotism, welfare state into a warfare state that has power to plan and inspect the individual life. He re-located his notions on conversation of gestures and reflective self at the cutting edge of the public deliberation over against the paternalistic determination of life.

   Then, an important implication of his thought is a fusion of intellectuals and laymen, profession and client, researchers and the object person, and other dichotomous notion on the knowing. Talking and listening, reading and writing on social life, like interviews and fieldworks by sociologist, are efforts for the dialectic of experience and language, the contemporary counterpart of the conversation of gestures and an occasion for the genesis of the reflective self in Meadian sense.

   This was also an attempt of reconceptualization of the public social science conceived by Uchida Yoshihiko, a Japanese scholar in the history of social thought in economics, who tried to go along with the development of people’s social recognition.