George Herbert Mead (1863-1931): Hegel in Social Psychology
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume I, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
Life and Intellectual Context
George Herbert Mead is the most Hegelian of the American pragmatists. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes: “Mead’s early Hegelianism has been aptly noted… others recommend reading Mead’s mature work in light of Hegel.”[1]
Mead studied in Germany under Wilhelm Wundt—a nodal point in the development of nineteenth-century philosophy. Wundt, the founder of experimental psychology, was also the author of a monumental Völkerpsychologie (10 volumes, 1900-1920), which carried forward Hegel’s objective and absolute spirit under the name “Volksgeist” (spirit of the people). Through this detour, Hegelian thought entered Mead’s social psychology.
In 1894 Mead was brought to the University of Chicago by John Dewey, where he taught until his death. His lectures were published posthumously as Mind, Self, and Society (1934)—the foundational work of symbolic interactionism.
The Social Genesis of the Self
Mead’s central thesis: the self does not arise through introspection but through interaction. We become selves by “taking the role of the other”—first concretely (the child plays at being the mother), then in generalized form (the child internalizes the perspective of the community).
This is Hegel’s master-slave dialectic in social-psychological form. Self-consciousness does not arise immediately but is mediated through recognition. Consciousness of myself presupposes the consciousness of an other who recognizes me as a self—and whom I in turn recognize as such.
“I” and “Me”: Hegel’s Dialectic Within the Individual
Mead’s distinction between “I” and “Me” is a social-psychological reformulation of Hegel’s dialectic of subject and substance:
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The “Me” is the internalized perspective of others—the social expectations, norms, and roles I have taken on. It corresponds to Hegel’s “substance”—that which the individual carries within itself as objective spirit.
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The “I” is the spontaneous, creative response to the situation—the unpredictable element that never fully dissolves into expectations. It corresponds to Hegel’s “subject”—that which goes beyond given substance.
The unity of “I” and “Me” is the concrete self—just as, for Hegel, the unity of subject and substance.
One commentator puts it: “The dialectical relation between society and the individual takes place at the intrapsychic level in the polarity of ‘me’ and ‘I’.”[2]
The “Generalized Other” as Objective Spirit
Mead’s concept of the “generalized other” is the perspective of the community as a whole—the internalized norms, expectations, and meanings that are borne not by any concrete person but by society as such.
This is Hegel’s objective spirit in social-psychological terminology. The language we speak, the rules we follow, the meanings we share—none of this is individually invented; it is supra-individually given, yet actual only in individual enactment.
The development from “play” (with individual roles) to “game” (with coordinated rules) is the development from the concrete other to the generalized other—from subjective to objective spirit.