This is an impressively researched, clearly expressed, and well-argued book. One of its chief aims is to shed new light upon the life and professional career of George Herbert Mead (1863-1931), social reformer and longtime member of the University of Chicago department of philosophy; another is to show how Mead’s thought came to function as a significant source of ideas for the Chicago department of sociology, particularly for those of its members concerned with the study of social psychology.

Chapters 1-3 explore key aspects of Mead’s intellectual development, about which Huebner’s sustained archival research has unearthed a great deal of previously overlooked information. In Chapter 1 (“Public Speaking”), for instance, he tells us that he has been able to document “nearly 200 public speeches” given by Mead over the course of his career at Chicago; an analysis of these speeches leads him to conclude that Mead was “known in his own lifetime more widely for his public reform efforts than for his contributions to professional philosophy or social thought” [27, 28].

In Chapter 2 (“Laboratory Science”) Huebner gives us new information about Mead’s exposure to experimental research in the areas of physiology and psychology during his student days at Oberlin College and then at the University of Berlin. This is followed by an examination of Mead’s early work in the areas of experimental and comparative psychology at the University of Michigan and the University of Chicago. All of these discussions provide us with background that is helpful for a better understanding of Mead’s later contributions to social psychological theory.

Chapter 3 (“Hawaiian Sojourns”) offers a sustained look at the numerous trips Mead made to Hawaii in order to visit the family of his wife, Helen Kingsbury Castle Mead, and her brother, Henry Northrup Castle (Mead’s best friend from college days). As a result of these visits, the author notes, Mead gained considerable knowledge of economic and social conditions in Hawaii. He was thus able to speak and write occasionally on topics related to the history and social development of Hawaii, and even to accept an invitation from the territorial governor to represent Hawaii and speak on its behalf at the November 1909 National Land Congress meeting in Chicago.

Part Two of the book consists of two chapters related to Mead’s teaching at the University of Chicago. The first of these, Chapter 4 (“Lectures, Classrooms, and Students”), is based upon a remarkably thorough search of archival records having to do with the influence of Mead’s teaching on many of his students. Huebner also reports here on the mutual intellectual influence between Mead and such noteworthy students as William I. Thomas (later an influential professor of sociology at Chicago) and John B. Watson (later a prominent faculty proponent of behavioristic psychology at Chicago and Johns Hopkins University).

In Chapter 5 (“The Construction of Mind, Self, and Society”), Huebner explores factors involved in the creation of the posthumously published volume by which Mead is most widely known today: Mind, Self, and Society: From the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist (1934). Huebner here and elsewhere also mentions the other three volumes of Mead’s work published posthumously during the 1930s: The Philosophy of the Present (1932), Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century (1936), and The Philosophy of the Act (1938). But since these do not figure prominently in the subsequent influence of Mead’s ideas upon sociological thought, Huebner does not examine their composition or contents in detail. His account of the production of Mind, Self, and Society, on the other hand, lies at the heart of what he wants to tell us about the ways in which Mead’s thought came to exert a significant influence upon social psychological theory; his remarks about this process are therefore worth mentioning more fully.

Huebner uses archival research to show that within a month of Mead’s death in April 1931 there were already a number of proposals under consideration by Mead’s son and daughter-in-law (Henry C.A. Mead and Irene Tufts Mead) for the publication of various materials that might help to preserve and draw greater attention to his intellectual contributions. One of these proposals had to do with the creation of a volume based upon his course lectures and/or his writings on social psychology. Following the advice of Mead’s longtime colleague, Edward S. Ames, the Mead family asked Charles W. Morris to take on the task of editing such a volume.

Morris had been a graduate student in at least six of Mead’s courses during the years from 1922 to 1925, and he had written his Ph.D. dissertation under Mead’s direction. Following a period of teaching philosophy at Rice Institute (now Rice University) he accepted an invitation in early 1931 to return to the Chicago department of philosophy as an associate professor. When he arrived at the University in the summer of that year he found waiting for him, courtesy of the Meads, copies of a set of notes apparently taken by sociology student Stuart A. Queen in the course on “Social Psychology” Mead had offered in the autumn quarter of 1912. After examining this material, however, Morris convinced Irene and Henry Mead that they might find more helpful notes by writing to the best students in more recent offerings of Mead’s social psychology courses. He accordingly prepared and sent out a letter to a large number of Mead’s recent students, asking whether they possessed (or knew of any other students who might possess) good lecture notes from Mead’s courses. Responses to this letter eventually led Morris (in February 1932) to a set of notes taken by a trained stenographer in Mead’s 1928 course in Advanced Social Psychology. It was this set of “stenographic” and more or less “verbatim” notes (along with a second set taken by graduate student Robert R. Page in Mead’s 1930 offering of the same course) that supplied the basic materials upon which Morris worked during his spare time for approximately two years in order to produce what was published by the University of Chicago Press in 1934 as George Herbert Mead’s Mind, Self, and Society.

Huebner carefully examines the process by which Morris brought Mind, Self, and Society into existence, and in doing so he raises important questions about the extent to which this volume reliably reports Mead’s actual views. He points out, for instance, the limitations of the notes upon which the book was based, how the content and organization of the volume were shaped by editorial decisions Morris made in working with these notes, and how choices made by the editorial staff of the University of Chicago Press further affected the final result. Somewhat surprisingly, however, Huebner does not seem much concerned here with the possibility of determining specific respects in which the resulting volume might need correction in order to provide a more accurate portrayal of Mead’s key social psychological ideas.

I would like to suggest at this point that we can admit the possible limitations of Mind, Self, and Society without giving up hope of achieving a reliable understanding of the most important concepts and insights at which Mead arrived during his many years of teaching social psychology at the University of Chicago. We can respect Morris’s achievement in editing Mind, Self, and Society, but at the same time read this book with an eye critically informed not only by Huebner’s analysis but also by Mead’s articulation of his fundamental social psychological ideas in essays published in various journals during his lifetime. (See, for instance, those essays on social psychological theory reprinted in Mead’s Selected Writings, published posthumously in 1964.) A careful reading of these essays can help us to judge with greater confidence whether Mind, Self, and Society does or does not give us a reliable rendition of Mead’s social psychological concepts; it can also throw much needed light on such controversial matters as the nature of Mead’s so-called “behaviorism” and the confusing discussions of the “I” and “me” distinction found in this volume.

Part Three of Huebner’s book involves two final chapters dealing with the subsequent “influence and interpretation” of Mead’s posthumously published works—especially of Mind, Self, and Society. Chapter 6 (“Intellectual Projects”) offers an insightful discussion of the ways in which these works were employed in the teaching and writing of two of Mead’s most influential students: Charles Morris and Herbert Blumer. Both of these men, Huebner persuasively argues, saw themselves as “promoters and gatekeepers” of Mead’s legacy. And both saw themselves (each in his own distinctive way) as carrying on a joint inquiry with Mead and his ideas.

Chapter 7 (“In Reference to Mead, or How to Win Students and Influence Sociology”) shows us, by analyzing a large number of carefully collected references to Mead in various sorts of academic literature, that there has been a significant change in the reception of Mead’s ideas over time. What began as an interest appearing in journals of philosophy and psychology has been gradually replaced over the years with an attention to Mead’s ideas found primarily in journals of sociology, especially those journals concerned with the sociological approach to social psychological theorizing. Huebner locates this transformation (which he calls the “rise of a sociological Mead”) in the years from 1920 to the mid-1950s. And he gives much of the credit for its occurrence to the influence of two important Chicago sociologists: Ellsworth Faris and Herbert Blumer.

He shows, first of all, that there was a significant increase in the number of sociology-related references to Mead’s work during the period 1920 to 1930, and that this increase can be traced in large part to the influence of Ellsworth Faris. Faris had taken four of Mead’s courses as a graduate student at Chicago during the years 1911-1913, and he was later invited to join the faculty of the sociology department following the departure of William I. Thomas in 1918. Shortly thereafter, he took over the teaching of “Introduction to Social Psychology,” from which platform he championed Mead’s social psychological ideas and encouraged many of his graduate students to elect Mead’s course in Advanced Social Psychology. He also served for a number of years as associate editor and later as editor-in-chief of the American Journal of Sociology, and in this capacity made frequent references to Mead’s work.

One of the graduate students Faris steered into Mead’s courses during this period was Herbert Blumer. Blumer had earlier earned his masters degree in sociology at the University of Missouri, and he then moved on to the University of Chicago in the early 1920s in order to continue his sociological studies. At Chicago he was soon exposed to Mead’s social psychological thought in courses taught by Faris, and Faris’s influence led him to register in Mead’s Advanced Social Psychology course for the Winter term of 1926. Thereafter he also served as a research assistant for Mead during the Fall term of 1926 and the Winter term of 1927.

After receiving his Ph.D. in 1928, Blumer accepted an appointment as assistant professor in the Chicago department of sociology. And several years later, when Mead was hospitalized by the illness that was to take his life, he took over the teaching of Mead’s course in Advanced Social Psychology—a course he was to teach regularly for twenty years at Chicago until he left to become chair of the sociology department at the University of California-Berkeley in 1952. Huebner shows that Blumer, like Faris before him, soon became an influential champion of Mead’s social psychological ideas in both his teaching and his writing. Huebner suggests, for instance, that Blumer began to use Mind, Self, and Society in connection with his teaching of social psychology shortly after its 1934 publication [161; 301 n. 44]. And references to Mead began to appear in Blumer’s writing as early as his 1937 essay on “Social Psychology,” in which he first wrote of Mead’s ideas as foundational for the social psychological orientation he here began to call “Symbolic Interactionism.” Mead’s influence on Blumer is even more obvious in various essays the latter published toward the end of his career at Berkeley, essays in which he wrote more fully about the importance of Mead’s ideas for an adequate understanding of human social interaction. In this way Mead’s social psychological ideas (at least as these were presented in Mind, Self, and Society, and were understood by Faris, Blumer and their students) came to shape a sociological school of thought that continues to exist to this day.

Several additional features of Huebner’s book will be of special interest to scholarly readers: (a) It contains two carefully prepared appendices, entitled “George Herbert Mead’s Published Works” and “Extant Notes from Mead’s Courses.” The first of these offers the most complete listing to date of Mead’s published essays (including a number of previously overlooked items discovered by Huebner) and a good deal of information about papers that were originally presented at various conferences. The second contains a list of notes taken by students in a wide variety of courses offered by Mead early in his career at the University of Michigan (1891-1894) and during his long tenure at the University of Chicago (1894-1931). Huebner has located more than seventy sets of such notes, and wherever possible he identifies the title of the course involved, the date of its offering, the number of pages of notes available, the name of the note-taker, and the present location of the notes. (b) The book also contains a very rich set of supporting Notes occupying some sixty pages. (c) Finally, the book concludes with a list of the names and locations of forty-four “Manuscript Collections” consulted by Huebner during the course of his research, a bibliography of the many secondary sources cited, and a well-developed index.