Mead and Modernity: Science, Selfhood, and Democratic Politics

Filipe Carreira da Silva addresses the basic questions ‘How should we read Mead?’ and ‘Why should we read Mead today’ by showing that the history of ideas and theory-building are closely-related endeavors. Following a contextualist approach in exploring the meaning of Mead’s writings, Carreira da Silva reads the entire corpus of Mead’s published and unpublished writings in light of the context in which they were originally produced, from concrete events like the American involvement in World War I to more general debates like that of the nature of modernity. Mead and Modernity attests to the relevance of Mead’s ideas by assessing the relative merits of his responses to three fundamental modern problematics: science, selfhood, and democratic politics. The outcome is an innovative intellectual portrait of Mead as a seminal thinker whose contributions extend beyond his well-known social theory of the self and include important insights into the philosophy of science and radical democratic theory.