Filipe Carreira da Silva

January, 2005

Despite decades of scholarship on G. H. Mead, we are still far from an adequate understanding of his intellectual edifice. Making use of the entirety of Mead’s writings, including numerous unpublished manuscripts, this article provides a more accurate portrait of Mead’s thinking. A system in a state of flux is perhaps the best description of an intellectual building comprising three ever-evolving pillars: experimental science, social psychology, and democratic politics. This article’s chief finding is that history of theory and theory building are related enterprises. Contemporary democratic theory, in particular, has much to gain from this historical re-examination of Mead’s oeuvre.