George Herbert Mead

Born February 27, 1863, Mead spent most of his career at the University of Chicago, working at the intersection of philosophy, sociology, and psychology. He became one of the key architects of pragmatism, the distinctly American school that treated ideas as tools rather than mirrors. His lectures sketched what would become symbolic interactionism — the theory that meaning and identity arise through social interaction, that the mind is a social product. He died April 26, 1931, leaving no major published work; students assembled his lectures posthumously. His influence on the Chicago School of S…