A Classic with no Author. G.H. Mead’s Mind, Self, and Society

Founding fathers and classic texts are the main protagonists of a certain way of viewing the history, and of thereby defining the identity, of different disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities. However, the relationship between authors, texts and authorial-textual achievement is arguably a complex one, and it has produced a vast literature and heated debates over the last few decades. It is by achieving a classical standing that a text contributes to an author’s canonization as one of the discipline’s greats. But despite the agentic and individualistic connotations of the “author” concept, it is not always possible to trace exemplary texts back to a determinate author, who can be posited as their source. Texts can become classics in their own right, even when their authorship is loosely collective, doubtful or unknown. There can be, so to speak, a relative autonomy of texts regarding authors. Sometimes this results in equivocal situations and phony performances. Just consider the recent faux pas of India’s foreign minister, S.M. Krishna, who inadvertently read out the speech of the Portuguese foreign minister at a UN Security Council meeting. But the relative autonomy of texts vis-à-vis their purported sources does not only produce embarrassing political situations like the one described. It can, and often does, raise serious scholarly questions. It is one such case we discuss in this chapter. The text is Mind, Self, and Society, and the author is George Herbert Mead.Leverhulme-British Academy