““Self and Society are twin-born.” Examine the statement of Mead.” (2015)
The phrase is Charles Horton Cooley‘s. In Social Organization (1909) he wrote that self and society are twin-born, that we know one as immediately as the other, and that a separate, independent ego is an illusion. George Herbert Mead did not coin it, but his Mind, Self and Society (1934) gives the idea its most rigorous grounding. Mead also qualifies it, and examining that qualification is the key to the question.
What the statement claims
- No self without society. Selfhood is a social product, not an inborn essence.
- No society without selves. Organised social life needs members who can anticipate one another.
- Simultaneity. Neither comes first; they develop together.
How Mead’s theory supports it
1. The self is born in interaction. The infant has a body but no self. Through significant symbols, the child learns to respond to its own gestures as others do. Through role-taking in play and game, it comes to see itself from others’ standpoints.
2. Society lives inside the self. The “me” is the community’s organised attitudes present in the person. Institutions, in Mead’s account, are the common responses of the community that each individual carries within.
3. Society depends on selves. Complex co-operation, such as markets, law and language, is possible only because members take the attitude of the generalised other. Organised society grows as the capacity for selfhood grows.
4. Selves remake society. The “I” answers the community and changes it. Every new self slightly redefines the social order that formed it.
Where Mead departs from the “twin” image
- In his 1930 essay on Cooley’s contribution to American social thought, Mead criticised Cooley for locating society in the imagination, as ideas persons hold of one another.
- For Mead, the social process comes before self-conscious individuals, both logically and in time. The process is the conversation of gestures among interacting organisms, and the self emerges within it.
- The twins therefore have a parent. Pre-reflective social interaction gives birth to the self. After that, self and organised society develop together.
An Indian illustration
In NALSA v Union of India (2014), the Supreme Court recognised transgender persons’ right to self-identify their gender. The Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019 followed. Years of hijra and trans activism, the “I” at work, reshaped the law. The new legal category in turn reshaped how many people could name and present themselves. Self and society changed together.
Critical examination
- Structuralists. Émile Durkheim (The Rules of Sociological Method, 1895) treated social facts as external to individuals and prior to them. Society outlives every self, so “twins” understates its independence.
- Conflict theorists. Mead’s society is consensual. Marxists and feminists stress that class and patriarchy shape selves unequally, so the twins are not born equal.
- Psychoanalysis. Sigmund Freud‘s drives suggest a pre-social layer of the psyche that Mead ignores.
- Postmodernists see the contemporary self as fragmented across many “societies”, not tied to a single community.
Conclusion
The statement captures Mead’s central insight: individual and society are two aspects of one social process, not separate entities. The more accurate Meadian formulation is that the social process comes first, and self and organised society then develop in continuous mutual shaping. That formulation is most convincing when it also accounts for the power that shapes both.