Social psychology, history, and ethics: Mead on international-mindedness

This article focuses on the ways in which Mead presents the relationship between psychology and international-mindedness in two articles – “The Psychological Basis for Internationalism” (1915) and “National-Mindedness and International-mindedness” (1929). While the analysis of the psychological dimension of internationalism is quite sketchy in the 1915 essay, it becomes far more interesting when he returns to it 15 years later by engaging with two extremely influential psychological interpretations of war at that time, those of William James and Sigmund Freud. Mead's standpoint on this topic becomes gloomier through the years, as his reflections point to the psychological difficulties of achieving international-mindedness, rather than to an optimistic anthropological foundation of internationalism. In doing so, he seems to partially adopt a psychoanalytical standpoint with regard to the problem of peace and war between “civilized” nations.