"We wished to be free to follow our individual thinking and feeling into an intelligent and sympathetic world without having to bow before an incomprehensible dogma or to anticipate the shipwreck of our individual ends and values. We wanted full intellectual freedom and yet the conservation of the values for which had stood Church, State, Science, and Art."

George Herbert Mead was an American philosopher, born in the late 1800s, a close friend of John Dewey and colleague of William James and Josiah Royce. Mead was basically a pragmatist who advocated thought over emotion when making decisions. Must have had a few run-ins with confused women who couldn't decide if he was cool enough for them or not.

As a modern thinker for whom process and evolution were central issues, Mead's philosophical roots are to be found in Hegel and Darwin. He understood human nature as social and problem-solving at its most fundamental level and the combined impact of these aspects of human nature would advocate that we have made some fundamental mistakes in our attempts to understand the present international situation. Labeled as: a challenge to claims of alienation; a reminder about our responsibility to attempt to address our problems; and a suggestion about how me might reconstruct contemporary international relations.

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