The author discusses the significance of G. H. Mead's social psychology to Habermas's social thought. Two streams of the American pragmatism - the analytic philosophy of language and the behaviorist psychological theory - are united in Mead to criticize the philosophy of conscience. In spite of naming its theory as ''social behaviorism'', Mead breaks with classical behaviorism in so far as he emphasizes the individual's internal experience and presupposes the ''social whole'' in it. Finally, the article shows how the theory of communicative action claims to incorporate and, at the same time, to overcome that approach.
Theory of communicative action; social psychology and pragmatism; G. H. Mead