Publisher's Synopsis
Drawing on a fresh synthesis of the writings of Charles Sanders Peirce, George Herbert Mead, and others, Wiley argues that the self can be seen as an internal conversation, or a "trialogue" in which the present self ("I") talks to the future self ("you") about the past self ("me"). A distinctive feature of Wiley's view is that there is a mutually supportive relation between the self and democracy, and he traces this view through American history. In finding a way to decenter the self without eliminating it, Wiley supplies an alternative to current theories of postmodernism, a much-needed closure to classical pragmatism, and a new direction to neo-pragmatism.