Domination: The Missing Principle in Mead’s Analysis of Society.

Sociologists have always paid greater attention to Mead's notion of the "self" than to his notion of "society." To correct this imbalance, his analysis of society is critically examined. Mead is characterized as providing the quintessential "institutional" view of society because, according to him, language, the family, economics, religion, and the polity are the basic institutions around which a society evolves. In critically examining his analysis of society, the spotlight is placed on his answers to three questions: (1) how did our fundamental institutions originally arise? (2) how do they operate in everyday life, and (3) how do they change after their inception? Mead's answers to these three questions are not only found to be wanting, but better answers to them than he supplies are provided. The overriding problem found with Mead's analysis lies not with the five fundamental institutions identified by him as comprising society, but instead with the master principle identified by him as governing their operation. The master principle on which all these different institutions operate is not "sociality" as he contends, but instead is "domination," which I argue incorporates sociality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]