‘Domination’

Abstract

We owe a great debt to George Herbert Mead for, arguably, analyzing the ‘social act’ more profoundly than anyone else before or after him. While undeniably profound, his analysis, which rests on the principle of ‘sociality’, still suffers from four shortcomings that, to one degree or another, can be traced back to his downplaying the importance of dominance in social action. First, he cannot adequately account for the superordinate and subordinate roles that always arise during complex social action. Second, he can adequately account for the immediate impact of conflict on an unfolding social act, but not its ultimate origin in social action. Third, he makes people’s temporal orientation a constant, when in actuality, it varies depending on the nature of the social act in which they are participating. Finally, Mead obscures some of the basic analytical components of the social act, which he otherwise identifies brilliantly. These four inherent problems in Mead’s analysis of the social act are not only identified, but resolutions for each of them are also provided. It is ultimately concluded that Mead’s principle of ‘sociality’ must be replaced by the principle of ‘domination’ because the latter principle better explains complex human social action.