printMead’s Concept of Political Institutions:
Stability and Transformability
Baranov A.I.
Postgraduate Student of Department of General Sociology, HSE University, Moscow, Russia; Lecturer at the Department of Theoretical Sociology and Epistemology of the Faculty of Philosophy and Sociology of the Institute of Social Sciences, RANEPA, Moscow, Russia tohax100@gmail.com
Baranov A.I. Mead’s Concept of Political Institutions: Stability and Transformability. Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniya [Sociological Studies]. 2026. No 9. P. 69-80
This paper examines the implications of George Herbert Mead’s conception of political institutions in the context of the problem of social change. The problem lies in how the modern governmental institution combines stability and transformative capacity. Mead’s concept of time provides a general framework for understanding change, expressed in sociality as a phase of adjustment. This phase, as a stage between the old and the new system, arises as a result of an emergent event that signals a disturbance of the universal order. In human conduct, sociality takes the form of conscious problem-solving. The conscious social problem-solving expresses Mead’s vision of social evolution as a dual process of reconstruction of Self and social reconstruction. A special case of the relationship between the two sides of reconstruction is the process of institutional transformation. The incorporated revolutionism of modern political institutions makes transformative capacity a basic feature of their existence. Their ability to delay action is aimed at harmonizing private interests and turning them into a common interest. However, the combination of two properties, incorporated revolutionism and the ability to constrain action, shows the incompleteness of institutional transformation as a form of social evolution. While political institutions serve as “tools and implements of the community” and substitute for the “immediate social interrelationship”, they do not fully guarantee natural rights, the origins of which lie in the common interests of society. A tacit implication of Mead’s theory is that the incorporated revolutionism of modern governmental institutions enables them to acquire new resources of stability by constraining human activity.
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