Practical Institutionalism
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Description
There are practical reasons to try to understand how institutions work in order to use them to help shape our collective lives together. Hobbes and many others have thought that problems of large and complex societies to pursue even widely shared purposes. A natural response to these "organizational" problems is to try to construct institutions that will permit a society to coordinate the activities of its dispersed and distrustful people. A great deal is known about traditional collective action problems and how they might be solved or at least mitigated. But, institutions can do more than permit people to coordinate their activities in order to achieve their goals. They can also help to create and transform the goals themselves and, beyond that, help transform the identities and self conceptions of the agents. To the neo-Hobbesian, these further possibilities are nuisances that make unnecessarily difficult the solution of collective action problems. If aspirations of the agents cannot be held fixed, it will be very hard to understand the sense in which a problem is "solved" at all. But, from a wider perspective, the wider potentiality of institutions offers the inviting prospect that new kinds of collective issues can be recognized and addressed. Part of the aim of this essay is to try to envision some of these wider opportunities.
Source Publication
Rethinking Political Institutions: The Art of the State
Source Editors/Authors
Ian Shapiro, Stephen Skowronek, Daniel Galvin
Publication Date
2006
Recommended Citation
Ferejohn, John A., "Practical Institutionalism" (2006). Faculty Chapters. 541.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/541
