The fragile promise of institutions

Searle uses a particularly effective analogy. Material objects normally deteriorate with use. A shoe worn every day wears out; a shirt washed a hundred times gradually loses its texture. With institutions, the opposite is often the case. “Unlike T-shirts and shoes, institutions do not wear out through continued use. On the contrary, the continued use of institutions such as marriage, private property and money reinforces them, but ‘use’ requires that we talk about them, and this talking serves to maintain and reinforce both the institution and the institutional fact within the institutions.” Every time we pay for a coffee with a banknote, we confirm that that piece of paper counts as money. Every time we ask the owner’s permission before entering a piece of land, we confirm ownership. Every time a lecturer records a mark and the student accepts it as valid, both are reproducing the university institution that grants the former that power. There is no need for anyone to solemnly declare: ‘I recognise the existence of private property’, ‘I recognise the euro’, ‘I recognise the authority of Parliament’. This recognition is embedded in the practices we all carry out on a daily basis. Indeed, once an institutional system has stabilised, we do not have to constantly decide whether to accept each of the facts it produces. Searle uses the example of baseball. If we recognise the rules of the game, we do not have to vote each time to determine whether a particular hit counts as a home run. There may still be an epistemological problem: has the ball actually crossed the designated boundary? This is precisely why umpires exist. Similarly, within a legal system, we can discuss whether a defendant has actually committed a particular offence without calling the very existence of criminal law into question every time. Once the structure is recognised, it produces a vast number of institutional facts almost automatically. This creates a sort of self-reinforcing cycle. The institution makes certain practices possible. By participating in those practices, we recognise the statuses on which the institution is founded. That recognition allows the institution to continue producing rights and obligations. These, in turn, shape new behaviours. Creation, use, recognition, reproduction. And use once more. Language also plays an important role in this process. According to Searle, continuing to use the vocabulary of these statuses means contributing to their maintenance. When we call someone ‘president’, ‘owner’, ‘spouse’, ‘citizen’ or ‘creditor’, those words do not merely describe people’s characteristics. They evoke a set of rights, obligations, authorisations and expectations.

And this is why even political struggles can become struggles over words. Searle recalls how the feminist movement challenged categories such as ‘lady’ and ‘gentleman’, because they embodied a particular code of conduct governing relations between men and women. The Russian revolutionaries, on the other hand, insisted on the use of ‘comrade’ precisely in an attempt to create new statuses and dismantle the old ones. And when a word denoting a status falls into disuse, the social position it helped to define may also erode. Consider the term ‘spinster’, once even present in American legislation and which has gradually disappeared from everyday language as well. Of course, simply changing a word is not enough to abolish an institution. That would be too simplistic a conclusion. But the example illustrates something deeper: institutions need to be continually represented as existing. They are not objects that we have constructed once and for all and then left to function autonomously. They are realities that we reproduce through an endless number of small, everyday acts.

At this point, perhaps the most important problem for a theory of justice comes to the fore. If recognition does not imply approval, an unjust institution does not need to convince those who suffer injustice that it is just. It is sufficient that they continue to treat it as existing. Why should they do so? A particularly interesting answer from Searle concerns the way in which we perceive institutions. Often, he writes, people do not understand private property, rights, government and the distribution of power as human creations. Instead, they tend to regard them ‘as part of the natural order of things that are to be taken for granted in the same way as the weather or the force of gravity’. Inequality can thus take on the appearance of necessity. The king commands because he is the king, and those in a subordinate position obey because that simply seems to be the position that is rightfully theirs. In this regard, Searle refers to a famous observation by Marx, according to which ‘A man is king only because other men behave as subjects towards him. They, in turn, imagine themselves to be subjects because he is king’. The causal relationship is mentally reversed. What exists because we reproduce it ends up appearing as the reason why we must continue to reproduce it. We may fully understand that an institution is a human construct and may even regard it as unjust, yet still continue to uphold it. Searle gives the example of the distribution of property. An individual may regard it as unjust; they may even consider the very institution of private property to be unjust, yet feel that there is little they, as an individual, can do about it. This point is crucial. If everyone believes that the institution exists because others recognise it, and each person feels they are too insignificant to change it, collective recognition can survive even when individual approval has collapsed. It is a paradoxical form of institutional equilibrium in which many might wish things were different and yet, through their daily actions, continue to produce the very reality they would like to change.

And here, too, we gain a better understanding of what a genuine institutional crisis entails. It does not necessarily coincide with a collapse in trust. The deepest crisis begins when something breaks down in the circuit of recognition, when institutional statuses cease to be treated as effective sources of rights, obligations and reasons for action. For, as Searle goes on to write, ‘Institutions function only as long as they are recognised or accepted’. A government can survive even if millions of citizens detest it. A currency can continue to circulate amongst people who criticise the central bank. A university can function whilst lecturers and students are exasperated by its bureaucracy. The breaking point comes when dissent turns into a lack of recognition: when the government’s decisions are no longer treated as binding, banknotes are no longer accepted as payment, and university degrees are no longer considered valid qualifications. At that point, it is not simply trust in the institution that wanes, but the institutional reality that collective recognition had sustained begins to crumble.

It is here that the paradox of institutions emerges – their fragility and, at the same time, their strength. They are fragile in their very existence yet stable in their application. Repetition consolidates them, just as habit consolidates a gesture until it seems natural. A rule applied thousands of times, a status continually recognised, a procedure that everyone continues to follow – these acquire a stability that no one has individually decided to create and that no one individually can call into question. This is why even an institution considered unjust can endure for a long time. Not because everyone approves of it, but because each person continues, for different reasons, to behave in a way consistent with its existence. This is why the most interesting political question concerns not only how much trust we place in our institutions, but why we continue to recognise them even when we no longer believe in them. It is in the gap between the judgements we make about institutions and the practices through which we continue to perpetuate their existence that a significant part of their strength lies. And it is probably precisely there that we must look to understand not only why certain institutions endure, but also under what conditions they can truly be improved.

(*) Professor of Economics, Department of Economics and Business, University of Cagliari