Why Do We Keep Coming Back to Institutions?

Abstract

The article examines contemporary philosophical and theoretical trends that lead to the dispersion and fragmentation of theories and research methodologies and even of the subject of inquiry. This process is dismantling the basic ontological distinctions that have long determined both the epistemological and the cultural characteristics of European society and science. These theoretical leanings have their own social and cultural roots in the rapidly increasing complexity of modern civilization. That civilization is relinquishing what Max Weber saw as a crucial distinguishing feature of modern society: its ability to comprehend the structure and functioning of the surrounding world. The author finds that one result is the emergence of a “new naivety” in which insurmountable difficulties in attaining rational understanding justify postulation of the ontological independence of actors, objects, etc., as well as the resurgence of various forms of metaphysics. The importance of an emotional relationship toward the world, which increasingly manifests itself as a universe of singularities, is expanding in step with the loss of a rational horizon for subjectivity in modern society. The historical perspective of the institutional approach has several epistemological advantages for dealing with these tendencies. The institutional approach maintains continuity with the project of modern historiography as such by concentrating on phenomena that have a comparable duration and sustainability and by facilitating examination of problems in the sociology of knowledge, for which a wide range of analytical techniques has been developed in order to analyze the interaction of institutions with different scales (for instance, within the framework of organizational institutionalism) among others. The historical analysis of institutions also has a significant practical value by disabusing us of a naive view of the world (including the natural world) as some kind of natural and unmediated given and by making us aware of the contingency of our historical existence. The institutional approach and modern historiography share a common mission as an emancipatory exercise in self-knowledge.