Piet Naudé | Michael Welker | John Witte, Jr. (Eds.): The Impact of Political Economy (Leseprobe)

48 Andreas Glaeser
from micro rituals, carried by at least two co-located interactants, to the world
financial system, carried by billions of globally dispersed people, and the global
climate, carried by all human beings together. Institutions’ temporal scope ranges
from the strategic cooperation of two partners for the duration of around of
cards, to the pre-homo-sapiens (roughly one-million-year-old) knowledge of controlling
fire. In spite of the fact that we tend to talk about habits, values, and
modes of thinking or feeling as properties of individuals, they are institutions,
since they all have to be grounded in ongoing encounters with other human beings
and other experiences in the world. 6 Building on the biological endowments
of homo sapiens (the capacities to imagine, to form language, to perceive, and to
desire, etc.), institutions mediate the particular physical, mental, and emotional
dependence ofany human being onothers as well as on the natural environment.
Unlike biological endowments, however—and herein lies their evolutionary
advantage—institutions can be reconfigured to reflect some kind of learning
that has taken place. 7
Ontologically speaking, institutions exist in the enchainment of self-similar
action-reaction effect flows involving at least two, but often very many, spatially
and temporally distributed persons. All who partake in making and remaking an
institution can be addressed as its carriers. What this means in the example
above is simply this: Amazon is Amazon not only because Bezos and all his
6
7
207–41. Both works build on Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction
of Reality (New York: Anchor Books, 1966); Alfred Schütz and Thomas Luckmann,
Die Strukturen der Lebenswelt (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1984); and Max Weber Wirtschaft
und Gesellschaft: Grundriss der verstehenden Soziologie [1922] (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr
[Paul Siebeck], 1972).
This follows from George Herbert Mead in conjunction with Ludwig Wittgenstein, and it
is backed up by empirical psychological research on people kept in isolation. See
George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self, and Society: From the Standpoint of aSocial Behaviorist
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934); and Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophische
Untersuchungen/Philosophical Investigations [1953], German text with English translation
by G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte (Oxford: Blackwell,
2009). For adetailed account, see Glaeser, Political Epistemics, chap. 3.
Thinking about the link between human biological endowments and institutional life
was pioneered by Helmut Plessner, Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch: Einleitung
in die philosophische Anthropologie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1928); and Arnold Gehlen,
Der Mensch: Seine Natur und seine Stellung in der Welt. [1940] (Wiesbaden: Quelle
und Meyer, 1997). Their general perspective has become very influential through the
works of Berger and Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality. For some contemporary
approaches bridging the biological and the institutional with special reference to
ethics, see Christopher Boehm, Moral Origins: The Evolution of Virtue, Altruism, and
Shame (New York: Basic Books, 2012); and Webb Keane, Ethical Life: Its Natural and
Social Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016).