Peculiar institution

“ We shall probably see the idea of free organization carried far, and in every organization and every institution, private and public, there must, we believe, be some place for the services and the interest of all. ”

“ There is no group of (let us say) ethical institutions answering to domestic, industrial or professional institutions. Social control, as I shall show, is exercised through all kinds of instruments in turn—through religious, governmental and professional organizations, through amorphous masses of people, through individuals and through super-organic products, such as folk-lore, tradition, ceremonial poetry and works of art. A classification, therefore, according to the institution, organ or agency by which control is exercised will not be satisfactory. ”

“ The institution represents might, and also, perhaps, right, but right organized, mature, perhaps gone to seed, never fresh and unrecognized. New right, or moral progress, always begins in a revolt against institutions. ”

“ The organization of a society, whose institution shall serve as a bond to its members, for the purposes of virtue, happiness, liberty, and wisdom, by the means of intellectual opposition to grievances, would probably be useful. ”

“ To keep in view this general end, to ascertain the way in which the powers composing that social necessity act, and their variable ingredients, and to maintain that end in them and against them, is the work of an institution which assumes on one hand, to the concrete of civil society, the position of an external universality. ”

“ In an institution the chief thing to look at is the idea it represents—the primordial thought; for that is the human mould in which the human substance of the institution is cast, and as the sheep are filled "according to their pasture," so the institution is like the idea which controls its shape. ”

“ Nor am I thinking of any new plan or any novel kind of institution or any new agency; rather shall we do better to escape some of the excessive institutionalism and organization. We are so accustomed to think in terms of organized politics and education and religion and philanthropies that when we detach ourselves we are said to lack definiteness. It is the personal satisfaction in the earth to which we are born, and the quickened responsibility, the whole relation, broadly developed, of the man and of all men,—it is this attitude that we are to discuss. ”

“ It will be a revival in a higher form of the liberty, equality, and fraternity of the ancient gentes."
The institution of Government is in fact the evidence in social life that man has lost his inner and central control, and therefore must resort to an outward one. ”

“ The state becomes a larger institution, by deepening its hold on a subordinate institution which had grown up as private property under the law of survival and centralization, until it reached the point where organization tended to suppress the free movement of the persuasive principle animating its members. ”

“ The institutional idealistic philosophies of the nineteenth century supplied this lack by making the national state the agency, but in so doing narrowed the conception of the social aim to those who were members of the same political unit, and reintroduced the idea of the subordination of the individual to the institution. ”

“ If a Society for the Encouragement of Literature be instituted, when more institution is threatened, and less institution is necessary, than at any former period, such society will be a hot-bed for the cultivation of little more than hopeful weeds. ”

“ When, therefore, the instructed in general can be brought to recognize one social arrangement, or political or other institution, as good, and another as bad—one as desirable, another as condemnable, very much has been done towards giving to the one, or withdrawing from the other, that preponderance of social force which enables it to subsist. ”

“ If an institution were discovered to have the slightest defect in principle, or to have degenerated a little in practice, their first step was to abolish it entirely, and leave the replacing it for the present to chance, and for the future to their successors. ”

“ Here was formed the greatest institution of the time, the only one that survived till the Revolution, that preserved--in the discredit of all moral laws--the authority of one law, la parfaite bonne compagnie, whose aim was a social one--to distinguish itself from bad company, vulgar and provincial society, by the perfection of the means of pleasing, by the delicacy of friendship, by the art of considerations, complaisances, of savoir vivre, by all possible researches and refinements of esprit. ”

“ The French Revolution began with the highest strata of the masses, and the control of it passed on down from one to another of the lower strata, until it reached the lowest,—the mob gathered in the slums of a great city.
61. The mores and institutions. Institutions and laws are produced out of mores. An institution consists of a concept (idea, notion, doctrine, interest) and a structure. The structure is a framework, or apparatus, or perhaps only a number of functionaries set to coöperate in prescribed ways at a certain conjuncture. ”

“ For the body political is informed and denominated from the pars imperans, the governing part or head: therefore as a head of divine institution, authorized for the spiritual or pastoral work, denominateth the society accordingly; so a civil head can make but a civil society, and a head of man's making, but a human society. ”

“ We ask whether the universal institution will improve our (please God) temporary institution. Yet I have known many such questions. For instance, I have known a man ask seriously, "Does Democracy help the Empire?" Which is like saying, "Is art favourable to frescoes?" ”

“ Thus the formation of society as well as the creation of state, organisation of education as well as the cultivation of letters, the institution of religious practices as well as the foundation of institutions, in fact, all aspects of human life, are influenced and modified by the social and physical atmosphere in which man is placed, and vary with the varying circumstances that diversify it. ”

“ But, along with the progress of this tendency to unity, we perceive that society was constantly becoming more diversified in character, and its elements more distinctly defined. The institution of chivalry, the troubadours, and minnesingers had played their part. Besides those great political and social powers, the Church, the barons, the kings, and the free cities, new classes were rising in society, giving it greater complexity, and, by their diversified activities and needs, urging it forward to a more comprehensive and centralized organization. ”

“ Well, then, what if we tried to rise above the idea of class to the idea of the whole community, the State, and to find our centre of light and authority there? Everyone of us has the idea of country, as a sentiment; hardly anyone of us has the idea of the State, as a working power. ”

“ The social instincts of man tend to crystallize in institutions; even his common hopes and fears. An institution implies a division of labor. Hence, in each age and in each race men have been set apart as representatives of these hidden forces and devoted to their propitiation. ”

“ We have for ages formed a society bound together by our peculiar tenets. That we individually differ in conduct, and, therefore, probably in ideas, from our countrymen, they necessarily know; that we form a body apart with laws and tenets of our own, is at least suspected. But our organisation, its powers, its methods, its rules of membership, and its doctrines are, and have always been, a secret, and no man's connection with it is avowed or provable. ”

“ Their development is the result of the enterprise of our people, under operations of the Government and institutions under which we have lived. Even our people, without these, never would have done it. The organization of society has much to do with the development of the natural resources of any Country or any Land. The institutions of a People, political and moral, are the matrix in which the germ of their organic structure quickens into life—takes root, and develops in form, nature, and character. ”

“ An institution implies a purpose or sentiment of more minds than one, and a more or less permanent embodiment of it. “Of more minds than one,” because it is to fix the meeting points of minds that the external embodiment is necessary. ”

“ The really living totality,—that which preserves, in other words continually produces the state in general and its constitution, is the government. The organisation which natural necessity gives is seen in the rise of the family and of the 'estates' of civil society. ”

“ And who commands our life and regulates it? The nobles, the functionaries and all sorts of other people, not belonging to our class. From them come the laws, the newspapers, science—everything from them. ”

“ The important and interesting institutions in such a case, those institutions which fill a large angle in men's vision and carry a great force of authenticity, are the institutions of coercive control, differential authority and subjection, personal dignity and consequence; and the speculative generalisations, the institutions of the realm of knowledge, are created in the image of these social institutions of status and personal force, and fall into a scheme drawn after the plan of the code of honor. ”

“ This distinct public power is necessary, because a self-acting armed organization of the population has become impossible with the break-up of Society into classes. ... This public authority exists in every State. ”

“ Combinations of classes in society, united by the bond of a corporate spirit, for the accumulation of power, influence, or wealth, by the control of intercourse or trade, or the spiritual or moral concerns of society, unquestionably desire limitations upon the sovereignty of the people, and the existence of an authority upon which they can repose in security and confidence. ”

“ That ceremonial government has its special organization, just as the political and ecclesiastical governments have, is a fact habitually passed over, because, while the last two organizations have developed, the first has dwindled—in those societies, at least, which have reached the stage at which social phenomena become subjects of speculation. ”

“ If I am asked, what system of political philosophy I substituted for that which, as a philosophy, I had abandoned, I answer, No system: only a conviction that the true system was something much more complex and many-sided than I had previously had any idea of, and that its office was to supply, not a set of model institutions, but principles from which the institutions suitable to any given circumstances might be deduced. ”

“ For what is applicable to our wants, habits, and necessities as a community or state, must necessarily to some extent be determined from the nature and genius of our government and institutions. Or, in other words, 412to determine whether a particular principle harmonizes with the spirit of our institutions, we must look to the habits and condition of the society which has created and lived under these institutions. ”

“ The state is only a part of the organization of society in and for itself. That organization secures certain interests and provides for certain functions which are important but which would otherwise be neglected. ”

“ Ask we too the ages what they have done to develope the true theory of political organisation, to improve the mechanism of the social system, to impart practical wisdom to its ministrations, in order that the State may discharge its high duty to the citizen, for whose sake it exists, and whose allegiance it claims. ”

“ The whole institutional fabric was the outgrowth of the group of ideas and habits that belong to a state of society ignorant of and incapable of imagining any other form of organization than the clan held together by the tie of a common maternal ancestry. ”

“ Such a task, sometimes small in its details, but difficult and grand in its comprehensiveness, required that creative, organizing, building kind of statesmanship, which to large and enlightened views of the aims and ends of political organization and of the wants of society must add a practical knowledge of details, a skilful handling of existing material, a just understanding of causes and effects, the ability to compose distracting conflicts and to bring the social forces into fruitful coöperation. ”

“ They are the expressions in which it becomes real. As conflicting with the momentary inclinations of the individual, these institutions are a power which he obeys unwillingly; which he has to, or is made to, obey. ”

“ We may see the need of government in societies by what is visible in families, those lesser societies of which all public societies are constituted. How miserable would these little societies be, if all were left to themselves, without any authority or superiority in one above another or any head of union and influence among them? ”

“ The great institutions are the outcome of that organization which human thought naturally takes on when it is directed for age after age upon a particular subject, and so gradually crystallizes in definite forms—enduring sentiments, beliefs, customs and symbols. And this is the case when there is some deep and abiding interest to hold the attention of men. Language, government, the church, laws and customs of property and of the family, systems [Pg 314] of industry and education, are institutions because they are the working out of permanent needs of human nature. ”

“ Then, with regard to the phenomena of what are called constitutions of government, or the political systems of exercising public authority, I find numerous cases in which the force of an individual will and intelligence has been not only a great factor, but by far the largest factor in the production of particular institutions. ”