By an institution I mean a pattern of motivation imposing restraints and incentives
on behavior. Its source is the free mind’s ceaseless revelation of possibility. The
political culture so created is embodied in a set of incentives and restraints on
political behavior. The political culture is not itself an institution, nor is political
behavior in itself. The institution is the behavior with the meaning given it as the
product of these incentives and restraints.
This concept of an institution directs attention to the nature and function of a
liberal constitution. In any liberal polity, its inherent pluralism will create a
complex of institutions in wider or narrower arenas of behavior, thereby creating
a need for an institution that orders the complex as a whole. The institution
charged with such a comprehensive task of coordination is appropriately called a
constitution. Proposals of constitutional reform need such an overall perspective.
A few years ago, for example, it seemed to me that Charter 88 ’s admirable concern
to relax Britain’s over-centralized system had become so one-sided that their
program, if enacted as a whole, would have quite destroyed the power of coherent
governance. The task of the liberal constitution, moreover, is not only coordin-
ation, but also integration. Incentives and restraints to facilitate and coordinate
liberal democracy are obviously needed. No less a constitutional imperative is the
integration that makes the nation more of a nation. The process of creative
advance, we may hope, is in constant motion; likewise its fulWllment in a more
perfect social union.
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