Neglecting this particularity, there is only so much that reasonably can be said on
the subject. But some things can be said, and the task here is to try and distil
elements in the common essence of institutional thinking. The institution in
question may be an organized social structure (such as the family, court system,
or church) or a social practice (such as marriage, rules of legal procedure, or
religious ritual). Here we are trying to sketch the coherence and signiWcance of
mental life inside any and all such institutions. The four points are obviously
overlapping; they probably have to do so in order to constitute a system for
appreciating the world. 1
- 1 What Institutional Thinking is Not
We might begin by observing what institutional thinking is not. It is not critical
thinking, as intellectuals use that term today. In other words, the central impulse is
not to question rigorously and challenge everything presented. It does not have the
‘‘critical’’ agenda to unmask, demystify, and expose the real from the apparent.
Against all modern trends, institutional thinking is not focused on a ‘‘hermeneutics
of suspicion’’ (Stewart 1989 ). On the contrary, institutional thinking oVers some
good reasons to be rather suspicious of unremitting suspicion.
By beginning this way, one risks burning bridges to any well-schooled reader.
The widespread assumption and teaching throughout academia is that the only
kind of real thinker is the critical thinker. A constantly questioning, skeptical
awareness is taken to be the very hallmark of intelligence. However, the truth is
that modern intellectuals, who are the sort of people who write about institutions,
are a peculiar social type with a particular outlook. They champion the idea of self-
consciously thinking about and questioning everything we are doing, while—just
like the rest of us—most of their lives areWlled with doing things from habit. Since
there is much about thinking institutionally that is not focused on thinking
critically about what you are doing, the conventional intellectual perspective subtly
but consistently devalues institutions. It does so by missing or holding in low
esteem one of their central operations, which is internalizing norms to the point of
habitual practice. As one of the more exceptional intellectuals put it almost a
century ago:
It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copybooks and by eminent people when
they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing.
The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important
operations which we can perform without thinking about them. (Whitehead 1911 , 61 )
1 Here I leave aside the question of whether or how institutions themselves might ‘‘think.’’ See
Douglas 1986.
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