(unknown to me, undergraduates George W. Bush and John Kerry were down the
street prepping for the later culture wars) the view of institutions became even
dimmer. Critical theory taught us that we were living amidst the ‘‘colonization of
the lifeworld by the system’’ (Habermas 1984 , 988 ). The duty seemed to be to rebel
against the system—another name for the Establishment, power structure, or just
plain institutions. Whether or not you let your hair grow long, any thinking person
knew that institutions represented the blighted life of mid-twentieth-century
‘‘organization man’’—the people ‘‘who have left home, spiritually as well as
physically, to take the vows of organization life, and it is they who are the mind
and soul of our great self-perpetuating institutions’’ (Whyte 1956 , 3 ). Institutions
were purely instruments of social control, end of story. Even before the arrival of
the immense modern power structures of industrial production, consumption,
transportation, the state, and media, the Romantics we studied in political theory
class had gotten it right. Institutions were about chains. The liberation mentality of
the 1960 s had already been given voice in Rousseau’sEmile:
Civil man is born, lives, and dies in slavery. At his birth he is sewed in swaddling clothes; at
this death he is nailed in a coYn. So long as he keeps his human shape, he is enchained by
our institutions. (Rousseau 1979 , 43 )
Needless to say, I was only vaguely aware of the paradox in all this. I was learning,
on one hand, to be dismissive of institutions as mere formalities of textbook
description, and on the other hand to be afraid of institutions as oppressive
structures of overweening power. Some very smart people, the 1960 s’ descendents
of the Romantic movement, were telling me to ‘‘raise my consciousness’’ and
see institutions as vehicles for ‘‘institutionalized’’ racism, sexism, consumerism,
militarism, and the like. Other very smart people, descendents of the Enlighten-
ment, were telling me that institutions were merely social techniques we invented
and reformed at will to meet our goals. In short, institutions were both the icing on
the cake of behavioral reality and the iron cages of social control.
The 1980 s saw the arrival of a ‘‘new institutionalism’’ in the social sciences
(March and Olson 1984 ; Cammack 1992 ). Political scientists talked about ‘‘bringing
the state back in,’’ which seemed a good thing for political scientists to do (Evans,
Rueschemeyer, and Skocpol 1985 ). Sociologists found that organizational theories
needed to consider institutions, and that too seemed a very good thing (Zucker
1987 ). Economists pondered anew the fact that economic actions might be embed-
ded in structured social relations (Granovetter 1985 ) and then pondered if the
‘‘new institutional economics’’ was really much better than the ‘‘old institutional
economics’’ of John R. Commons (Andersen and Bregn 1992 ). Some left the
fraternity altogether and started calling theirWeld socioeconomics (Stern 1993 ).
It seems to me that all of these ways of talking about institutions represent a
worthy endeavor occupying the minds of very erudite people. But if that is all
scholars are doing, it also seems to me that something important is missing. It is
732 hugh heclo