The Social Magic of Nature: How Institutions are Stabilized in Reference to Natural Processes

Andreas Glaeser, University of Chicago

Social life exists in the flow of actions triggering reactions. Institutions form where such flows become recognizably self-similar across time. This can only happen where action-guiding understandings of various kinds lead to such replication. But understandings stabilize only where they are continuously validated which in turn depends on stable sources continuing such validations and so on. Institutions thus refer to each other like signs in Peircean semiosis which is the reason why I call this process institutiosis. Yet, there is no infinite regress. Stability in such a system emerges from several sources. One of them, political inertia, derives from the inability of most actors to change more than a few preexisting institutions at a time. Another, the one I explore in this paper, comes from natural grounding. It derives from naturally recurring processes in human bodies (e.g. the need for food and sleep) and the physical environment (e.g. gravity, the rotation of the earth around itself and around the sun).

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 29. Conceptualizing Institutional Stabilization