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Earlier this month in Southampton, while talking about Political Ideologies, I was asked what I meant by ‘institutions’. First of all, values and institutions should really be looked at together. To describe both, I think this quote is one of the better ones:

What do we mean by values and institutions? Values are “conceptions of desirable, influencing selective behavior” (Values, International Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences). A cluster of values constitutes a value system. Shared values imply shared conceptions of the desirable. In order to share conceptions of the desirable, of what ought to be, the group that shares those conceptions must also have achieved some shared perception of what is. Institutions I define here as commonly known rules used to structure recurring interactions and coupled with a sanctioning mechanism whose use will be threatened in case of noncompliance. We may distinguish various kinds of institutions according to their relevant sanctioning mechanisms: some rules are enforced by representatives of the state and are called external institutions … Other rules are enforced by mechanisms that work without resort to the state – such as, for example, through their effect on reputation – and are called internal institutions … (Source: Stefan Voigt in ‘Islam and the Institutions of a Free Society’, The Independent Review, Summer 2005)

Voigt went on to suggest that the core institutions at the base of free societies are (1) the rule of law, (2) constitutional democracy, and (3) market economy.

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Filed under: Freedom & Liberty