The Importance of Institutions

Contemporary political imagination is increasingly shaped by distrust of institutions. Parties, unions, universities, constitutions, parliaments, and courts no longer organize shared life as they once did, while the protection and regulation they offer are viewed with suspicion.

This institutional fatigue turns mediation into a synonym for bureaucracy, administrative weight, and the reproduction of existing power. Political parties appear reduced to machinery, unions represent only part of the workforce, universities grow more bureaucratic, constitutions seem impossible to change, parliaments become instruments of executive power, and courts act more as veto points than as checks and balances.

Two opposing responses dominate the debate. One treats institutions as a management problem that can be solved through reform, modernization, and adaptation. The other denounces every institution as an instrument of domination and calls for forms of self-organization that bypass them. Between managerial optimization and revolutionary rupture, however, there is a third possibility: understanding politics as renewal rather than absolute refoundation.

Institutions make it possible to connect generations and to reactivate the principles that gave them legitimacy. Democratic procedures are incremental, limited, negotiated, and sustained over time. Expectations that every mobilization should produce immediate results lead first to indignation and then to disappointment. Lasting change requires accepting the longer time frame of institutions, rather than demanding that every intervention bear fruit at once.