What Each Institution Solved, and What It Broke

An institution is the visible sign of an invisible substance — the container for something that cannot be contained. And its tragedy is that it can never fully hold what it was built to preserve.

— Paul Ricoeur

To understand what kind of institution is needed now, we must understand what the great institutions of history actually accomplished — not in the idealized form their proponents claimed, but in the concrete, flawed, historically specific ways that they solved the coordination problems of their era. And we must understand, with equal honesty, what they broke. We approach this history with neither nostalgia nor contempt. Every institution examined here solved something real. Every institution broke something real. And what each preserved, even imperfectly, is something any successor institution must find a way to honor.