Institutions As a Mode of Historical Analysis Gail Bossenga

Institutions as a Mode of Historical Analysis Gail Bossenga, Elizabethtown College The debate on the origins of the French Revolution left historians in a bit of a quandary. The Marxist interpretation of the Revolution attributed the causes of the Revolution to “social” forces–class conflict--arising from contradictions generated in the means of production. The demise of this interpretation, however, left historians without a clear sense of how to define and study other forms of social power. The turn toward political culture provided a necessary corrective to Marxist economic reductionism, but it left the field without a clear way to connect cultural frameworks to social organization and practice. One way to address these problems is through the study of institutions. As scholars associated with the “new institutionalism” in the social sciences have contended, institutions are rooted in cognitive and normative frameworks by which individuals make sense of the world, and, at the same time, they are sources of resources that both constrain and empower people to act in order to realize socially-defined purposes. Institutions thus bridge the cultural and social realms in complex ways. Another reason for advocating the study of institutions is empirical in nature. The French Revolution was an institutional transformation of enormous scope, the greatest attempt to date in European history to overturn and rewrite the principles governing the distribution of power and resources of a society and to institutionalize those principles in new organizations and procedures. If, as the economist Douglass North has argued, institutions are “the rules of the game,”1 then the revolutionaries were attempting to be game changers of massive proportions. There is certainly nothing dramatic about calling for the study of institutions in order to understand the origins of the Revolution and its social, as 1Douglass North, Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 3. 10 Gail Bossenga well as political, dimensions. Most likely, this approach conjures up the books along the lines of Roland Mousnier’s erudite work, The Institutions of France under the Absolute Monarchy, a valuable reference work, but one whose interpretive framework was couched in terms of a hierarchical society of orders that was evolving, although it was not really clear how or why, into a society of classes.2 One problem with arguing in favor of institutional history is that, although institutions have played a central role in interpretations of the old regime, much of this history has not been considered institutional history as such. Rather, depending on the topic, it has been labeled social, political, or cultural history, or it has been subsumed under the historiographical question at stake, such as, was the French Revolution a “bourgeois revolution”?3 David Bien’s analyses of important institutions, including the army and venality of office, provided path-breaking insights into the workings of the old regime, including social mobility, intra-noble relations, state finance, and the failure of reform before 1789.4 Yet Bien never tried to define institutions as such as a historical methodology. Although historians often use institutions to explain broad historical trends, institutions are rarely granted explicit causal weight in their own right. In the Marxist interpretation of the Revolution, institutions came into play, but were viewed as epiphenomenal offshoots of deeper class relations. The parlements, for example, were seen as spokesmen for the noble class. Divisions between the parlements and other elitist institutions like the provincial estates, therefore, were defined out of existence as questions for further research.5 Keith Baker placed his study of the discourses of “reason, justice and will” within institutional contexts, but left the study of the corresponding practices of actual institutions to others.6 2Roland E. Mousnier, The Institutions of France Under the Absolute Monarchy, 1598- 1789, 2 vols., trans. Brian Pearce (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1979). 3In the early stages of revisionism, valuable studies were published of institutions, such as provincial parlements, bailliage courts, and provincial estates, but they were cited primarily as revisionist refutations of the Marxist interpretation and generally considered part of the new wave of “social” history. 4Many of his articles have been republished in two volumes: David D. Bien, Jay M. Smith, and Rafe Blaufarb, Caste, Class and Profession in Old Regime France: the French Army and the Ségur Reform of 1781 (St. Andrews: Centre for French History and Culture of the University of St Andrews, 2010), and David D. Bien, Rafe Blaufarb, Michael Scott Christofferson, et. al. Interpreting the Ancien Régime: David Bien (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2014). 5For one example of ongoing battles between provincial estates and parlements see Julian Swann, Provincial Power and Absolute Monarchy: the Estates General of Burgundy, 1661- 1789 (Cambridge, University of Cambridge Press, 2003), ch. 9. 6Keith Baker, Inventing the French Revolution (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Simona Cerutti notes a general tendency of “American imprint” to 2016 Institutions as a Mode of Historical Analysis 11 As a result, institutions have often appeared as inert or stable containers that receive and transmit signals from more important historical processes and agents. If not passive recipients of impulses from other forces, how might institutions be defined? This is a question at the core of the so-called “new institutionalism” that over the past decades became a major source of debate in economics, political science, and sociology. A quick survey of several handbooks dealing with this development in the social sciences reveals that defining institutions is about as easy as nailing jello to a wall.7 Definitions vary by academic discipline, and are shaped by the intellectual concerns and research agendas particular to each.8 Drawing on this diverse literature, I would emphasize three elements important to defining institutions. First, institutions involve a cultural dimension, for example, a “guiding idea” or “a set of rules, beliefs and norms.” Second, these institutional rules and norms generate recurrent, durable forms of collective behavior, or practice. “An institution is a relatively enduring collection of rules and organized practices,” states two scholars.9 Another cites the oft-quoted aphorism of Douglass North, that institutions “are the rules of the game,” and then asks pointedly, “or do the rules only become institutions when they are acted out?”10 Third, institutions are both endowed with resources and accumulate them. In an illuminating discussion, William Sewell, Jr. argued that institutional resources can be material--such as money, land, tools, and the like--that help individuals to produce goods, compete in markets, and accumulate wealth. Yet they can also be intangible, consisting of emphasize culture and discourse at the expense of social practice in “Normes et pratiques, ou de la légitimité de leur opposition,” in Les Formes de l’experience: Une autre histoire sociale, ed., Bernard Lepetit (Paris: Albin Michel, 1995), 127-149. 7 R.A.W. Rhodes, Sarah A. Binder, and Bert A. Rockman, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Political Institutionalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Glenn Morgan, John L. Campbell, Colin Crouch, et. al, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Institutional Analysis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Karl Orfeo Fioretos, Tulia Gabriela Falleti, and Adam D Sheingate, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Historical Institutionalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); hereafter OHPI, OHCIA and OHHI, respectively. As Mousnier observed, “this word [institution] has been used by sociologists in so many different senses that the philosopher-sociologist George Gurvitch was no longer able to make any sense of it and wanted to ban its use completely.” Institutions of France, I: xiii 8For example, John L. Campbell, “Recent Trends in Institutional Political Economy,” The International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, 17, nos. 7/8 (1997): 15-56; and Jean Blondel, “About Institutions Mainly, but Not Exclusively, Political,” in OHPI, 716-730. 9 James G. March and Johan P. Olsen, “Elaborating the ‘New Institutionalism,” OHPI, 3-22 at 3. The term “guiding idea,” is from Mousnier, Institutions. 10 Marie-Laure Djelnic, “Institutional Perspectives–Working Towards Coherence or Irreconcilable Diversity?” in OHCIA, 15-40, at 25. Journal of the Western Society for French History 12 Gail Bossenga things such as loyalty, esteem, or knowledge.11 Institutional resources thus encompass not only economic capital, but what Pierre Bourdieu has called “social” and “cultural” capital.12 As sociologist Richard Scott has observed, scholars treat the cultural, rule- like dimension of institutions--that is, their ability to shape social behavior--in three different ways: regulative, normative, and cognitive.13 Scholars stressing regulation see institutions as constraining or encouraging different kinds of behavior through rules, sanctions, and incentives. An example is the work of Douglass North who argued that if the institutional structure of a society provides incentives to piracy, that society will find itself overrun with pirates.14 One criticism of this perspective is that although it asserts that institutional rules

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