Preface

Summary

This collection faces two directions at once. Looking inward, it serves to showcase work done under the auspices of the Institutional Design Project, sponsored by and conducted within the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University. All of thèse chapters grow out of work originally presented at seminars and conferences of that Project, the bulk of them at a pair of conferences in July and December 1992. We are grateful to the many other participants in those conferences, and to the many other visitors to the Project over the years, for exchanges that have enlivened and enriched the intellectual life of the School. Such close collaboration among economists, political scientists, lawyers, sociologists, and philosophers is precisely the sort of thing that a research school of social science should stand for and hope to foster.

Looking outward, this collection serves as both flagship and sampler for the new Cambridge University Press series on Theories of Institutional Design. That series, like this book, will be insistently cross-disciplinary – looking to law as much as to political science, to history as much as to sociology, to philosophy as much as to economics. The thematic core underlying all this interdisciplinary effervescence is a concern with the role of institutions in social life, and the way in which societies shape and reshape those institutions in turn. Behind all that is a continuing quest for theories, normative as well as empirical, to guide as well as explain those important institutional transformations.

In its own formative period, the Institutional Design Project was well served by a highly talented administrative assistant, Annette Ritchie.