Chapter 8, The Individual Human Being as a Category – A Conclusion and an Outlook, returns to theory. To this end, the chapter weaves together the results of the case studies and the theoretical and methodological considerations. The chapter, serving as a conclusion to the book, simultaneously summarises the book, revisits the issue of interdisciplinarity, and presents its results. It also discusses the book’s contribution and value added. Most importantly, it demonstrates how the results of the empirical case studies are relevant for IR theory and what implications for IR theory, IL scholarship, and the study of global politics can be derived from these results. Finally, the chapter outlines future research based on the book’s results.

The Conclusion begins by summarizing the extensive terrain surveyed in Chapters 2–5 on key concepts of sociality, temporality, (in)efficiency, and power, and aggregates findings on institutional origins, maintenance, and change. It then brings work under different conceptual headings into dialogue and identifies many opportunities for mutual enrichment across schools, traditions, and approaches. With respect to the endogeneity problem, our wide-ranging engagement with a number of literatures show it to present local problems, but not a general threat. Indeed, the four concepts together reveal institutional causal autonomy to be overdetermined across a huge number of conditions. Finally, the chapter holds no expectation of, nor does it advocate the pursuit of, a unified theory of institutions. Instead, it sees ample room for mutually intelligible work relying on a “fish-scale model of omniscience,” with unique specialties exhibiting just enough tangency with other work to sprawl continuously across the social sciences.