The human condition teems with institutions, yet scholarly attention ebbs and flows, and scientific progress proceeds unevenly. After almost half a century of “new institutionalisms,” the time has come to take stock of the vast literature, and to identify existing strengths and new opportunities. Building on dozens of conceptions of institutions from across the social sciences, Theories of Institutions defines them as “intertemporal social arrangements that shape human relations in support of particular values.” By definition, institutions endure and institutions are intersubjective. But they are also consequential, impacting aggregate human welfare and very often shaping distributional outcomes. Setting up key concepts of temporality, sociality, (in)efficiency, and power, on which the heart of the book focuses, the Introduction also articulates a set of common questions around institutional origins, maintenance, and change to be addressed throughout. Such analysis promises to shed new light on the dual nature of institutions as human constructs and human constraints, and to identify promising avenues for interdisciplinary dialogue.

Incentives to attend parliament should have been common to both the French and the English nobility . Yet only the English nobility ended up being regularly involved in parliamentary proceedings. Their presence was fundamental for functional fusion and institutional layering to occur. Only where the nobility was compelled to attend parliament, especially in connection to its judicial functions, did the crown have a regular forum to raise taxation. Justice provided the regularity that taxation did not, allowing the institution to consolidate. Conversely, when the most powerful groups were regularly present in a central institution, they were able to solve their collective action problem and cooperate to oppose the crown. The chapter thus shows that the capacity of the English crown to compel nobles for judicial and political service was greater than that of France. The point is further established through the literature on Legal Origins, which explains the divergence of Common from Civil Law, as well as by an assessment of the remarkable level of conscription of English subjects to perform judicial functions that were disbursed by paid officials in France.