Reading the news means you’re bombarded with information. Most of the time, we use whatever cognitive schemas or theoretical frameworks we have available, but those can be either unclear, fuzzy, mixed, or not self aware. This is why having clear and coherent general frameworks help understand the world.
Having this as a motivation to read about broad political theories, I invite y’all to take a look at Welzel’s Freedom Rising. It has been incredibly useful to understand my personal context and the news I read about.
It stands along with Acemoglu and Robinson’s *Why Nations Fail *and North, Barry, and Weingast’s Violence and Social Order as general frameworks to understand the world (not to mention classical grand narratives like Marx’s). But even those texts are tackled head on by Welzel’s text. For example, Marx claims material conditions and social relations determine social values/ideologies. While this held true in the past, Welzel claims, it does so less and less because of globalization and the internet. Similarly, it is values that determine institutional arrangements, and not vice-versa, tackling head on the claim that it is institutions that matter most for freedom and prosperity.
I am quite aware of the dangers of getting married to a framework, but so far I think the way I’ve used it has been valid, and it could do the same wonders for you.
I can see how his understanding of institutions can seem reductive: he’s using right guarantees as a proxy for institutional enabling of freedom. If you understand institutions as organisms, then of course the “causation” that he’s seeking is “largely non-sensical”!
It’s important to note that the way Welzel is talking about institutions is probably making reference to a social relation, a set of social norms (as in Acemoglu and Robinson’s Why Nations Fail), and not to the organisms of the State. For example, it’s different to say “the institution of marriage” than “the organism of Congress”. So when Welzel speaks of institutions, he’s referring to a type of social relations where most people agree and police the enforcement of freedom guarantees. These become the evidence for institutional support of freedom.
As to the history of institutions, the Marxist in me agrees with you: institutions were the result of a deliberate design largely to protect the interests of the more powerful bourgeois. However, within that part of me, I don’t find that rights extend themselves with an ever-growing class of managers and eventually the whole population. Rather, there are either mystified rights or social demands. Mystified rights can be exemplified with how gig work like Uber can sound free and enticing, but is really a way of reducing costs for employers. So a mystified right would be establishing the legal category of gig work. On the other hand, social demands are the genuine class-aware demands that somehow make it into the State, protecting workers a bit from their hardships. A welfare state is an example of this.
This all sounds coherent, but we have to remember that this is the Marxist perspective. Many other theoretical perspectives propose their own method of analysis, their own causality and therefore their own history and predictions. And so, while —again— there is a Marxist in me, there is also a ‘Northian’, an ‘Acemoglu and Robinsonian’, a ‘Welzelian’, etc., and those promote views that are much brighter than the Marxist one. An exception could be the Acemoglu and Robinson one, because of how haphazard their view of causality is.
But besides that exception, societies can guarantee the rule of law; violence can be prevented and reduced through impartial judges and, when someone is found guilty, swift and assured punishment; medical systems can expand quickly and effectively to guarantee the right of quality primary medicine; primary education has been largely guaranteed as a right around the world in the last decades. However, you are onto something: rights aren’t uniform in the same way that citizenship is not the same for everyone (even though the legal categories may be the same for you or your neighbor). This is a reality that, depending on the framework that you use, will make an assessment and perhaps a recommendation.
I am inclined towards using institutions (as social arrangements) to reinforce the guarantees and protections that rights afford us. In other words, I would like to see a world where we all strive to protect each other. If it so happens to be through communes, I’m down. I’m also down if it so happens to be done through the organisms of the State, which is in fact how the right guarantees of health, education, and life (to name a few tangible rights) have historically been massively expanded. I do not doubt at all that someone would be able to cite examples of States that go against these guarantees, but historically those rights have been guaranteed through capable States.
I’m sorry if this is all a bit rambly; It’s 1am and here I am typing away. I need some sleep 😅. Thanks for your response and your thoughts! It was interesting to think about this.