What kind of human being do our institutions assume?
Every society is built upon assumptions about
what human beings are. These assumptions may be explicit, as in political
philosophy, religious doctrine, constitutional law, or economic theory. More
often, they remain implicit in administrative procedures, educational systems,
labor markets, welfare policies, technologies, and cultural expectations[1].
They shape how freedom and responsibility are
understood. They influence who is considered independent, rational, deserving,
employable, competent, or capable of participation. They determine whether
vulnerability is treated as a shared human condition or as an individual
failure. They also affect how societies distribute resources, opportunities,
authority, care, recognition, and risk.
A political or economic system may officially
affirm equal human worth while organizing social life around assumptions that
favor particular forms of education, productivity, independence, communication,
or cultural identity. People who do not conform to these expectations may then
appear deficient, even when the real problem lies in the relationship between
institutional demands and human diversity.
This book begins by bringing these hidden
assumptions into view. Its central question is:
What does it mean to be human, and what should
this mean for the way societies and institutions are organized?
This question is both descriptive and normative.
It concerns what scientific research and human experience reveal about
development, identity, agency, dependence, cooperation, conflict, and meaning.
But it also concerns justice: which social and institutional conditions should
be protected if all people are to have a genuine opportunity to develop and
participate as equals?
The argument proceeds from a simple premise.
Before institutions can be evaluated only by their efficiency, stability,
legality, or economic performance, they must also be examined in relation to
the people whose lives they structure.
A Different Conception of Humanity
Modern institutions frequently presuppose an
individual who is rational, autonomous, informed, and capable of taking
responsibility for choices in relatively stable circumstances. This image has
supported important achievements, including individual rights, personal
liberty, legal equality, and protection against arbitrary authority. Yet it
offers only a partial account of human existence.
Human rationality is bounded[2].
Knowledge is incomplete and socially distributed. Identity develops through
relationships and cultural interpretation. Autonomy depends on education,
security, recognition, and opportunities to participate[3].
Human beings require care at different stages of life, remain vulnerable to
illness and loss, and depend on ecological systems they cannot replace. Even
apparently private choices are shaped by institutions, technologies, social
expectations, and unequal access to resources.
No single historical conception of humanity
adequately captures this complexity. Religious, rationalist, economic,
humanist, evolutionary, expressive-individualist, and social-constructivist
traditions each illuminate important dimensions of human life. Each also
becomes reductive when treated as a complete explanation.
An alternative requires an interdisciplinary
perspective. Insights from developmental psychology, social neuroscience,
anthropology, evolutionary biology, genetics, phenomenology, narrative theory,
relational sociology, and complexity theory increasingly support a view of
human beings as embodied, relational, context-sensitive, and continuously
developing.
This book describes that view as a process-based
conception of humanity and develops it within the broader framework of
relational-processual anthropology.
Human beings do not first exist as completed
individuals and only later enter into relationships. Their capacities emerge
through interaction among biological predispositions, psychological
development, social relationships, cultural meanings, institutions,
technologies, and ecological conditions. Identity is not an immutable core but
a temporarily stabilized and revisable pattern of experience, interpretation,
recognition, and adaptation[4].
This does not mean that people are merely
products of their environment. Human beings can reflect, resist, reinterpret
their experiences, revise their commitments, and influence the conditions in
which they live. Agency is real, but it is developed and exercised within
relationships rather than outside them.
Freedom should therefore not be understood as the
absence of all dependence. It is better understood as a socially developed
capacity to act, form judgments, pursue meaningful goals, and participate in
shaping one’s life. This is relational autonomy: autonomy sustained by
conditions that enable people to become agents without prescribing what they
must become.
The term human becoming refers to this open
process of development. It does not describe a final state of maturity or a
universal ideal life. It concerns the real possibility of developing
capacities, relationships, identities, and forms of participation under
conditions compatible with equal worth and ecological continuity.
From Anthropology to Normative Orientation
A conception of humanity does not automatically
generate a political program. Facts about human development cannot by
themselves determine which institutions are just. Normative conclusions require
interpretation, public reasoning, and defensible moral commitments.
Nevertheless, anthropology matters. Institutions
built around empirically implausible assumptions may systematically misjudge behavior,
allocate responsibility unfairly, or conceal structural sources of
disadvantage. A realistic account of human beings can expose these failures and
inform more responsible choices.
Several normative orientations follow—not as
logically unavoidable deductions, but as reflectively justified responses to
shared human conditions.
The first is equal worth. Human dignity cannot
depend on achievement, productivity, rational ability, independence, social
status, or cultural identity. Differences in capacities and circumstances are
real, but they do not establish differences in fundamental human value.
The second is developmental opportunity. Formal
rights are insufficient when people lack the material, relational, educational,
or cultural conditions needed to exercise them. Justice must consider what
people are genuinely able to do and become[5].
The third is relational responsibility.
Individual responsibility remains important, but people act within social and
institutional contexts that shape their options, incentives, knowledge, and
vulnerabilities. Responsibility must therefore be distributed between
individuals, institutions, and collective structures.
The fourth is pluralism. Human development
follows multiple paths. Institutions should not impose one conception of
identity, morality, family, belief, achievement, or the good life. They should
protect the conditions under which different ways of living can coexist,
provided that they respect the equal worth of others.
The fifth is ecological and intergenerational
responsibility. Human development takes place within natural systems and across
time. Institutions that secure present prosperity by undermining future living
conditions contradict the very purpose they are meant to serve[6].
These orientations establish a moral direction
without offering a closed blueprint.
Society as a Field of Power, Knowledge, and Meaning
Human becoming is always socially mediated.
Societies distribute not only income and property but also recognition,
credibility, security, exposure to risk, political influence, and access to
developmental opportunities.
Power is therefore central to the analysis.
Differences in authority are sometimes necessary in education, care, expertise,
adjudication, and administration. They become unjust when they harden into
domination, exploitation, exclusion, or unaccountable control. Legitimate power
must be limited, transparent, contestable, and capable of correction.
Narratives also structure social reality. Ideas
about merit, success, citizenship, growth, security, and responsibility
influence how institutions operate and how people interpret inequality.
Narratives can support solidarity and meaningful cooperation, but they can also
present historically created arrangements as natural or inevitable.
Emotions are equally significant. Fear,
resentment, humiliation, empathy, hope, and trust shape political participation
and social cohesion. Institutions cannot simply remove emotion from public
life. They can, however, influence whether emotions are exploited, suppressed,
or transformed through recognition, dialogue, and fair procedures.
Knowledge constitutes another form of social
infrastructure. Democratic societies require more than freedom of opinion. They
need trustworthy processes for producing, communicating, contesting, and
correcting knowledge. Science, journalism, education, public administration,
professional expertise, lived experience, and digital platforms all contribute
to the epistemic quality of society[7].
When knowledge becomes inaccessible,
strategically manipulated, or concentrated in unaccountable institutions,
democratic judgment deteriorates. Yet the answer cannot be technocracy.
Expertise is indispensable, but it must remain transparent, pluralistic,
contestable, and connected to democratic decision-making.
Institutions as Conditions for Human Development
Institutions are often understood as systems of
rules intended to direct behavior, maintain order, or achieve policy
objectives. This book develops a different emphasis: institutions are creators
of conditions.
They shape what people can realistically do,
which risks they must bear, whether their voices have influence, how they
encounter public authority, and whether they can challenge decisions affecting
them. Their quality should therefore be assessed not only by formal legality or
aggregate outcomes, but by their contribution to human development.
Five connected dimensions provide the book’s
principal framework for institutional evaluation:
- Basic
security and material foundations: access to the resources and public
provisions required for a dignified and socially participatory life.
- Equal
worth and the distribution of power: protection against discrimination,
exclusion, domination, and excessive concentrations of political,
economic, or technological authority.
- Relational
autonomy and developmental space: genuine opportunities to form judgments,
make choices, revise one’s direction, and participate in shared
institutions.
- Correctability
and epistemic quality: the capacity of institutions to identify errors,
receive criticism, incorporate different forms of knowledge, repair harm,
and revise decisions.
- Ecological
and intergenerational boundaries: preservation of the natural and temporal
conditions on which present and future human development depends.
These dimensions cannot always be maximized
simultaneously. Security may conflict with flexibility, participation with
speed, expertise with political equality, and present welfare with long-term
ecological protection. Institutional judgment therefore requires transparent
balancing rather than mechanical optimization.
Correctability in a Complex World
Societies are complex adaptive systems. Their
development emerges from interactions among individuals, organizations, technologies,
laws, cultural practices, markets, and ecosystems[8].
These interactions are only partly predictable. Small interventions can have
large consequences, while ambitious reforms may produce little effect or create
unintended harm.
This limits the possibility of complete
institutional control. It does not eliminate the possibility of responsible
design[9].
If mistakes cannot be prevented entirely,
institutions must be designed to discover and process them. Correctability
should not be treated as an exceptional response after failure. It should
become a normal and permanent feature of governance.
Correctable institutions make their assumptions
visible. They evaluate outcomes and distributional effects. They create
accessible mechanisms for appeal, participation, and criticism. They remain
open to new evidence and practical experience. They protect independent sources
of knowledge and countervailing power. Where harm has occurred, they seek not
merely to explain it but to repair it.
The Human Development Monitor introduced in this
book is intended to support this learning process. It evaluates societies and
institutions through multidimensional developmental profiles rather than a
single ranking. Its purpose is not to replace political judgment with
measurement, but to make neglected conditions, trade-offs, inequalities, and
long-term consequences more visible[10].
Democracy as an Unfinished Project
The democratic constitutional state is one of the
most important institutional achievements of modern history. Elections,
representation, fundamental rights, independent courts, legal constraints, and
public accountability provide essential protection against arbitrary power.
Yet democracy faces structural pressures that its
traditional forms cannot always address. Electoral cycles encourage short-term
decision-making, while ecological and technological developments require
long-term coordination. Economic and digital power cross national borders,
while democratic authority remains largely territorially organized. Citizens
possess equal votes but unequal time, security, knowledge, access, and
influence. Information abundance coexists with fragmentation, manipulation, and
declining trust.
A system may consequently remain formally
democratic while losing the social, epistemic, and ecological conditions
required for democracy to function.
The response developed here is not to abandon
democracy but to deepen it. The book proposes a polycentric and correctable
model in which power is distributed across institutions, levels, and actors.
Representative democracy is retained but supplemented by deliberative forums[11],
citizen assemblies, continuous participation, independent oversight, judicial
protection, epistemic safeguards, and organized countervailing power.
The democratic renewal proposed here does not
move beyond democracy but beyond the assumption that its present institutional
form is complete. It deepens constitutional democracy by extending equal
citizenship, rights, participation, public justification, and correctability to
new concentrations and scales of power. It does not refer to government without
democracy or to the replacement of politics by experts. It refers to democracy
moving beyond the assumption that its current institutional form represents the
endpoint of political development.
Democracy becomes part of a broader normative
project: creating and protecting the conditions for human becoming.
The Structure and Method of the Book
The argument develops through three main
movements.
The first examines competing conceptions of
humanity and develops the foundations of relational-processual anthropology. It
considers embodiment, identity, autonomy, empathy, morality, narrative,
culture, diversity, and human development across biological, psychological,
social, and ecological levels.
The second turns from human beings to the
conditions of social life. It investigates power, conflict, emotions,
narratives, epistemic structures, pluralism, inequality, and ecological
interdependence. It also develops a framework for assessing how social
conditions enlarge or restrict human developmental space.
The third translates these insights into
institutional and democratic design. It considers the rule of law,
constitutional protection, participation, representation, countervailing power,
access to justice, social security, care, education, housing, taxation,
economic organization, digital governance, ecological boundaries, international
cooperation, and responsibility toward future generations.
The argument unfolds through five parts arranged
in three movements. Part I develops relational-processual anthropology and the
concept of human becoming. Part II examines the social conditions—power,
culture, knowledge, inequality, economy, and ecology—through which human
development is enabled or constrained. Part III translates these insights into
criteria for institutional design. Part IV applies those criteria to the
renewal of constitutional democracy. Part V integrates the resulting proposals
into a polycentric and correctable democratic model and considers pathways of
implementation, stress testing, and revision.[12]
The method is deliberately interdisciplinary. It
does not claim that all disciplines use the same concepts or explanatory
levels. Nor does it attempt to reduce biological, psychological, social,
cultural, legal, and ecological phenomena to one unified theory. Instead, it
searches for a coherent framework that respects differences between disciplines
while examining where their findings converge, conflict, or require
translation.
This breadth inevitably brings limitations. Some
arguments will require further empirical examination, legal elaboration,
philosophical refinement, or contextual adaptation[13].
The framework should therefore be read as an open and revisable research
program rather than as a definitive theory or institutional blueprint.
An Invitation to Inquiry
This book asks the reader to reconsider familiar
categories: freedom without denying dependence, responsibility without ignoring
structure, equality without erasing difference, expertise without accepting
technocracy, democracy without treating existing institutions as final, and
human development without assuming unlimited ecological expansion.
Its central claim is both modest and demanding.
Institutions cannot manufacture human
flourishing, eliminate uncertainty, or determine the course of social
development. They can, however, create conditions that enlarge or restrict
people’s real possibilities. They can distribute power fairly or permit
domination. They can protect developmental space or close it. They can learn
from failure or reproduce it.
The question is therefore not whether a perfect
society can be designed. It is whether institutions can be made more attentive
to the human beings who live through them, more responsive to criticism, more
capable of learning, and more responsible toward the ecological and
intergenerational conditions on which every human future depends.
That inquiry begins with a conception of
humanity, but it ultimately becomes a shared political task.
Would you like to explore how a relational
understanding of humanity can transform democracy, law, the economy, and public
institutions? Click the link below to read the full book, Becoming Human
Together, and discover a new framework for building a more humane,
democratic, and correctable society within ecological limits.
[1] Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The
Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989);
Douglass C. North, Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511808678.
These works support the claim that social and institutional orders embody
historically formed assumptions about agency, identity, and conduct.
[2] Herbert A. Simon, “A Behavioral Model of Rational Choice,”
Quarterly Journal of Economics 69, no. 1 (1955): 99–118, https://doi.org/10.2307/1884852.
Simon provides the classic formulation of and the limits of fully optimizing
models of choice.
[3] Catriona Mackenzie and Natalie Stoljar, eds., Relational Autonomy:
Feminist Perspectives on Autonomy, Agency, and the Social Self (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2000), https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780195123333.001.0001;
Richard M. Ryan and Edward L. Deci, “Self-Determination Theory and the
Facilitation of Intrinsic Motivation, Social Development, and Well-Being,”
American Psychologist 55, no. 1 (2000): 68–78, https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.55.1.68.
[4] Iris Marion Young, Responsibility for Justice (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2011). Young develops a social-connection account of
responsibility for structural injustice that supplements individual fault and
liability.
[5] Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1999); Martha C. Nussbaum, Creating Capabilities: The Human Development
Approach (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). These works provide
the principal theoretical lineage for evaluating substantive rather than merely
formal opportunities.
[6] Will Steffen et al., “Planetary Boundaries: Guiding Human
Development on a Changing Planet,” Science 347, no. 6223 (2015),
https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1259855; Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change, Climate Change 2023: Synthesis Report (Geneva: IPCC, 2023),
https://report.ipcc.ch/ar6syr/.
[7] Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of
Knowing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198237907.001.0001;
Helen E. Longino, Science as Social Knowledge: Values and Objectivity in
Scientific Inquiry (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990).
[8] Urie Bronfenbrenner and Pamela A. Morris, “The Bioecological Model
of Human Development,” in Handbook of Child Psychology, ed. William Damon and
Richard M. Lerner (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2006), https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470147658.chpsy0114.
The bioecological model treats development as an interaction among person,
process, context, and time.
[9] Sandra D. Mitchell, Biological Complexity and Integrative Pluralism
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511802683;
Elinor Ostrom, “A General Framework for Analyzing Sustainability of
Social-Ecological Systems,” Science 325, no. 5939 (2009): 419–422, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1172133.
[10] United Nations Development Programme, Human Development Report 1990
(New York: Oxford University Press for UNDP, 1990), https://hdr.undp.org/content/human-development-report-1990;
Sen, Development as Freedom. These sources establish the multidimensional
human-development tradition from which the proposed monitor departs and which
it extends.
[11] OECD, Innovative Citizen Participation and New Democratic
Institutions: Catching the Deliberative Wave (Paris: OECD Publishing, 2020),
https://doi.org/10.1787/339306da-en. This comparative report documents the
design and institutionalization of representative deliberative processes.
[12] Elinor Ostrom, “Beyond Markets and States: Polycentric Governance
of Complex Economic Systems,” American Economic Review 100, no. 3 (2010):
641–672, https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.100.3.641.
Ostrom supplies the principal institutional meaning of polycentricity used in
the later democratic model.
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