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Institutions: Institutions are social structures that organize and guide human behavior. They can be formal or informal, and they can be public or private.
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Annotation: The above characterizations of concepts are neither definitions nor exhausting presentations of problems related to them. Instead, they are intended to give a short introduction to the contributions below. – Lexicon of Arguments.

 
Author Concept Summary/Quotes Sources

Liberalism on Institutions - Dictionary of Arguments

Gaus I 177
Institutions/traditional liberalism/Gaus/Mack: The distinctive feature of political institutions in the liberty tradition is that they authorize the use of force and can legitimately threaten and use force against citizens. Because the scope of legitimate force is so limited, political policies and institutions readily fail to be legitimate.
Gaus I 118
Justification: Within the tradition, political institutions that use coercion more extensively must bear an especially heavy burden of justification, one that is too great to justify a state that extensively employs coercion against its citizens.
Use of force: One familiar way of conveying the liberty tradition is to say that individual A may rightfully be subject to force by individual or institution C, if and only if that force will prevent A from harming B or will nullify some harm that A has already inflicted upon B.
Mill: This formula, deriving from J. S. Mill (1991 [1859])(1), nicely highlights purposes that do not justify the use of force: (a) C’s preventing A from harming himself does not justify C’s forcible intervention. (b) C’s preventing A from acting in some sinful or ignoble way does not justify C’s forcible intervention. (c) C’s preventing A from offending B (in a nonharming way) does not justify C’s forcible intervention. (d) C’s causing A to bestow a benefit upon B does not justify C’s forcible intervention.
Problems: As is well known, how such a Millian formulation works itself out depends upon such detailed matters as, for example, how one construes harm and what counts as an imposition of harm.
Personal freedom: Members of this tradition ((s) the traditional liberalism) hold that, even though some form of political authority is perhaps necessary and justified, citizens must always be jealous of such power, on their guard against it, be ready to condemn and resist its expansion and misuse.
((s) cf. >Civil Disobedience).

1. Mill, John Stuart (1991) On Liberty. In John Gray, ed., On Liberty and Other Essays. New York: Oxford University Press.

Mack, Eric and Gaus, Gerald F. 2004. „Classical Liberalism and Libertarianism: The Liberty Tradition.“ In: Gaus, Gerald F. & Kukathas, Chandran 2004. Handbook of Political Theory. SAGE Publications.


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Explanation of symbols: Roman numerals indicate the source, arabic numerals indicate the page number. The corresponding books are indicated on the right hand side. ((s)…): Comment by the sender of the contribution. Translations: Dictionary of Arguments
The note [Concept/Author], [Author1]Vs[Author2] or [Author]Vs[term] resp. "problem:"/"solution:", "old:"/"new:" and "thesis:" is an addition from the Dictionary of Arguments. If a German edition is specified, the page numbers refer to this edition.
Liberalism
Gaus I
Gerald F. Gaus
Chandran Kukathas
Handbook of Political Theory London 2004


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