An Institutionalist Approach to Liberaliam (1)

The aim of this paper is to present a new way of theorizing liberalist political / social doctrines. Formerly, most supporters of liberalism have constructed their political / social theories on the base of "methodological individualism". But here I try to found a discriptive / normative theory of liberal societies on the ground ofa sort of "wholism". A main idea of this paper is to conceptualize "personhood" as one type of institutions. I define "institution" as a expected pattern of actions, or a system of rules of conducts, and see "person" as the special type of institution, the institution enacted by one physical humane individual. And I make a thoretical modell of liberal society as a band of different types of institutions. In this modell, "person" is not a sort of "social atom", but have a very specific functioning.

論説 (Article)