COURSE DESCRIPTION

Institutions permeate our everyday lives, be they economic, political, or legal. They are part of the governance of modern societies and enframe the behaviour of individuals and communities. The scholarly study of institutions has seen a resurgence in the last thirty years, leading to an “institutional turn” in the social sciences. It is therefore not surprising that many of the Nobel Prize Winners in Economics have been scholars of institutions, such as Douglas North, Ronald Coase, Elinor Ostrom, Gunnar Myrdal, Amartya Sen, and, most recently, Daren Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson.

The study of institutions has been shaped by various scholars trained in history, economics, political science, sociology, anthropology, and law. However, one of the defining traits of these scholars is their ability to get outside their disciplinary silos and engage in interdisciplinary research. But before that, they have gained a solid foundation in their own disciplines to be able to engage with other disciplines later.

This course lays the foundation for students of sociology/anthropology to engage with the study of institutions by focusing on two primary institutions of modernity i.e. the State and its legal apparatus, by investigating how social structures and everyday social interactions are shaped by the law, state, and social institutions. Conversely, this course will also focus on how societies maintain and shape the law, state, and institutions.

The project of social transformation through economic, political, and legal institutions has been the experience of the post-colonial state in India. This experiment has had interesting outcomes when institutions have had to deal with the social stratifications that underlie Indian social space. By bringing back the social into the study of institutions (be they economic, political, or legal), the student of sociology will gain an insight that institutions are not only based on abstract rules but rather are embedded in society. Hence, we can understand abstractions such as the State or Law only when we study how exactly they work in practice using theoretical insights and engaging with debates from the sociology/anthropological lens. This course will examine the processes, structures and effects of the State, law and institutional structures in society and how society constructs, attaches meaning to and restrains them.

This unique perspective on social institutions will also enable students from history, economics, political science, and law to gain a foundation in a sociological/anthropological understanding of the post-colonial State and its legal apparatus with a focus on how the State and Law is experienced by individuals or communities in their everyday engagement across different social strata. In this course, we will follow the realist tradition of scholarship in law and social sciences which studies the social lives of the State and the Law through experience rather than logic.