Being a Citizen in the Rubble of Institutions

Abstract What is the best foundation for democracy: citizenly habits sustained informally by the spontaneous effort of citizens themselves, or formal institutions and the law? C. L. Skach's How to Be a Citizen tells us how someone who dedicated her career to the importance of law and institutions lost her faith in them and came to see the habits and informal relations of citizens as the real site of democracy. Like many observers of politics in recent years, Skach has concluded that the regnant social order based on law and institutional mediation has fatally discredited itself. But giving up on institutions and law is no small thing. There are powerful reasons for, and immense social forces tied up with, coordinating modern societies by means of them. This review article explores the tensions between Skach's approach and some of these reasons and forces. Yet it does so not in the spirit of critique but rather as a challenge for those who view institutions and law as almost unquestionably fundamental to modern life. It seeks to explore what value there is in Skach's informal, anti-institutional approach for those who have not yet entirely lost the faith she once affirmed in modernity's legal and institutional workhorses.