The Institutionally Creative Human

We've now traveled through 10,000 years of institutional history. We've seen that the standard story—the straight line from bands to tribes to chiefdoms to states—is wrong. We've seen egalitarian cities, seasonal hierarchies, temples before farms, and people who actively chose to remain stateless.

The common thread: humans are institutionally creative in ways we've systematically underestimated.

This creativity isn't just historical curiosity. It's the foundation for thinking about what's possible now.

What We've Learned

Each piece of this series revealed a different aspect of institutional possibility.

From Graeber and Wengrow: Early humans experimented constantly. They tried hierarchy and equality, permanence and seasonality, scale and intimacy. They were conscious political actors, not passive subjects of material conditions. Institutional forms weren't imposed by circumstances—they were chosen.

From James C. Scott: States see simplified versions of complex realities. This legibility enables administration but destroys local knowledge. High modernist planning—the belief that experts can redesign society from above—consistently fails. The alternative is humble, incremental change that respects what already works.

From Graeber on debt: Money and markets didn't emerge naturally from barter. Debt came first—and the way societies handle debt reveals their power structures. Current arrangements are contingent, not necessary.

From Dunbar's Number: Humans can maintain about 150 genuine relationships. Beyond that, different coordination mechanisms—hierarchy, roles, formal systems—are required. These mechanisms work but lose information. Scale always costs something.

From Göbekli Tepe: Complex coordination is possible without agriculture, surplus, or states. Religion may have driven agriculture rather than the reverse. Motivation matters more than material conditions.

From state formation: States emerged rarely—only a handful of independent cases in all of human history. They required specific conditions and were actively resisted. The state form is one option among many, not the natural endpoint of development.

The Capacity We've Forgotten

We have a word for the capacity to imagine and implement new institutional forms: political imagination. And we've largely lost it.

Modern political debate operates within narrow bounds. Left versus right. More government versus less. Incremental adjustments to existing structures. The fundamental forms—the state, the corporation, the market, the bureaucracy—are treated as natural features of the landscape rather than human inventions.

The historical record shows this is false. Humans invented these forms. They could have invented others. They still could.

Consider what early societies managed:

Seasonal variation. The same people could have authoritarian coordination during the buffalo hunt and egalitarian consensus the rest of the year. Authority was situational, not permanent. We've lost this—we assume that once hierarchy exists, it persists.

Scale without state. Göbekli Tepe, Ukrainian mega-sites, Poverty Point—massive coordination without permanent bureaucracy. We assume that large-scale coordination requires states. The evidence says otherwise. Tens of thousands of people built and maintained monumental architecture through ritual obligation and voluntary participation. They didn't need tax collectors or standing armies. They needed shared meaning.

Plural authority. Some societies had different authority structures for different domains—one set of leaders for warfare, another for ceremony, another for dispute resolution. Authority wasn't unified. We've mostly lost this. Our institutions concentrate multiple forms of power in single positions.

Deliberate regression. Teotihuacan's egalitarian revolution. The Ukrainian mega-sites' deliberate abandonment. Societies that chose to scale down, to dismantle hierarchy, to walk away from complexity. We assume progress is one-directional. It isn't.

Exit as constraint. When people can leave, leaders must behave. The freedom to move was a more effective check on authority than elections or constitutions. We've lost this—borders, citizenship, and property tie us to places and make exit costly.

These aren't primitive arrangements we've evolved beyond. They're technologies we've forgotten.

Why We Forgot

Several factors contributed to the narrowing of institutional imagination.

The triumph of the state. States conquered alternatives. The non-state peoples who resisted incorporation were eventually absorbed or marginalized. With no visible alternatives, the state seems inevitable.

The dominance of particular theories. Marxism and liberalism—for all their differences—both treat the state as a natural stage of development. The debate is about which kind of state, not whether states at all.

The collapse of utopian projects. The 20th century's grand experiments—Soviet communism, fascism—failed catastrophically. This discredited not just those specific projects but utopianism in general. Better to accept existing arrangements than risk another catastrophe.

The complexity of modern life. Contemporary societies are so interconnected, so dependent on technical systems, so globally integrated, that radical change seems impossible. What would happen to the supply chains? The internet? The hospitals?

The professionalization of politics. In early societies, political participation was general—most adults engaged in collective decision-making. Now politics is a specialized profession. Citizens are spectators, not participants. When politics is something done by others, institutional imagination atrophies.

These concerns are legitimate. But they don't mean institutional creativity is impossible. They mean it must be careful.

Contemporary Experiments

Institutional experimentation hasn't stopped. It's just become less visible.

Platform cooperatives. Worker-owned alternatives to Uber and Airbnb. The same technology, different ownership structures. Early and small, but demonstrating that alternatives exist.

Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). Blockchain-based organizations governed by smart contracts and token holders. Most have failed. A few are finding forms that work. They're attempting governance without traditional hierarchy.

Community land trusts. Separating land ownership from building ownership to preserve affordability. A different property structure that addresses specific problems.

Participatory budgeting. Citizens directly allocating portions of public budgets. Implemented in hundreds of cities worldwide. A partial democratization of resource allocation.

Platform unionization. New labor organization forms for gig workers who don't fit traditional employment relationships. Adapting old institutional forms to new conditions.

Prediction markets. Using market mechanisms to aggregate distributed knowledge about future events. When they work, they outperform expert panels. They're an attempt to extract collective intelligence without requiring collective deliberation.

Special economic zones. Geographically bounded areas with different rules than the surrounding territory. Often used for economic development, but potentially applicable to governance experimentation more broadly. Charter cities take this further—attempting to implement entirely new institutional frameworks in limited areas.

None of these is revolutionary. Most will fail. But they represent the same experimental spirit that characterized early human institutions—trying different configurations, seeing what works, abandoning what doesn't. The key difference: early societies could experiment in isolation. Today's experiments occur within and alongside existing systems. This makes them harder but also potentially less risky—they're additions, not replacements.

Principles for Institutional Design

What does the historical record suggest about how to approach institutional design?

Start with motivation. Göbekli Tepe shows that people will coordinate extraordinary efforts for purposes they care about. Material incentives are less important than meaningful purpose. Institutions that can generate genuine commitment can achieve what bureaucratic compliance cannot.

Respect mētis. James C. Scott's lesson: the people doing the work know things that designers don't. Top-down redesigns that ignore experiential knowledge fail. Good institutional design incorporates feedback from practitioners.

Allow exit. The freedom to leave was the most powerful constraint on early authority. Institutions that trap their members become extractive. Institutions that must earn continued participation stay responsive.

Build in reversibility. Early societies could scale down, dismantle hierarchies, abandon configurations that stopped working. Our institutions are much stickier. Designing for reversibility—making it possible to undo what doesn't work—is essential for experimentation.

Maintain scale-appropriate forms. Dunbar's Number suggests that different scales require different coordination mechanisms. Don't impose large-scale bureaucracy on small-group coordination. Don't expect personal trust to function at institutional scale.

Remember contingency. Current arrangements are not necessary. They emerged from specific historical circumstances. Different circumstances could have produced different arrangements—and still could.

Design for conflict. Every institution generates conflicts—between individual and collective interests, between current members and future ones, between efficiency and legitimacy. Good institutional design doesn't eliminate conflict but channels it productively. The question isn't whether there will be disagreement but how it gets resolved.

The Stakes

Why does institutional imagination matter?

Because we face challenges that existing institutions seem unable to address. Climate change. Technological displacement. Global coordination failures. Rising inequality. Declining trust.

Consider climate change. The problem is global but the institutions are national. The time horizons are generational but the political incentives are electoral. The costs are diffuse but the benefits of inaction are concentrated. Our institutional toolkit—states, markets, international agreements—hasn't solved it. Maybe it can't.

Or consider the governance of technology. Platforms with billions of users are more powerful than many states. AI systems make consequential decisions without accountability. The people building these systems aren't elected, aren't regulated, often aren't even visible. Traditional institutional forms don't fit.

The default response is to tweak existing structures—a regulation here, a policy there. This may help at the margins. But if the problems are structural, marginal adjustments won't solve them.

The alternative is institutional innovation—designing new forms that better fit contemporary challenges. This is risky. The 20th century showed how badly utopian projects can fail. But it's also the way every institution we now take for granted came into being.

States were once innovations. So were corporations, democracies, central banks, international organizations. Each emerged from experimentation—from people trying to solve coordination problems with new configurations.

The corporation itself is only a few centuries old in its modern form. Central banking is younger than the United States. The welfare state is barely a century old. International organizations for collective security emerged after World War I and were redesigned after World War II. Each seemed radical when introduced. Now they seem natural.

The institutions we'll need for the next century probably don't exist yet. Someone will have to invent them. The historical record suggests that humans are quite capable of this—but only when they believe it's possible.

We're still those people. We still have that capacity. The question is whether we'll use it.

The Takeaway

Humans have always been institutionally creative. We've invented every social form we now inhabit—states, markets, hierarchies, communities. We've also invented and abandoned many others: seasonal hierarchies, egalitarian cities, stateless confederations, temple economies.

The standard story—that institutions evolved naturally from simple to complex—is wrong. Institutions were designed, debated, experimented with, and sometimes deliberately dismantled. Our ancestors were more creative than we've given them credit for.

This capacity hasn't disappeared. It's been obscured by the triumph of particular forms, by the failure of 20th-century utopianism, by the complexity of modern life. But it's still there.

The anthropological record is a library of experiments. Most haven't been tried again. Some might be exactly what we need. The first step is remembering that alternatives exist—that what we have is not the only thing we could have.

Institutional imagination is the prerequisite for institutional change. This series has been an attempt to recover it.

Further Reading

- Graeber, D., & Wengrow, D. (2021). The Dawn of Everything. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. - Scott, J. C. (1998). Seeing Like a State. Yale University Press. - Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the Commons. Cambridge University Press.

This concludes the Anthropology of Institutions series.