Against Mediating Institutions

Mediating institutions – those formations and associations that stand between the individual and the state – are essential for freedom, we’re often told. I agree with the aim, but have questions about whether the notion of mediating institutions gets at it.

The main objection is that the theory appears to leave the two poles – state and individual – untouched. State remains state, individual remains individual, but now there’s a demilitarized zone between. That’s better than no demilitarized zone, but we’d like something more transforming.

It thus assumes a part-whole contrast that is unworkable.

Parts and wholes don’t exist in themselves, but only in perichoretic union with each other. There are no wholes without coordinated parts, no parts that don’t unite in wholes. The theory of mediating institutions reifies parts and wholes as separate entities; the empty space between them is filled with mediating institutions. But there is no empty space between them.

Milbank puts it this way: “multiple associations [do not] ‘mediate’ between part and whole, but become themselves a new sort of context, a never ‘completed’ and complexly ramifying ‘network,’ involving ‘confused,’ overlapping jurisdictions, which disperses and dissolves political sovereignty.”