Who Gets to Determine What Comes Next?

Institutions that expand what people can do together have repeatedly also changed the conditions under which people can use those capabilities, and who controls those conditions.

Irrigation systems make more land cultivable, but also create questions about who controls water, coordinates maintenance, and determines access. Systems of measurement and accounting make increasingly complex forms of exchange and administration possible, while changing which activities become visible and governable. Property arrangements can encourage investment and productive specialization while altering people’s access to the resources on which their independence depends.

These are not exclusively modern problems, nor do they arise only from capitalism, industrialization, or digital technology. They belong to a much longer history of how human beings organize cooperation, accumulate knowledge, establish authority, and transform their material circumstances.

The archaeological record makes one point especially important: large-scale social coordination has not required a single, inevitable arrangement of political and economic power.

In southern Mesopotamia, early administrative tablets recorded the movement and distribution of commodities, while irrigation networks involved rulers, temples, and organized labor.1 Such arrangements enabled sophisticated coordination, but also made control over resources and productive activity a central institutional question.

The roughly contemporaneous cities of the Indus civilization present a different puzzle. They developed extensive urban infrastructure, standardized bricks and weights, and sophisticated systems of production and exchange without leaving the same clear evidence of palaces, elaborate royal tombs, or conspicuous ruling monuments found in several other early civilizations.2

The political organization of Indus society remains debated. It would be premature to conclude that these cities were free of hierarchy or coercion. Nevertheless, their archaeological remains challenge any simple assumption that technological sophistication and urban coordination necessarily require the same concentration of authority.

The significance of such comparisons is not that one civilization supplies an ideal model for the present. It is that arrangements often treated as necessary consequences of complexity have themselves varied historically.

Anthropological research complicates the picture further. Studies of Balinese irrigation have documented the importance of water temples and local associations in coordinating agricultural activity across interconnected landscapes. Subsequent historical research has also demonstrated the involvement of dynastic authorities, challenging accounts that portray irrigation management as entirely autonomous from the state.3 The disagreement is instructive. It reveals that collective coordination cannot always be adequately described through a simple opposition between centralized administration and local self-government. Different forms of authority can overlap, reinforce one another, or compete over the same productive system.

Research on farmer-managed irrigation in Nepal provides another important comparison. Studies associated with Elinor Ostrom and her collaborators found that locally governed systems could, under certain conditions, outperform systems administered by government agencies, despite the latter’s greater access to engineering resources and formal expertise.4 The implication is not that local governance is universally superior. Ecological circumstances, institutional rules, material resources, and social relations all matter. Technical capacity cannot be evaluated independently of the arrangements through which people maintain, govern, and adapt it.

Historical changes in property relations raise another dimension of the problem. The enclosure of common fields in England reorganized landholding and agricultural production, contributing to changes in productivity while transforming customary rights and access to land. Historians continue to debate its distributional consequences, the extent of displacement, and the relationships between enclosure, agricultural development, and industrialization.5 What matters for the present argument is that a transformation in productive organization can alter what is produced and also who possesses the means to sustain independent livelihoods and participate in determining future arrangements.

Across these cases, a recurring problem comes into view. Institutions do not merely allocate existing resources or coordinate present activities. They also shape the development and distribution of the knowledge, capabilities, dependencies, and authority through which future activities become possible. Their effects are cumulative, historically situated, and often difficult to reverse.

This does not establish that institutional complexity inevitably produces domination, or that decentralization necessarily produces freedom. That is the claim the program states as necessity, foreclosure and revisability, and Success Is Not Independence carries the professional case. Neither proposition is supported by the diversity of historical experience. It suggests instead that the organization of collective capability and the distribution of authority over its future development must be examined together.

The contemporary version of an old problem

That concern has renewed importance in the relationship between government, private enterprise, and contemporary technology. The historical cases do not show that a modern firm or agency works the way a temple economy or an enclosure did. They show that the question can be asked wherever a shared capability is organized, and each contemporary case has to establish its own mechanism.

We commonly debate which institutions should develop important capabilities, whether government should regulate or directly provide them, and whether innovation is best organized through private investment, public planning, or alternative forms of collective ownership. These are consequential disagreements. But they can obscure another question:

How do the institutions responsible for creating today’s capabilities influence who is able to determine what capabilities will be developed tomorrow?

A private enterprise may create extraordinary technological capabilities while making other organizations increasingly dependent on its infrastructure, standards, or expertise. A government may develop essential public systems while concentrating authority over their purposes, operation, and revision. Experts may improve the quality of collective decisions while acquiring disproportionate influence over which questions are recognized, which alternatives receive support, and what counts as legitimate knowledge.

None of these outcomes necessarily requires institutional failure, malicious intentions, or deliberate suppression. They may emerge through the accumulation of individually reasonable decisions, investments, adaptations, and commitments. An arrangement can become more effective at accomplishing its established purposes while making alternative arrangements progressively harder to develop.

Three distinctions

The argument stays precise only if three things are kept apart:

• What an institution makes possible: the benefits, infrastructure, knowledge, and capabilities it creates.
• What it makes necessary: the dependencies, commitments, and forms of coordination that its operation reproduces.
• What it leaves possible: the independent knowledge, resources, organizational capacities, and effective authority through which people can contest its judgments, revise its purposes, or develop alternatives.

The third dimension is especially important because present institutional success does not necessarily demonstrate that the capacity to develop alternatives has expanded, or show who holds it. People can become increasingly capable of accomplishing things through existing institutions while becoming less able to determine what should replace them.

A problem shared across traditions

This is where apparently opposed political traditions have a problem worth examining together. Market liberals have reasons to worry that concentrated political authority can suppress experimentation and voluntary choice. Socialists have reasons to worry that concentrated ownership of productive resources allows private actors to determine the direction of economic development. Social democrats have reasons to emphasize the public institutions and material security necessary for meaningful freedom. Technocrats have reasons to defend specialized competence, while participatory democrats have reasons to question when expertise becomes an insufficiently accountable form of authority.

These concerns cannot be reduced to a common ideology. Their disagreements over property, legitimacy, collective decision-making, and distribution remain substantial. Yet each can recognize a version of the same structural problem: the possibility that institutions exercising legitimate functions today may acquire disproportionate control over the conditions under which their own authority can be challenged tomorrow.

The capitalist innovator, socialist planner, welfare-state administrator, and technocratic expert can therefore be examined through a common question without treating their purposes, histories, or mechanisms of power as equivalent:

Do their achievements develop the social capacities through which people can govern and transform these arrangements, or do they increasingly reserve those capacities to the institutions themselves?

This shifts the conversation beyond a choice between more government and less government, public ownership and private ownership, centralized coordination and decentralized competition. It asks what different arrangements do to the capacity of people outside the incumbent institutions for further institutional experimentation, independent inquiry, collective action, and self-government.

What the analysis has to establish first

The question becomes more than a generalized suspicion of successful institutions when it makes three demands of any case.

First, establish the genuine contribution. Do not assume that dependence cancels the value of useful coordination or specialized expertise.

Second, identify the mechanism by which that contribution affects future alternatives: switching costs, proprietary standards, resource concentration, legal privilege, organizational dependence, or control over evaluation.

Third, identify whose effective authority changes, and compare the arrangement against feasible alternatives.

Without those steps, the critique collapses into suspicion. With them, it becomes a comparative method for distinguishing legitimate institutional durability from domination-producing entrenchment.

The principle that follows

Where those steps show that an institution’s contribution has concentrated control over alternatives to it, a political principle follows:

No institution’s present contribution should, by itself, entitle it to durable authority over how alternatives to it are developed, evaluated, and carried out.

This is not a demand for permanent disruption or indiscriminate replacement. Stable institutions may be indispensable to the very capacities through which people exercise meaningful freedom. The relevant distinction is between institutional continuity that remains politically revisable and institutional continuity that progressively forecloses its own revision.

Nor is the ambition merely to preserve abstract possibilities. Alternatives require knowledge, resources, organizational infrastructure, legal standing, and effective decision-making authority. An arrangement may formally permit institutional change while these capacities are distributed in ways that make change practically impossible.

Public power and private innovation

The same test applies to the relationship between public power and private innovation. Neither should be judged only by what it enables people to do through existing institutions. Each should also be judged by what it enables people to do independently of those institutions, against their preferences, and beyond their original purposes.

The relative size of government and the private sector is then a secondary issue. The central one is whether their relationship preserves an effective public capacity to determine the direction of future development.

The objective is neither state supremacy over innovation nor private supremacy over the state, but a social order in which neither can monopolize the conditions under which the arrangement itself can be changed.

The shift

The argument moves from how can institutions serve people better? toward how can people retain effective authority over the institutions through which their collective life develops? That changes what receives primacy:

The qualifications matter. Effective self-government cannot simply override rights, evidence, ecological limits, or the legitimate interests of others. Nor does keeping the future open mean refusing to choose, commit, or build durable institutions.

The deepest claim is that people should not have to choose between institutions that grow more capable and retaining the authority to determine what those capabilities are for.

The ambition

The positive ambition is not a society without institutions, markets, experts, hierarchies of competence, or durable commitments. Human societies have always faced problems of coordination, conflict, ecological constraint, and unequal access to resources. Their institutional responses have been varied, imperfect, and historically contingent. No plausible politics can dispense with these problems through an abstract commitment to freedom or decentralization.

The ambition is instead to develop institutions that can become extraordinarily capable without converting their present achievements into a permanent monopoly over the conditions of their own transformation.

That requires more than formal permission to disagree or propose alternatives. It requires attention to the distribution of material resources, the organization of knowledge, the availability of independent institutions, the practical possibility of collective action, and the mechanisms through which binding decisions can be revised.

It also requires historical humility. Arrangements that appear natural, inevitable, or technically necessary may depend on circumstances and political choices that can change. Conversely, alternatives that appear desirable in principle must be evaluated against the actual ecological, economic, and organizational conditions needed to sustain them.

The question is therefore neither how to abolish institutional power nor how to identify its permanently rightful holder. It is how collective capabilities can be organized without the people who depend on them losing effective authority over the direction of their further development.

The measure of progress cannot be limited to what existing institutions enable people to accomplish. It must also consider what those institutions enable people to understand, govern, contest, and transform — and what possibilities they leave available to those who come after them.

That is a question for political philosophy and institutional design, but equally for history, archaeology, anthropology, economics, and the study of technological change. It is ultimately a question about how human societies remain capable of making their own history, even as the institutions inherited from earlier generations shape the possibilities available to them.

Research grounding

The historical claims above are supported by identifiable scholarship, with important disagreements retained rather than flattened.

The methodological adjustment is to distinguish historical observation, causal explanation, and normative judgment. Archaeology can establish that sophisticated coordination existed under different apparent institutional arrangements. It cannot, by itself, establish how much effective political authority every member of those societies possessed. Anthropology can reveal how people organize shared resources and negotiate authority. It need not imply that observed practices are egalitarian, universally transferable, or free of exclusion. History can demonstrate that productive transformations redistributed resources and authority. Whether particular changes constituted progress requires attention to their counterfactuals, beneficiaries, costs, and longer-term consequences.

That approach makes the project more empirically serious. Its central principle becomes a hypothesis and evaluative standard to be investigated across different periods and social forms, not a conclusion imposed on the historical record in advance. Most importantly, it prevents the framework from assuming that institutional domination is a uniquely modern problem or that any historical society provides a ready-made solution.