Abstract

Social reformers necessarily proceed, after the fashion of Rousseau, ‘taking men as they are and laws as they can be’. Thus it has been since the founding of political science in the nineteenth century. But the lessons of the behavioural revolution in political science are that taking people ‘as they are’ might be more constraining that we ever imagined; and the lessons of the policy sciences are that there are far fewer ways that institutions ‘can be’ than we ever supposed. All told, it might make more sense to start with the limited number of institutional options, rather than starting with a value‐driven wish list and searching for institutions that might more or less fill that bill.