Abstract

This article argues that contemporary political theories adopt institutionalism as the reading-key both to the foundation of democratic political institutions and to the performance of democratic political praxis in a double vein: institutions are the object of the theory of justice, in the sense that they determine, from the way they are organized, the configuration of the status quo and of the access to political power; and they are also the political subjects from which social normativity is constructed, legitimized and streamlined over the whole of society. As a consequence, it is advocated that institutionalism, understood in the light of systems theory, directly or indirectly leads, in contemporary political theories, to strong institutionalism, that is, to the state of affairs in which institutions centralize and monopolize the legitimation and actualization of social evolution, beyond social classes and their struggles for hegemony, becoming depoliticized and correlatively depoliticizing social struggles and the political subjects who act politically. The notions of social class and class struggles are emphasized as the core from which it is possible to think about and frame the institutional constitution and the dynamics of the process of social evolution, in opposition to contemporary political theory’s omission of political subjects as the basis of institutional structuration and social evolution.