ABSTRACT
The real instrument both of freedom and oppression is always the organized partial constituent of a community: the institution. An ethnographer taking a rapid survey of various types of human culture, from the most primitive to highly developed ones, would make an interesting discovery. The study of any culture must therefore be carried out in terms of institutions. This chapter looks more closely into the nature of institutions in their relation to implemented human action. The concept of the institutionalized realization of everything which makes life worth living has a clear bearing on the concept of freedom. The institution as the organized means of realizing the values, the techniques, or the contributions to human welfare embodied in its charter, is the very cultural instrument of freedom, if freedom be the realization of purpose and reaping the benefits thereof.
