Dieser Gastbeitrag erscheint in seiner Originalsprache Englisch.

Institutions are, by temperament, latecomers. They arrive at legitimacy the way a notary arrives at a marriage – not to bring love into being, but to certify, formalise and file it. Long before a university confers a chair, a court hands down a precedent or a ministry issues a decree, something has already happened in the world that made such acts thinkable, and indeed necessary. The question posed to me – who decides what becomes legitimate before institutions formally decide? – is, I would argue, slightly misphrased in its very structure, for it presumes a single decisive agent, a hidden legislator standing in the wings. There is no such figure. What precedes institutional legitimacy is not a decision at all, but a slow and largely invisible accretion of consent, distributed across so many small judgements that no one of them could be called a verdict.

Consider how a word enters a dictionary. Lexicographers do not decide that a coinage is legitimate; they observe, often years after the fact, that it has already become so. The Oxford English Dictionary’s own editors have long described their task as descriptive rather than prescriptive – they follow usage, they do not command it. By the time “selfie” or “doomscrolling” reached the page, both had already lived full lives in speech, in journalism, in the unregulated commons of everyday conversation. The dictionary does not baptise the word; it issues its birth certificate retroactively, once the registrar has finally caught up with the christening that occurred, unceremoniously, in the street.

The same pattern governs the more consequential business of ideas. Scientific revolutions, as historians of science have long observed, rarely begin with the sanction of the academy. They begin in correspondence, in marginal notes, in papers rejected by one journal and grudgingly accepted by another, in the private conviction of a handful of researchers who trust one another’s judgement before any institution has ratified it. Peer review, for all its indispensable rigour, is structurally a lagging indicator: it measures whether a claim has already persuaded enough of the right people to be taken seriously, not whether it is true in some prior, institution-free sense. Legitimacy, in this domain as in others, is less bestowed than recognised – and recognition takes time to travel from the periphery of a discipline to its centre.

What interests me most, however, is not the epistemic case but the social one: the way entire communities extend legitimacy to persons, practices and objects long before any institution is asked to weigh in. Reputation is the currency here, and it is remarkably well policed without a central bank. A craftsman becomes a master not on the day a guild certifies him but on the day his neighbours stop checking his work. A restaurant becomes essential not when an inspector grants it a licence but when it becomes unthinkable to visit a city without eating there – a judgement rendered collectively, unsystematically and with far greater speed than any inspectorate could manage. Sociologists who study the diffusion of norms have shown that legitimacy typically spreads through networks of trust before it consolidates into rule: early adopters vouch for a practice to their immediate circle, that circle vouches for it further outward, and only once the practice has become sufficiently unremarkable – sufficiently taken for granted – does an institution step in to formalise what has, in effect, already been settled by a thousand small acts of social confidence.

This has a slightly unsettling implication for institutions themselves, which like to imagine that they confer legitimacy rather than merely record it. In truth, an institution that moves too far ahead of this diffuse, informal consensus risks issuing rulings that go unrecognised – laws unenforced, degrees unrespected, certifications nobody bothers to ask for. And an institution that moves too far behind risks irrelevance of a different kind: it becomes a rubber stamp for decisions the public has already made without it, its formal authority reduced to ceremony. The art of institutional timing, if such a thing exists, lies in sensing the precise moment when informal consensus has hardened enough to bear the weight of formal recognition – not so early that the ruling looks like advocacy, not so late that it looks like an afterthought.

There is, admittedly, a darker reading of all this. The same informal mechanisms that grant legitimacy to a new word, a new practice or a rising craftsman can just as easily grant it to a falsehood, a prejudice or a fraud, provided the requisite social conditions – trust, repetition, the appearance of consensus – are cynically engineered rather than organically earned. Reputation markets, like all markets, can be gamed. This is precisely why institutions retain their value even in an age suspicious of them: they offer, at their best, a check against the tyranny of premature or manufactured consensus, a place where claims must submit to scrutiny slower and more sceptical than the pace of social contagion allows. The informal and the formal need one another. The former supplies the raw material of legitimacy – the lived, tested, negotiated sense that something works, matters or is true; the latter supplies the discipline that separates durable legitimacy from its counterfeit.

Perhaps, then, the honest answer to the guiding question is this: legitimacy before institutions is decided by no one and by everyone – by the cumulative, largely unrecorded verdict of people acting in good faith on partial information, extending trust to one another in small increments until a threshold is crossed that no single person could have identified in advance. Institutions do not create this threshold. They discover it, usually somewhat later than they would like to admit, and then – with appropriate solemnity – sign their names to a decision that was, in every meaningful sense, already made.

Institutions are, by temperament, latecomers. They arrive at legitimacy the way a notary arrives at a marriage – not to bring love into being, but to certify, formalise and file it. Long before a university confers a chair, a court hands down a precedent or a ministry issues a decree, something has already happened in the world that made such acts thinkable, and indeed necessary. The question posed to me – who decides what becomes legitimate before institutions formally decide? – is, I would argue, slightly misphrased in its very structure, for it presumes a single decisive agent, a hidden legislator standing in the wings. There is no such figure. What precedes institutional legitimacy is not a decision at all, but a slow and largely invisible accretion of consent, distributed across so many small judgements that no one of them could be called a verdict.

Consider how a word enters a dictionary. Lexicographers do not decide that a coinage is legitimate; they observe, often years after the fact, that it has already become so. The Oxford English Dictionary’s own editors have long described their task as descriptive rather than prescriptive – they follow usage, they do not command it. By the time “selfie” or “doomscrolling” reached the page, both had already lived full lives in speech, in journalism, in the unregulated commons of everyday conversation. The dictionary does not baptise the word; it issues its birth certificate retroactively, once the registrar has finally caught up with the christening that occurred, unceremoniously, in the street.

The same pattern governs the more consequential business of ideas. Scientific revolutions, as historians of science have long observed, rarely begin with the sanction of the academy. They begin in correspondence, in marginal notes, in papers rejected by one journal and grudgingly accepted by another, in the private conviction of a handful of researchers who trust one another’s judgement before any institution has ratified it. Peer review, for all its indispensable rigour, is structurally a lagging indicator: it measures whether a claim has already persuaded enough of the right people to be taken seriously, not whether it is true in some prior, institution-free sense. Legitimacy, in this domain as in others, is less bestowed than recognised – and recognition takes time to travel from the periphery of a discipline to its centre.

What interests me most, however, is not the epistemic case but the social one: the way entire communities extend legitimacy to persons, practices and objects long before any institution is asked to weigh in. Reputation is the currency here, and it is remarkably well policed without a central bank. A craftsman becomes a master not on the day a guild certifies him but on the day his neighbours stop checking his work. A restaurant becomes essential not when an inspector grants it a licence but when it becomes unthinkable to visit a city without eating there – a judgement rendered collectively, unsystematically and with far greater speed than any inspectorate could manage. Sociologists who study the diffusion of norms have shown that legitimacy typically spreads through networks of trust before it consolidates into rule: early adopters vouch for a practice to their immediate circle, that circle vouches for it further outward, and only once the practice has become sufficiently unremarkable – sufficiently taken for granted – does an institution step in to formalise what has, in effect, already been settled by a thousand small acts of social confidence.

This has a slightly unsettling implication for institutions themselves, which like to imagine that they confer legitimacy rather than merely record it. In truth, an institution that moves too far ahead of this diffuse, informal consensus risks issuing rulings that go unrecognised – laws unenforced, degrees unrespected, certifications nobody bothers to ask for. And an institution that moves too far behind risks irrelevance of a different kind: it becomes a rubber stamp for decisions the public has already made without it, its formal authority reduced to ceremony. The art of institutional timing, if such a thing exists, lies in sensing the precise moment when informal consensus has hardened enough to bear the weight of formal recognition – not so early that the ruling looks like advocacy, not so late that it looks like an afterthought.

There is, admittedly, a darker reading of all this. The same informal mechanisms that grant legitimacy to a new word, a new practice or a rising craftsman can just as easily grant it to a falsehood, a prejudice or a fraud, provided the requisite social conditions – trust, repetition, the appearance of consensus – are cynically engineered rather than organically earned. Reputation markets, like all markets, can be gamed. This is precisely why institutions retain their value even in an age suspicious of them: they offer, at their best, a check against the tyranny of premature or manufactured consensus, a place where claims must submit to scrutiny slower and more sceptical than the pace of social contagion allows. The informal and the formal need one another. The former supplies the raw material of legitimacy – the lived, tested, negotiated sense that something works, matters or is true; the latter supplies the discipline that separates durable legitimacy from its counterfeit.

Perhaps, then, the honest answer to the guiding question is this: legitimacy before institutions is decided by no one and by everyone – by the cumulative, largely unrecorded verdict of people acting in good faith on partial information, extending trust to one another in small increments until a threshold is crossed that no single person could have identified in advance. Institutions do not create this threshold. They discover it, usually somewhat later than they would like to admit, and then – with appropriate solemnity – sign their names to a decision that was, in every meaningful sense, already made.