Charter and Institution

Abstract

This paper addresses the nature of the Charter as the basic document of the Institution, that is, the most important document that lends the institution its force. The “and” between Charter and Institution or the conjoining of Charter with Institution has two tasks to perform. Firstly, the Institution needs to be structured and incorporated as a Charter (and conversely, the Charter is the Institution embodied). In this sense, my question is: can the institute of the Charter be the starting point of a potential theory of the institution? Secondly, it is the Charter – and not law, contract, norm, not Searle’s declaration, not Husserl’s Ausweiss – that could improve the theory of documentality and its connection with institutionalism.

Keywords

• Charter
• institution
• document
• documentality