Social and cultural institutions as a universal: to a possible solution to the problem of syncretism

The subject of this article is the scientific category of a social institution, which, despite its active use in the social and human sciences for the past century and a half, still does not have a clear definition. The author discovers that in modern studies there is a shift towards the use of the category of sociocultural institution as a hyperonym, or as a substitute for a concept that has a greater semantic completeness. This is due to the general nature of the methodological turn at the beginning of the XXI century and an increase in the intensity of interdisciplinary exchange and with the initial cultural fullness of the content of the category of social institution, which is revealed on the basis of a theoretical analysis of the interpretations of the studied category by various authors. The syncretism of understanding the categories of a social and sociocultural institution is found both in the difference in the scale of social phenomena to which the institutional character is attributed, and in the difference in the principles and forms of their social objectification. According to the researcher, the discovered syncretism is explained (and justified) by the fact that the category of social institution describes universals of two types: generalizing terms and emergent social systems. The general concept of the institute is a universal of the first kind (the result of abstracting from a specific social essence and the form of objectification and functional generalization). Each concrete institution is a universal of the second kind - it is an emergent system that arises and develops, acquiring in its totality properties that are not inherent in any of its social «atoms» - people.