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The popular complaint that "Congress does nothing" is based, it seems, on the fallacy that characterizes the standard, stereotyped view of many organizations: that it is some single-purpose behemoth, like the monolith in "2001: A Space Odyssey": universally drawing the unsuspecting into its aura. To judge by what we hear and read in the popular media and even, if we're so disposed, in scholarly journals, this fallacy is applied whether we are taking a positive or negative view of Congress. We toss about the quaint phrase, "We're a nation of laws," as if laws appeared cleanly from the hand of Providence rather than from the coffee-fueled & gastrically disturbed members of Congressional committees and caucuses.

We fondly call Congress an institution, & so it is. But if we're pressed about how exactly we define "institution," then we're a bit more circumspect. We can blurt out, "Oh, please, you must be kidding," or drown ourselves in the foamy rhetoric of unsatisfactory explanation. Congress is an institution, but only a handful of its members are.

There is an old but pretty much unknown (unknown, because it's buried in an 800-page volume of social theory by French writer Sartre published in French in 1960; in English in 1976; and synopsized by rhetoritician Michael McGee in 1989) idea of an institution as a form human groupness. We can talk about groups of people and let imagination run freely: from a group of people waiting at a bus stop to a group of people charging down the street to firemen fighting a fire to senators casting their votes. Which of these would we most likely characterize as "an institution?

I will hypothesize that there is at least one astonishing aspect to this question, one that, as we say, cuts across racial, class, & cultural boundaries: anyone with a modicum of cognitive capacity can answer it. A four-year-old child that had heard the term "Smithsonian Institution" or has seen a picture of one of its buildings in Washington, D.C., could tell you that senators casting their votes is an institution but that people at a bus stop are not.

One reason for this what-we-sometimes-call-an innate ability is that we learn to recognize relationships among people by sight: girl and boy necking in a car, the urgent gesturing of a police officer and a citizen while standing near a car with a ticket flapping beneath the windshield wiper, or the cacophony of firemen fighting a house fire. Moreover, we can learn this sort of thing based on very little or even

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