The importance of voluntaristic action In chapter 4 institutions of external procedural restraint were distinguished analytically from three other types of institutions. What was left unclear was how any normative restraint, procedural or substantive, can remain “external” to group competition and systemic drift, and simultaneously contribute intrinsically to a nonauthoritarian direction of social change. Once Parsons's early concept of voluntaristic action is reformulated into a distinct concept, it becomes clear how this is possible.

As a preliminary approach, voluntaristic action may be defined in the following way:

Once voluntaristic action is distinguished analytically from purposiverational action, on one side, and from nonrational and normative action, on the other, the theory of societal constitutionalism may be seen clearly to revolve around normative restraints that are distinctively procedural and voluntaristic. The theory cannot be based on substantive restraints of any kind, whether normative or strategic. It also cannot be based on procedures that are rational rather than distinctively voluntaristic.

Still, what exactly is the relationship between voluntaristic action as a distinct concept and the internal and external restraints introduced in chapter 4? What is the relationship between voluntaristic action as a distinct concept and the procedural turns taken by Habermas and Fuller discussed in chapters 5 and 6? Finally, why was it said in chapter 4 and then again at the end of chapter 6 that Fuller's procedural threshold is intrinsically interrelated with the collegial form of organization in particular? This chapter lays the conceptual groundwork for answering these questions.