  This approach allows us to see the “facts” of modern societies as practical: they are precisely those determinations that are embedded in relatively long-term social processes, whose consequences cannot be reversed in a short period of time—such as a generation— by political action. Practical theories thus have to consider the ways in which such facts become part of a constructive process that might be called “generative entrenchment” (Wimstatt 1974, 67–86). By “entrenchment of social facts,” I mean that the relevant democratic institutions promote the very conditions that make the institutional social fact possible in assuming those conditions for their own possibility. When the processes at work in the social fact then begin to outstrip particular institutional feedback mechanisms that maintain it within the institution, then the institution must be transformed if it is to stand in the appropriate relation to the facts that make it feasible and realizable. All institutions, including democratic ones, entrench some social facts in realizing their conditions of possibility.