Abstract Drawing upon literature from Australia, Canada, England, India, South Africa, Sweden, and the United States this article offers an alternative framework for the study of Commissions of Inquiry. Conventional understandings of such inquiries as policy‐making instruments of Government fail to grasp the significance of their political form. A reading which stresses the symbolic and ritual aspects of their work and analyses the forms of communication which are organized through public inquiries provides a better framework for grasping the place of these institutions in the reproduction of State power. This article argues that public inquiries derive authority from their distinctive legal, social, and epistemological status. The work of such inquiries can be characterized as ‘reckoning schemes of legitimation’, and this work structures political discourse in three phases: investigative, persuasive, and archival. The abiding significance of Commissions lies not simply in the investigation of facts and the recommendation of policy, but in the elaboration of the ‘idea of the state’. Such schemes of legitimation serve in constituting a realm of discourse through which collective action vis‐à‐vis Society by those who act in the name of the State becomes thinkable, and thereby organizable.
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