Navigating Normative Orders: Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Normative orders emerge and pollinate everywhere. Whether it be with Kant or among conservatives, posts on the internet, in environmental discourses, or in our raising of our children: Norms populate and spread. This book explains how norms are created, why they are adopted, how they can be legitimated, and how they are contested and disappear. Combining twelve contributions from a diverse range of disciplines, the book unites, for the first time, younger scholars from the Research Centre “Normative Orders” at the University of Frankfurt. Even as certainties are questioned, norms are shown to play a central and vital role in regulating our behavior and understandings. Together, these norms form normative orders, with and through which political authority and the distribution of rights and goods are legitimized, in criminal law, educational systems, the territorial state, the discourse on progress, and in the Anthropocene. As Navigating Normative Orders shows, these norms control our personal and political lives in ways we may not even realize.
 

Matthias C. Kettemann is head of research at the Leibniz Institute for Media Research, Hans-Bredow-Institut, Hamburg.