Former Fellow

Wojciech Engelking, Ph.D.

Department of Law and Administration, University of Warsaw

Research Abstract
“Few questions – Herbert Hart famously stated on the question what is norm – concerning human society have been asked with such persistence and answered by serious thinkers in so many diverse, strange, and even paradoxical ways”. More than half a century after his The Concept of Law, we are not any closer to the answer, but much further advanced in discovering the spaces, that can be normative, and therefore – in revealing the new contributions to this question. In the paper I am working on, I want to show, how normative an art narrative can be. Drawing on, firstly, Karl Popper’s idea of World Three as a space in which the human creations that aspire to contain objectivity live, and, secondly, Rainer Forst’s concept of noumenal power (the one which is a tool to “in different degrees – influence, use, determine, occupy, or even seal off the space of reasons for others”, as Forst writes), I analyses different art narratives to show, how, while living in World Three, each of them bases its noumenal power on different justifications and claims to legitimacy. The main aim of my research is therefore to show how narrativity encloses in itself the noumenal power in the story about the fictional world and becomes normative in a sense that it covers the factual world with the World Three as the world of norms, equating the map with the territory.

  • Biografische Angaben

    Wojciech Engelking (1992) is a research assistant at the University of Warsaw, conducting a project Awaiting a Messiah. Normative narratives in European thinking after the Great War . His research interests include history of ideas, legal philosophy and political theory (Schmitt, Strauss, Durkheim, Thucydides, Shakespeare).
  • Publikationen

    Engelking, Wojciech (2024): Caliban as legal subject: The Tempest and Renaissance juridical thought. Law and Humanities. 10.1080/17521483.2023.2298001 Engelking, Wojciech (2023): French Antecedents of Carl Schmitt’s Concrete-Order Thinking: From Georges Sorel’s Myth to Maurice Hauriou’s Institution. Interpretation. 50. 31-54. Engelking, Wojciech (2019). Shakespeare as a method. Carl Schmitt’s reading of Othello and Hamlet. History of European Ideas. 45. 1-14. 10.1080/01916599.2019.1637359.

News from the research center

News
30.06.2025

Article "Ideology and Suffering: What Is Realistic about Critical Theory?" by Amadeus Ulrich published in EJPT

The article "Ideology and Suffering: What Is Realistic about Critical Theory?" by Amadeus Ulrich has just been published open access in the European Journal of Political Theory (EJPT). Ulrich brings the perspective of radical realism into a productive dialog with Adorno's critical theory.

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News
30.06.2025

Prof. Dr. Franziska Fay awarded the Sibylle Kalkhof-Rose University Prize 2025

Prof. Dr. Franziska Fay (Junior Professor of Ethnology with a focus on Political Anthropology at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) and former postdoctoral researcher at the Research Center Normative Orders at Goethe University) receives the Sibylle Kalkhof-Rose University Award 2025 in the category Humanities and Social Sciences.

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Publication
25.06.2025 | Online article

Ideology and Suffering: What Is Realistic about Critical Theory?

Ulrich, Amadeus (2025): Ideology and suffering: What is realistic about critical theory? European Journal of Political Theory, 0(0).  https://doi.org/10.1177/14748851251351782

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News
24.06.2025

New series “Vertrauensfragen” in the Frankfurter Rundschau initiated by Hendrik Simon

Democracy thrives on debate - if it serves the joint search for solutions. There is often a problem with this cooperation. The new FR series “Vertrauensfragen”, initiated by Hendrik Simon (Research Institute Social Cohesion (RISC) Frankfurt location at Goethe University's Research Centre Normative Orders ), examines why this is the case and how we can do better.

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Publication
23.06.2025 | Working Paper

Untrustworthy Authorities and Complicit Bankers: Unraveling Monetary Distrust in Argentina

Moreno, Guadalupe (2025): “Untrustworthy Authorities and Complicit Bankers: Unraveling Monetary Distrust in Argentina”. Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies Discussion Paper 25/3.

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News
22.05.2025

Does deliberative democracy have a future in the age of oligarchs, autocrats and patriarchs?

On June 3, Prof. Simone Chambers will give a lecture on the value of democracies and the future of the form of government.

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Publication
19.05.2025 | Anthology

Klimaethik. Ein Reader

Sparenborg, Lukas; Moellendorf, Darrel (Hrsg.) (2025) : Klimaethik. Ein Reader. Suhrkamp.

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News
19.05.2025

What can a baroque tapestry tell us about colonial iconography?

Lecture by Cécile Fromone on May 21. The professor at the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University, director of the Cooper Gallery at the Hutchins Center and author will talk about the long-forgotten African origins of iconography and its colonial dimension.

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News
05.05.2025

Normative Orders Newsletter 01/25 published

The newsletter from Research Centre Normative Orders collects information on current events, reports, news and publications several times a year. Read the first issue 2025 here.

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