Multinormativity

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Project management: Prof. Dr. Thomas Duve, Prof. Dr. Klaus Günther, Prof. Dr. Dr. Matthias Lutz-Bachmann and Prof. Dr. Armin von Bogdandy

People encounter normativity in many forms; norms of various kinds regulate their behavior and make society possible. Among the legal ones, law, commandment and contract appear as possibly primary types (Hasso Hofmann). Jurisprudence has always discussed questions of legal source typology and hierarchy, it is involved in the ordering of norms of a juridical type and attempts to draft conflict-of-law rules. But there are also other forms of normativity: social rules and moral imperatives appear to be the main types, along with religious law and technical norms. The terms change their meaning, they have partly overlapping semantics. They fulfill different functions, but what they have in common is their claim to regulate human behavior.

The project, in which the PIs Armin v. Bogdandy, Thomas Duve, Klaus Günther and Matthias Lutz-Bachmann are involved, is dedicated to the phenomenon of multinormativity from a systematic and legal-historical perspective. Meetings in the initial phase clarified the concept of multinormativity. It was deliberately defined broadly and not narrowed down from the outset to the phenomenon of law or a certain claim to validity or legitimacy.

At the annual conference of the Cluster of Excellence in 2014, the Multinormativity Project organized a panel that linked theoretical and empirical dimensions of the field (Chair: Thomas Duve (MPI for European Legal History); presentations by Marie Claire Foblets (MPI for Ethnological Research, Halle), Stefan Kroll (EXC Formation of Normative Orders, Frankfurt a. M.), Milos Vec (University of Vienna)).

The legal history part of the project, which is based at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History, was concerned with describing and analyzing the coexistence, cooperation and collision of different normativities in given historical constellations. From a methodological point of view, the aim was to incorporate analytical approaches from legal studies, but also from theology, philosophy, sociology, political science and ethnology, and to explore a transdisciplinary terminology.

In the first phase of work, the issue of multinormativity was discussed intensively and established as a research focus in the Institute’s medium-term research planning. The MPI’s research focus areas have the function of accompanying, structuring and further developing the work being carried out at institute level in the individual research fields with regard to the focus topic. In this way, knowledge on significant historical constellations of multinormativity could be generated and incorporated into the work of the project network at the level of the Cluster of Excellence. One focus was on early modern Latin America, with its significant border zones and hybridizations. A second focus was on questions of “private legislation” and the related dimensions of the juridical decision-making system. These are innovations in the normative sphere that flank the development of modern economic society and, in terms of constitutional history, help to shape the reorientation from government to governance. In particular, the Institute’s international relations were used in the spirit of the multinormativity project to involve foreign guests and scholarship holders in the research. For example, “Multinormativity” was the main theme of the MPIeR’s Summer Academy in 2016. In addition, this year (2017) the thematic focus of the journal Rechtsgeschichte, published by the Max Planck Institute, will be dedicated to the topic of multinormativity.

The contribution of the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law (MPIL) under Armin von Bogdandy examined multinormativity primarily from a systematic perspective. This applies in particular to a project on dogmatics, which stems from a collaboration with researchers from the Faculty of Law and Theology at the University of Heidelberg. Dogmatics in theology and law consists of a conceptual foil that deals with incoherencies within law and theology. At the same time, dogmatics is sensitive to normativities from other disciplines that are brought to it. The aim of this collaboration is to develop a concept of dogmatics for public law and (Protestant) theology based on interdisciplinary learning that is appropriate to pluralistic, globalized and multi-religious societies. This research was brought to the cluster by a panel organized by Matthias Goldmann and Dana Schmalz as part of the 2013 conference for young academics on “Dogmatics – Apology or Critique of Normativity?”. The lectures were published in the journal “Staat” (2014, Vol. 53, issue 3). In addition, the MPIL is conducting a major Latin American project. Its aim is to structure Latin America’s constitutional pluralism through common principles and to develop it further in a progressive direction. This project gave rise to cooperation with PI Thomas Duve, which was reflected in conference participation, among other things.

Matthias Lutz-Bachmann’s research into the history and systematics of philosophy, as well as courses and workshops, focused on fundamental problems of normative legitimization and delegitimization of political rule, as well as on questions relating to the justification of philosophical ethics, particularly with regard to questions of human rights and human dignity. Significant publications were prepared, in part in cooperation with colleagues from the fields of law, political science, general history and theology, and some were completed for publication. In these academic activities, close cooperation with the aforementioned colleagues from the Cluster of Excellence “The Formation of Normative Orders” was of fundamental importance. With regard to the promotion of young academics, it should be noted that five habilitation candidates worked on their habilitation thesis in the context of the PI’s work.

In Klaus Günther’s sub-project, the studies on legal pluralism already begun in the first funding period were continued in the now expanded perspective on multinormativity and extended to include a critique of normative pluralism. The focus here was on the authors Schiff Berman and Teubner. Schiff Berman’s theory of the “management of hybridity” and Teubner’s proposal of a collision norm generated internally by the individual global subsystems, which is intended to resolve conflicts with the intrinsic rationalities of the other systems, were subjected to an immanent critique. The main aim was to show that both can only formulate their proposals under the assumption of an at least hypothetical and fictitious universalistic meta-norm. The status of this research is documented in the essay on “Normative Legal Pluralism”. At two international conferences in Belo Horizonte in 2015 and Cartagena in 2016, impulses from the discussion of this essay were taken up to further develop this meta-norm in the direction of a rule of recognition of global law. Initial thoughts on this were formulated in an essay on Habermas’ system of rights. At the same time, an investigation into the multinormative contexts of the application of norms was begun, primarily under the impression of the Multinormativity Panel and the subsequent discussion at the Cluster Annual Conference 2014. A norm is not abstract and contextless on its own, but always in multinormative contexts of a moral, legal, religious, political, moral nature, but is also linked to epistemic norms and rules of prudence. In these multinormative contexts, norms and normative orders support and explain each other, each in a temporally, factually and socially concretized constellation. They form a concrete, particular network of historically situated, locally and situationally available behavioral requirements. In specific individual cases, the problem arises that no one in the respective situation is able to gain an overview of these multinormative reference contexts. This deficit is compensated for by justification narratives. They bundle and interpret multinormative contexts of reference in such a way that they interpret and justify individual norms and normative orders with regard to the respective historical situation of a particular lifeworld. The state of this research is documented in the essay on parapractical justification narratives.

The most important publications in this project: