Behemoth. A Journal on Civilisation. Vol. 3, No. 2
<http://www.behemoth-journal.de/current-issue/>

Behaviour guides and law. The Particular and the Universal of the (In)Formal
Karin Harrasser / Elisabeth Timm (eds.)

While in media and politics and often also in political science the failing enforcement of law is criticized simply as a problem (of corruption, of a lagging process of modernisation), cultural studies, historical research and anthropology offer another perspective.
 The juridification of social life in the bourgeois modern world has been understood for a long time as a triumph of rationality over particular interests, as the ‘civilisation’ of physical violence. For some time now, this grand narrative of the modern world has been criticized as a specific historical case, as Eurocentric and bourgeois respectively. Furthermore, new actors (NGOs, security services, social movements) whose sphere of action is intermediary and transcends the state and any idea of ‘institution’ are increasingly appearing on the political scene. The related practices are based rather on ethics that on codified law (e.g. truth commissions, reconciliation commissions). Social conflicts are increasingly expressed in discourses on style and behaviour, and to a lesser extent as conflicts about formal participation (e.g. quotas, enforceable industrial law). These dynamics are related to specific social and cultural milieus, and are in turn represented and reproduced by a growing number of guide books, style coachings and consulting soaps.
As well as the modern, national sovereignty of the state is being challenged in many ways, individuals are experiencing an unbounding of their sovereignty. This volume therefore will not take up again the dichotomy of the previous debates (ethics / particular / informal / personal / emotional-cultural vs. law / universal / formal / institutional) as an either-or question. Rather, it grasps emerging orders and new analytical assessments of these two poles.