11 - Contracting and Founding in Times of Conflict

Summary

The question of the emergence of a common world out of a diverse set of founding assumptions – and the question of what sort of world it can be – are crucial in the context of pronounced regional varieties of world-making conceptions. Assuming that world-making possibly means that a society must be framed, then this frame entails rules – i.e., rules can be the frame. This call for rules answers Nancy Fraser's call (in Chapter 10) for a frame. But the frame she suggests should be of a special kind. She argues that framing refers to transformative politics and thus should reconsider not only the persons who build justice – as beneficiaries or as providers – but also the constitutive process, the ‘process of frame-setting’. I would argue that frame-setting can be done through rules. In that sense, frame-setting could consist in making rules to achieve the social constitutive objective: this world to be made.

This preliminary remark on the adequacy of a normative tool to fulfil the objective of world-making leads to the question of the types of rules needed to achieve it. Legal rules appear prima facie relevant to a concept of world-making. This is so under two conditions imposed on the way in which the words used here are understood. First, in the perspective suggested in this chapter, worldmaking is about how to make a world. Indeed the how question asks what it means to make a world.