Looking for orientation, it is worthwhile to reconstruct the intellectual trajectory of Rudolf Wiethölter, a radical legal scholar from the Frankfurt school of critical theory. Wiethölter reacts to the disaster of both current liberal and Marxist legal theories. He has the courage to lay out the blueprint for a constitutional utopia. Two distinct phases are discernible. In the first phase, he develops the program of a material constitution – the economic constitution as the constitution of society. In the second phase, after his long march through the three most advanced social theories of modernity, he develops a ’critical systems theory of law’, which, however, he sharply positions against Niklas Luhmann’s functionalist systems theory. Selbstgerechtes Rechtsverfassungsrecht (self-justifying law of constitutional law) – in this condensed formula Wiethölter enigmatises his vision of a future material constitution. No less enigmatic are its two main elements of a novel ’reciprocity’ and an ’impartial partiality’. How can these enigmatic concepts be deciphered? And what prospects do they open up to an ambitious constitutional program?

The first chapter of the book develops a normative theory of court organisation and decision-making. It provides the normative framework to assess the development and state of the ECJ’s procedural and organisational law. The chapter argues that the procedure and organisation of a court should depend on its role in a political system. To develop this argument, it presents three ideal models of court decision-making: a liberal model, a rule of law model and a democratic model. The liberal model is associated with the theoretical work of Christoph Möllers. He sees the role of courts as protecting individual liberty. The litigants need to be at the centre of the judicial process. The rule of law model, which I associate with Niklas Luhmann’s theory of the judicial process, sees the role of courts not so much in the service of the individual; rather it sees the judicial process as instrumental for creating normative stability by inducing acceptance for court decisions as authoritative interpretations of the law. Finally, the democratic model, that I associate with the theory of adjudication by Jürgen Habermas, conceptualizes courts as democratic organs of a political community. They need to connect to the will of a political community and aim for a procedure that embeds a court’s work in the public sphere.

Kirste discusses legal scholars who were active in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, identifying four main types of German legal positivism – jurisprudential, sociological, naturalistic, and statutory positivism – and a fifth type that he calls the general theory of law. His idea is that these theorists were legal positivists because they shared an epistemological aim, namely, establishing legal science as a science in its own right, independent of both the natural and the social sciences, and because they held that the only law is positive law in the sense of enacted norms or customary norms. He considers the theories of Hans Kelsen and Gustav Radbruch as examples of legal positivism. He points out that legal positivism lost its dominance in the wake of the post-World War II revival of natural law theory but soon reasserted its influence through the likes of Ota Weinberger, Niklas Luhmann, and Norbert Hoerster. He also notes that, since the late 1960s, authors such as Peter Koller and Ottfrid Höffe have focused on overcoming the gulf between natural law theory and legal positivism.

The introduction examines the pre-history of the elegiac ideal of a life of love. Although Latin love elegy and tender depictions of lovers in Roman wall painting may be described as Augustan phenomena, their roots lay in the ethical and aesthetic transformations that marked the Republican era. From the construction of luxury villas along the Italian coast to the emergence of a more personal style of poetry, we see in this period a new valuation of private life and a growing concern with individual experience among Rome’s aristocracy. Catullus’ poems to Lesbia represent the apogee of this turn toward the intimate and the private. In his verses we see for the first time the fusion of domus (home) and amor (erotic passion) – concepts long seen as mutually exclusive. Catullus’ domestication of erotic passion thus prefigures the elegists’ rejection of Augustan morality and their own construction of an alternative worldview. The poets’ witty appropriation of familial and marital terms also points to the codification of amatory experience in Roman literature and, later, in art. In both images and texts, erotic tenderness manifests itself through a series of metonymies that render love an experience that can be recognized, learned, remembered, and recounted.

The notion that comparison is not the search for similarities but the systematization of differences leads to the question of which shared set of concepts and assumptions might be employed to explore this notion. Comparative analysis should at once reduce the complexity of data in the service of comparison and yet still reference the uniqueness and specificity of local values and ideas. Three types of comparison potentially fulfill these criteria. Claude Lévi-Strauss traces the transformations of oppositions and codes across cultural boundaries without claiming to compare societies as such. Louis Dumont contrasts systems of values that represent societies-as-wholes by analyzing their structuring into hierarchical levels. Niklas Luhmann’s theory of autopoietic systems enables the comparison of relationships between social systems and their environments, without assuming societies as units of comparison – examples being the making of ethnic identities and boundaries. A synthesis of the three approaches provides avenues of comparison in a globalized world, as is exemplified by the author’s own work in upland Southeast Asia.

In this chapter we discuss standards as forms of partial organization. Standards are defined as decided rules for common and voluntary use. Taking the example of CSR and corporate governance standards, we show that the degree of partiality of standards can vary widely – ranging from a single element of organization, i.e. decided rules, to all five elements of organization, i.e. decided rules, hierarchies, membership, monitoring and sanctioning. We demonstrate that in some cases partiality is the result of restrictions in the design of standards, while in other cases it is the result of an explicit choice. We also demonstrate that the degree of partiality of standards can change over time, as there are often pressures for standards to adopt additional organizational elements. Furthermore, we discuss the dispersed nature of many standards, showing how different actors often provide different organizational elements of standards without any central coordination. We close with an outline of an agenda for future research.

In recent years, researchers have observed the increasing emergence of new forms of organization, in which membership is described as becoming fluid or unclear. Against this backdrop, scholars have proposed to drop membership as a defining criterion for formal organizations and instead to apply the broader concept of ‘contributorship’, which states that there are not only members of an organization, but also contributors who belong partially to the organization, as long as they participate in the organizational processes. I add to this development and combine the concept of contributorship with the decision-based perspective on organizations, which sees decisions as the constitutive elements of organization. Thus, contributorship can be understood as a matter of decision: through their decisions, organizations manage the possibilities for individuals to contribute. I build on two qualitative case studies demonstrating that instead of defining specific members, organizations can decide on spatial, temporal, attributional, resource-related, and/or quantitative-limitational premises for distributing possibilities of contributions.