40.1 - Law and Conventions

HSR Vol. 40 (2015) No. 1: Special Issue: Law and Conventions from a Historical Perspective, Rainer Diaz-Bone, Claude Didry & Robert Salais (Eds.)

The institutional approach of economics of convention (in short, EC) has been established in France over the last three decades and since then received growing international recognition. From its beginnings, EC has introduced a pragmatic as well as a historical perspective on economic coordination and economic institutions. Also, EC has included law in its analysis from the start. EC conceives law not as an external constraint, but as internal to action and coordination open to interpretive and situational adoption by competent actors. Consequently, for the socio-historical analysis of law, EC analyzes the meaning of law from the standpoint of actors which rely in their coordination on conventions. This HSR Special Issue demonstrates that the approach of EC in the socio-historical analysis of law can be a real transdisciplinary alternative to approaches such as “Law & Economics” or economic neo-institutionalism.

Focus: Spaces – Objects – Knowledge.

Pascal Schillings & Alexander van Wickeren (Eds.): Spaces – Objects – Knowledge. An Integrative Perspective on Recent Turns in Historical Research

How could we create more complex images of historical processes of knowledge production? The answer that the contributions to this HSR Focus offer to this question is: By combining concepts that have until now frequently been applied separately. Integrating approaches suggested by the material as well as the spatial turn, the articles in this HSR Focus discuss three exemplary constellations in which new knowledge is generated: Objects producing spaces, objects circulating through different spaces, and musealized objects.