Abstract

Norms are to be distinguished from imperatives in the kantian sense. They are based upon contingent factors with regard to their genesis, their content and their practical execution. Those factors representing the constitutive historicity of norms function as a necessary limitation for the claim to rationality of the norms themselves. The philosophical tradition of natural law and utopian constructions up to the present tends to neglect the historical dimension of norms - a dimension that can be clarified only through a hermeneutical theory of history.