The relationship of entropy‐related measures to money information
The specific purpose of this paper is to trace the development of entropy-related thought from its thermodynamic origins through its organizational and economic applications to its relationship to money information. That trace reveals that existing entropy measures are of states or changes in states that are caused by energy processes. We propose that entropy may as well be conceived as entropic process. The social emergent specific exchange value provides a metric by which entropic process may be quantified. The analysis connects the traditional state-oriented entropy measures to measures of entropic process in social systems. In doing so, the character of exchange-based societies and the function of money information within them are elaborated. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Criticality, Entropy and Conflict
Power‐law distributions are ubiquitous in the natural and social worlds and also characterize the intensity of intrastate conflicts. One of the most convincing approaches to explain the origin of power laws is the so‐called forest‐fire model, which is based on the notion of self‐organized criticality. In order to make this model more fruitful for social science, its components require a deeper theoretical specification. We turn to general systems theory and the conception of entropy (uncertainty, insecurity and disorder) and its conceptual complement, negentropy. We argue that intrastate conflict is an ‘eruptive’ form of ‘social fissioning’: an evolutionary mechanism whereby sharp friend–foe differences and rigid within‐group conformity are created, increasing the certainty of social interactions. In intrastate conflicts, the political system burdens the economic and cultural systems with entropy and extracts negentropy resources from them. This process is characterized by discontinuous outbursts of entropy, which collectively follow a power law. © 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Law in a law-governed union (Recht in einer Rechtsunion) : the Court of Justice of the European Union and the free law doctrine
The Court of Justice of the European Union characterizes the Union as a Rechtsunion: a law-governed union. The conception of “the law” in Article 19 paragraph 1 of the Treaty on European Union transcends the Treaties, according to the Vice-President of the Court of Justice, Koen Lenaerts. This thesis demonstrates with reference to the work of Georg Jellinek that the Union is a non-sovereign state and, with reference to the work of Eugen Ehrlich in particular, that the state-based perception of law is a misperception. Not all production of law is reserved to the state and not all law is state-recognized law. There is extra-state law. It has been alleged that the Court of Justice of the European Union has had “a free law attitude”. The author discusses the free law doctrine developed at the beginning of the twentieth century and has made literal translations of writings in German, French and Italian by the main representatives of the free law movement. The free law doctrine provides a descriptive framework for the case-law of courts. The author describes the creation by the Court of Justice of four constitutional principles of Union law through its case-law. He concludes that every court is, to quote Hermann Kantorowicz, praeter legem law-creatively active and has, in that sense, a free law attitude. The decisions of judges are often volitional decisions. How the law will be applied should be predictable but volitional decisions, because they are unpredictable, are inconsistent with the principle of legal certainty. In the Union and its member states the judiciary and not the statute or “the law” is pre-eminent. The author suggests how the concept of law should be defined in a material Rechtsunion. He argues that societal legal norms could be provided with an appropriate position consistent with the principle of legal certainty by making the validity of a societal legal norm contingent on its material lawfulness.