To Decide or Not to Decide, That Is the Question: On Early Modern Cultures of Decision-Making

It is an everyday conviction that all social action is based normally on decisions (with these being made on the basis of rational consideration). My thesis, in contrast to this, is that decision-making is not self-evident, and is indeed not even probable. Rather, explicit decision-making is always challenging. Whether a certain situation is framed, modelled, staged, perceived and interpreted as a decision-making situation is historically variable and therefore culturally dependent. In other words, decision-making has a history. In my lecture, I will exemplify this by the case of assemblies of estates in the early modern Roman-German Empire that usually avoided making explicit decisions.