Making Constituent Power Safe for Democracy

Alessandro Ferrara (Università degli Studi)

This paper offers a synthetic overview of the main points advanced in Sovereignty Across Generations.  The book develops a Rawlsian theory of democratic sovereignty grounded in the idea of constituent power as not unbound, but ‘under law’, i.e. responsive to the normativity of what is ‘most reasonable for us’ due to its congruence ‘with our deeper understanding of ourselves and our aspirations’.

Constituent power is vested in ‘the people’ not as a one-time founding subject, but as the transgenerational author of a constitutional project, in which each generation co-authors the constitution alongside those past and preserving the equal freedom of future generations. This ‘sequential’ understanding of democratic sovereignty is argued by Ferrara to safeguard a democratic polity from three possible consequences of the opposite ‘serial’ view, famously articulated by Rousseau and Jefferson and now hijacked by populism. The sequential view does so by positing the people’s transgenerational political project as ‘implicitly unamendable’ even in the absence of explicit eternity clauses. Ferrara aims to improve Rawls’s case for implicit unamendability by introducing the concept of vertical reciprocity: each living segment of a people is under the obligation to relate in terms of reciprocity to all the free and equal generations.

The point of foregrounding the temporality of democratic legitimacy, i.e., sovereignty ‘over time’ or ‘across generations’, is to offer a compelling framework for sustaining a just and stable society amid the challenges of rising populism.

This seminar is co-sponsored by Monash University Department of Politics, School of Social Sciences.

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