Sovereignty Across Generations

Abstract

Every cohort of voters may dream of being ‘the people’, under the sway of serial visions of sovereignty; or it may understand itself more modestly, as co-author of a constitutional project in a cross-generational sequence rooted in the past and extending into the future. This book articulates a theory of democratic sovereignty and constituent power grounded in John Rawls’s political liberalism. His political philosophy and implicit constitutional theory offer an unsurpassed normative, yet non-foundationalist, account of the justness and legitimacy of political and legal orders. Neither exegetic nor abstractly analytic, this book assumes that ‘political liberalism’ is broader than in Rawls’s Political Liberalism of 1993. In answering the question ‘How is it possible for there to exist over time a just and stable society of free and equal citizens, who remain profoundly divided by reasonable religious, philosophical, and moral doctrines?’, the paradigm implicit in Political Liberalism enables us to address facets of that question that the context of the time induced Rawls to sideline. In response to populist threats to democracy, still latent in the early 1990s, this book focuses on a hitherto neglected phrase within Rawls’s question: ‘over time’. That inconspicuous phrase signals the urgency of clarifying the proper relation of ‘the people’, as transgenerational author of the constitution, to its pro-tempore living segment in its capacity as electorate (a constituted power among other constituted powers) and as co-author of the constitution. An elucidation of that relation brings ‘constituent power’ into the picture and unfolds in seven steps that form the conceptual backbone of this book.