Intergenerational Reciprocity and Sequential Democratic Sovereignty: A Reply

• Ferrara, Alessandro ^[1]
  1. [1] Professor Emeritus of Political Philosophy at the University of Rome Tor Vergata and Adjunct Professor of Legal Theory at LUISS Guido Carli University, Rome.

• Localización: Ethics, Politics & Society, ISSN 2184-2582, ISSN-e 2184-2574, Vol. 8, Nº. 2, 2025
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Sovereignty Across Generations. Constituent Power and Political Liberalism (Ferrara 2023, hereafter SAG) takes on many battles. It aims to strengthen the paradigm of political liberalism by reconstructing and expanding Rawls’s concept of constituent power, which is very different and indeed at loggerheads with what today’s populists mean by this term. The book also aims to highlight the innovativeness of Rawls’s view of constituent power by bringing it into an intense dialogue with the paradigms of constitutionalism developed by Hans Kelsen and Carl Schmitt. Finally, Sovereignty Across Generations supplements Rawls’s liberal principle of legitimacy with two additional principles – designed to account for the legitimacy of constitution-making and of constitution-amending – and is designed to corroborate, by recourse to a principle of “vertical reciprocity”, Rawls’s case for the implicit unamendability of a constitution’s essential elements.