The Transgenerational Demos

Abstract

As individuals, we inherit debts and benefits from the past legally and morally too. The same is true for collectivities, whether families, corporations or nations. The aim of this interesting book is to defend an approach to the puzzles generated by this practice — and moral attitudes to it — based on Rawls’ political liberalism. It seeks to work out an account of constituent power implicit in Rawls’ work, and then to use it to explain how a demos can operate over time in such a way that sovereignty is secured, along with political identity, and equality amongst generations. In essence, the idea is that we should think of the demos as inherently transgenerational, stretching forward and back well beyond the lives of those living now and their immediate predecessors and descendants, and then conceive our constitutional order as establishing the rules of legitimacy for all of us, without distinction. The constitution, therefore, is not something which each generation is free to alter as it sees fit – or as its conceptions of justice or prudence dictate because ‘a constitution articulates a project for jointly living a political life over an open-ended time span’. (p. 260) Each generation is bound by norms of reciprocity to those that precede and succeed it and must therefore find ways of resolving disagreements about what the constitution means, and whether/how it should be changed, in ways that reflect the claims of the past as well as the future. Believing that present political majorities, however enlightened, are too transient and too self-interested to resolve conflicts of interest between the present, past and future, Ferrara argues for some form of constitutional court, whose job is to ensure that disputes about the constitution are resolved in ways that acknowledge and protect the transgenerational sovereignty of a people. (pp. 203-4)