Representing the Future: Amid Present Contingencies and Future Aspirations
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.21814/eps.8.2.7082Keywords:
Political representation, Sequential sovereignty, Judicial review, Populism, Public reasonAbstract
Alessandro Ferrara’s Sovereignty Across Generations is a compelling work that engages with the contemporary debate on intergenerational justice. Ferrara intervenes in this debate, tackling not only questions of ethical and political obligations between different generations in terms of distributive justice or environmental sustainability, but also of institutional continuity and political possibilities. He develops his argument with the usual acumen and systematicity, identifying the main problems, deconstructing their various dimensions and then addressing each of them to construct a solid answer.
The core of the argument concerns democratic sovereignty, specifically the locus of constituent power: whether this power resides with the people in a cross-generational sense—incorporating past, present, and future generations—or the people in its pro-tempore living segment. The former perspective leads to what Ferrara terms ‘sequential sovereignty,’ which he advocates and which he considers attuned to Rawls’ political liberalism; while the latter results in what he calls ‘serial sovereignty,’ a view he criticises and associates with contemporary populist movements and thinkers like Rousseau, Locke, Sieyès, and Jefferson.
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