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Abstract

My intent is to reconstruct and develop Rawls’s largely implicit conception of constituent power, to show how it cuts across the opposition of Kelsen’s and Schmitt’s legal paradigms, and to complete the task, unaddressed within Political Liberalism, of elucidating the conditions for the legitimate exercise of constituent power. What sort of normativity binds constituent power, according to Rawls? Drawing on Frank Michelman’s article “Always under law?”, I propose a “liberal principle of constitutional legitimacy”, designed to operate alongside Rawls’s “liberal principle of legitimacy”.

Biography

Alessandro Ferrara is professor of political philosophy at the 8xav�������� of Rome Tor Vergata and former president of the Italian Association for Political Philosophy. He is also the founder and director of the Colloquium Philosophy & Society in Rome and the director of the Center for the Study of Religions and Political Institutions in Post-Secular Society at the 8xav�������� of Rome Tor Vergata. His most recent monographs include Rousseau and Critical Theory (2017), The Democratic Horizon (2015,) and The Force of the Example. Explorations in the Paradigm of Judgment (2008).