Freedom and Time: A Theory of Constitutional Self-Government
Language: English
Pages: 272
ISBN: B001B1P6SI
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Should we try to live in the present? Such is the imperative of modernity, Jed Rubenfeld writes in this important and original work of political theory. Since Jefferson proclaimed that 'the earth belongs to the living', since Freud announced that mental health requires people to 'get free of their past', since Nietzsche declared that the happy man is the man who 'leaps into the moment', modernity has directed its inhabitants to live in the present, as if there alone could they find happiness, authenticity, and above all freedom. But this imperative, Rubenfeld argues, rests on a profoundly inadequate, deforming picture of the relationship between freedom and time. Instead, Rubenfeld suggests, human freedom, indeed human being itself, necessarily extends into both past and future; self-government consists of giving our lives meaning and purpose over time. From this conception of self-government, Rubenfeld derives a new theory of constitutional law's place in democracy. Democracy, he writes, is not a matter of governance by the present 'will of the people'; it is a matter of a nation's laying down and living up to enduring political and legal commitments.
Constitutionalism is not counter to democracy, as many believe, or a pre-condition of democracy; it is or should be democracy itself over time. On this basis, Rubenfeld offers a new understanding of constitutional interpretation and of the fundamental right of privacy.
The Holy History of Mankind and Other Writings (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought)
State, Power, Socialism (Radical Thinkers)
Machiavelli and Republicanism (Ideas in Context)
Max Stirner (Critical Explorations in Contemporary Political Thought)
Vernacular Zarathustra’ ”). 66. Id. at 136–37. 40 Living in the Present tooth decay, of weariness.” At the age of nineteen, he looks as if he himself had become a memorial—“older than Egypt,” “monumental like bronze.” Funes dies at twenty-one from congestion of the lungs.67 But if there is irony when Nietzsche, the classicist, inveighs against history, the irony in Borges’s story is almost overpowering. The narrator of Funes is recounting events “half a century” after they happened. He.
Identity. They are binding on us because we cannot unbind ourselves from them: our “identity is bound” up with them already. Their “moral force consists partly in the fact that living by them is inseparable from understanding ourselves as the particular persons we are.”5 5. Michael J. Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent 13–17 (1996). 98 Being Over Time On this view, we do not make our commitments; they make us. They make us “the particular persons we are.” We do not lay claim to them; we are.
Unwritten law: a right of privacy, of inviolable individual freedom, that no democracy can do without. Fourth implication: the aggressive “globalization” today of a certain politicallegal order—essentially free-market democracy, backed up by a written constitution modeled on or even copied from the United States Constitution— The Moment and the Millennium 13 is a process about whose embarrassments we Americans, among its most earnest purveyors, cannot afford to keep silent. The problem is not.
Itself, and it is impossible for a self to be so engaged with an object without feeling. Consider in this light the fact that constitutional provisions tend to be enacted at times not of sober rationality, but of high political feeling. The enactment of the Fourteenth Amendment is notorious in this respect. Within a few years, American justices and constitutional scholars were characterizing the revolutionary propositions of the Fourteenth Amendment as a product of the “excited feeling growing.
Actual constitution-making, Peter drunk legislating for Peter sober. The entire logic and normative structure of pre-commitment, as a vehicle for understanding and justifying written constitutionalism, founders on the passionate nature of constitution-writing. But this passion is necessary and proper from the perspective of commitmentarian self-government. Thus the rationality of commitment and its passion. Yet we still have not arrived at the bottom of commitment’s reason-giving force, nor have.