The Sequential Texture of Democracy: A Reply

The paper comprehensively responds to critical comments by M. Croce, M. Santambrogio, A.E. Galeotti, F.G. Pizzetti e F. Pasquali on Alessandro Ferrara’s Sovereignty Across Generations. Constituent Power and Political Liberalism. The themes debated include: the convergence and discrepancies between Rawls’s and Schmitt’s understandings of constitutionalism and
constituent power (Croce); the inexistence, or at best fictional quality, of “the people” as bearer of constituent power and the gap, or absence thereof, between the models of normativity undergirding A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism (Santambrogio); the nature of consent to democratic institutions, the temporal extension of the transgenerational people, and the institution best  positioned for representing the will of the transgenerational people (Galeotti); a comparison of American and (Continental) European forms of judicial review, and the challenge posed by a  multilayered constitutionalism, based on multiple sources of supranational binding higher law, to the model of a domestic constitutional court entrusted with representing the domestic  “intergenerational people” (Pizzetti); the unequal burdens placed on the presently living and the founding generation, on account of the principle of vertical reciprocity cogent for sequential sovereignty (Pasquali)