Ferrara’s Principles of Constitutional Legitimacy: From Plato to Rawls, and Backwards?

In his latest book, Sovereignty Across Generations: Constituent Power and Political Liberalism, Alessandro Ferrara explores the grounds, norms and scope of liberal constitutions’ legitimacy. Specifically, Ferrara develops Rawls’s political liberalism by exploring liberal legitimacy in a constitutional direction. Indeed, while the grounds of constitutions’ legitimacy were not the primary focus of Rawls’s own investigations, Ferrara believes that political liberalism must now be extended in this direction – for both theoretical and political reasons. In this review, we examine Ferrara’s proposal, bearing in mind his project’s Rawlsian roots. Specifically, we examine the relationship between reasonableness and constitutional legitimacy; we suggest that some of Ferrara’s conclusions – especially his intergenerational conception of the people as sovereign – might stand in tension with the Rawlsian framework within which he has drawn them.