Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- 1 The Search for Sovereignty: Law, Language, and the Beginnings of Modern Constitutionalism
- 2 Consent How? Challenges to Lockean Constitutionalism
- 3 Constitutional Language and the Possibility of Binding Commitments
- 4 Consent to What? Exclusivity and Completeness in Constitutional and Legal Language
- 5 The Question of Substance: Morality, Law, and Constitutional Legitimacy
- 6 The Defense of Constitutional Language
- Bibliography
- Index
4 - Consent to What? Exclusivity and Completeness in Constitutional and Legal Language
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 July 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- 1 The Search for Sovereignty: Law, Language, and the Beginnings of Modern Constitutionalism
- 2 Consent How? Challenges to Lockean Constitutionalism
- 3 Constitutional Language and the Possibility of Binding Commitments
- 4 Consent to What? Exclusivity and Completeness in Constitutional and Legal Language
- 5 The Question of Substance: Morality, Law, and Constitutional Legitimacy
- 6 The Defense of Constitutional Language
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Chapters 2 and 3 concluded with the proposition that the conditions of possibility for constitutional consent involve a collective willingness to create a language in which to engage in an act of sovereign self-authorship, and that sovereignty and precommitment to language are a sufficient basis for a constitutional regime's claim to legitimacy. But that is only a partial answer, since it cannot be equally the case that any and every hypothetical system of constitutional language is equally appropriate to the task of legitimation.
This chapter begins to explore the content that a system of constitutional language must contain if precommitment to that language is to serve the central role in establishing the legitimacy of a regime that has been suggested here. In terms of the descriptions employed in these chapters, this is the move from the question “Consent How?” to the question “Consent to What?” Accepting the proposition that a binding commitment to a constitutional language is the necessary condition for constitutional consent, what are the necessary characteristics of that language for it to be a sufficient basis for the creation of a legitimate constitutional regime?
There are three basic dimensions along which this inquiry will be pursued: exclusivity, completeness, and substance. Identifying these essential categories of description for a system of constitutional language provides the specific inquiries that motivate this chapter and the next.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Language of Liberal Constitutionalism , pp. 197 - 259Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007