Potere emendativo, popolo transgenerazionale e agency politica

The article focuses on the principle of vertical reciprocity proposed by Alessandro Ferrara to regulate the exercise of amending power. The principle is integral to the theory of democratic sovereignty and constitutional power developed by Ferrara in Sovereignty Across Generations: Constituent Power and Political Liberalism. In the book, Ferrara elaborates on Rawls’s insights and updates political liberalism to make it more suitable for addressing contemporary tendencies and phenomena, particularly populism. From Ferrara’s perspective, populism improperly reduces the will of the people to the will of its living segment – namely, the electorate – so he emphasizes the need to distinguish the electorate from the people, and he defends a sequential account of sovereignty according to which past, present, and future generations are all co-owners of the constitution. Therefore, the electorate is not entitled to unilaterally modify the constitution, and the principle of vertical reciprocity grants legitimacy only to constitutional amendments that, although proposed by the electorate and expressing the electorate’s own will, could prove acceptable also to past and present generations. As the article suggests, the principle tends to constrain the political agency of the electorate, which is bound to preserve the political project inscribed in the constitution by the founding generation. Though possibly  problematic, this implication seems perfectly consistent with – and fully vindicated within – Ferrara’s general approach. Therefore, to assess more reliably the principle of vertical reciprocity and its import, the article examines its presuppositions. More precisely, the article discusses Ferrara’s defence of the sequential model of sovereignty, his understanding of the constitution as the expression of the will of the people, and his conception of the latter as irreducible to the will of any single generation composing the people itself. Based on such investigation, the article highlights the merits and the shortcomings of Ferrara’s approach and questions whether, while certainly coherent with political liberalism, his proposal is fully effective in countering populism.