Ebooks for the Classroom+Faculty

Freedom and Time: A Theory of Constitutional Self-Government
ISBN: 9780300129427
Platform/Publisher: Oxford Academic / Yale University Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Unlimited; Download: Unlimited
Subjects: Social and Political Philosophy History of Western Philosophy;

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--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.