Title: Review of Eoin Daly's Rousseau's Constitutionalism: Austerity and Republican Freedom
Abstract: Perhaps more than any other social contract theorist, Rousseau is a frequent target of constitutionalists. His system of popular sovereignty can be understood as exemplifying all that is wrong with unlimited political power. Indeed, constitutionalism, as a theory of limited government, is the perfect antidote for the type of dangers associated with an uncontrolled Rousseauian sovereign. Eoin Daly's Rousseau's Constitutionalism presents an interesting and persuasive challenge to that approach. Daly argues that Rousseau should be read as advancing a distinct constitutionalist ideal directed at protecting citizens not only from the domination of arbitrary state power, but from the different (and not necessarily legal or political) conditions that make self-government impossible. Daly advances this argument in five chapters that engage both with most of Rousseau's published writings and with some of the main works on the subject in the secondary literature.
Publication Year: 2019
Publication Date: 2019-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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