Book Launch: Keepers of the Common Good by D.J. Galligan – The People, Opinion, and the Social Foundations of Constitutional Authority
Professor Denis Galligan, University of Oxford; Professor Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, QMUL; Dr Sarah Nason, Bangor University; and Professor Francesco Bilancia, La Sapienza.
About the Book
Keepers of the Common Good provides a social understanding of constitutional authority from the point of view of the people. The book divides into three parts.
The first part sets out the social foundations of constitutional authority, drawing on David Hume, Adam Smith, and Giambattista Vico.
The second part portrays the constitutional order as a field of endeavour, borrowing from Pierre Bourdieu, in the cultivation of which the people seek to engage, fortified by the idea that 'peoples precede nations'. On that base, the author identifies a lower register of constitutional discourse emerging among the people themselves, from which they approach and evaluate the official, upper register of constitutional discourse.
The third part, drawing on patterns of opinion identified from history, the author proposes three models of constitutional authority, to which is added a fourth: the notion of the people as keepers of the common good, the keepers model.