Abstract
The present article commences analyzing the origins and influences of the religious discourse on the configuration of the modern constitutional discourse and the contributions of the jus-positivism in the consolidation of this sacred-civil language. The second issue is the definition of the U.S. Constitution as a mixed and not as a democratic constitution, with regard to the influences of Plato, Aristotle, Cicero and Polybius to the Drafters of the first modern constitutional text; stability and equilibrium took preference over democracy in a wide sense. I also analyze how the Drafter’s decision has conditioned the modern constitutional system up to the present.
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About the theory of exclusive positivism and guidance see Marmor (2001), and Waluchow (1994).
See also Gardner (2005), where he states that legal positivism is the thesis that in any legal system, whether a given norm is legally valid, and hence whether it forms part of the law of that system, depends of its sources.
The Federalist Papers No. 10 (Madison).
See, e.g., Declaration of the Independence, July 4, 1776, Preamble of the U.S. Constitution & Mc Culloch v. Maryland, 17 U.S. 316 (1819), The Federalist Papers: 78 (Hamilton et al.).
Rosenfeld et al. (2003). See Supra. P.3.
The Federalist Papers No. 10 (Madison).
The Federalist Papers No. 10 (Madison), see also Gilje (1987).
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Acknowledgments
I am grateful to James A Gardner, Bruce Ackerman and Rabbi Gerson Lerner for helpful conversations. I benefited enormously from written comments by Mark Tushnet and I am deeply thankful to him for his advice.
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I consider in this paper that the American constitutionalism started in 1789 as a sort of big bang of the American constitutionalist experiment. Other authors might suggest that the American constitutional tradition might be more critically tied to the events and moral-religious-legal conflations leading to the execution of Charles I in 1649, in this sense see David L Holmes (2006) and Donald Lutz (1988).
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Abad i Ninet, A. Playing at Being Gods. Philosophia 38, 41–55 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-009-9210-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-009-9210-8