Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1992

Abstract

This Article bridges the dichotomy between communitarian and liberal social contract conceptions of subjectivity by excavating the deeply rooted meaning of covenant as a promissory relationship constitutive of identity. I trace the covenant paradigm’s role in formative debates over the creation of “We the People” as a constitutional subject. I connect tensions in that debate with polarities between freedom and equality and between the private and social construction of first-order value claims. I argue that feminist-intersubjectivist critiques of Rawls’ Theory of Justice can benefit from a careful mining of the covenant paradigm’s emancipatory potential for metaethical and constitutional doctrine.

Comments

This article was published in 55 Law & Contemp. Probs. 159 (1992).

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