Further Thoughts on A-Legality, Exemplarity and Constituent Power: Responding to Hans Lindahl

The paper is a response to H.Lindahl’s extensive reply to Ferrara’s critical remarks. This reply was published as part of a larger symposium (in Etica & Politica/Ethics & Politics XXI, 2019, 3) on Lindahl’s recently published Authority and the Globalisation of Inclusion and Exclusion. In an effort to push the dialogue further, new reflections and counterarguments are here put forward in relation to four thematic areas: a) the notion of a-legality, revisited in light of a distinction between foreground and background assumptions of a practice; b) exemplarity, positive and negative, in law, c) the paradox of constituent power, and d) the relation of Lindahl’s notion of “collective self-restraint” to the later Rawls’s paradigm of “political liberalism”