Membership questions structure all other political judgments and resist analytical resolution.

Evidence

Although demonstrated through intricate formal proofs, Arrow and Sen’s results also can be seen to represent echoes of the foundational paradox of constitutional democracy; that is, the originary moment of colegitimation, in which a people is said to have expressed its demo cratic will to form a po liti cal community through a constitutional irruption that simultaneously is said to have received the people’s assent as a mechanism of willrecognition. Legitimation of the constitution demands pop u lar sovereignty, yet the pop u lar sovereign’s will must be discerned through principles of constitutional law that already somehow have been legitimated. This paradox cannot be resolved analytically; instead, it must simply live on in the continuing and never completely successful efforts of the community to overcome its foundational tension, to demonstrate the continued vitality of the performative utterance, “We the People,” which fi rst constituted the po liti cal community as a community even as the utterance represented the community as already formed. — Douglas A. Kysar, Regulating from Nowhere, 461

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘We the People’ performative-paradox framing connects to the reader’s interest in law as interpretation/storytelling and to constitutional legitimation debates in Legal Systems. — connects to: Membership dilemmas persist even in border-sealing preference-maximizing states. — Douglas A. Kysar, Regulating from Nowhere: Environmental…, 461; Collective subaltern politics makes the questioner-respondent relation indeterminate — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 1507; Political stances must be judged by whether they stand alone or answer other forces — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 692 (+2 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: The paradox that a people authorizes a constitution while being constituted by that same performative act is genuinely paradigm-level material for anyone teaching law’s foundations.

Broader Connections

• Political stances must be judged by whether they stand alone or answer other forces #expands (0.85) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 692
• Collective subaltern politics makes the questioner-respondent relation indeterminate #complicates (0.80) — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader, 1507
• Uncontained revolutionary alliances can outrun resolvable class questions. #complicates (0.80)
• Transforming concrete political questions into abstract principles guarantees political failure. #corroborates (0.75)