Amending Power and Vertical Reciprocity in the Climate Change Era: Reconsidering Sovereignty Across Generations

The paper revolves around the need of rethinking the amending power as one of the crucial issues within the contemporary political theory of democracy. The topic is addressed starting from a selective reading of Sovereignty Across Generations by Alessandro Ferrara. The book offers the opportunity to develop a series of considerations for a theory of sovereignty that, in my view, takes the theme of climate change as the focus and epochal destiny of our time. Two macroquestions and correlative sub-questions will be underlined. On the one hand, the paper proposes a series of possibilities for reviewing and integrating the theoretical vocabulary and profiles we would like to ground the idea of justice at the centre of every democratic exercise of sovereignty. On the other, the paper focuses on the elaboration and the functioning of the “vertical reciprocity” procedure, that is understood as the fundamental normative structure for a renewed idea of sovereignty that is capable of meeting what we should consider the most urgent challenge of our time.