Jefferson and the Paradox of Founding.

This paper reconsiders Jefferson’s critique of constitutionalism in light of recent debates on the paradox of democratic founding. The paradox of a democratic founding suggests that neither the people nor a founding can be ontologically prior to the other, but rather that they are mutually constitutive. This mutual constitution, however, has placed dominant approaches in a position to displace the problems of one, the other or both. But does this displacement result from the conceptual architecture of dominant conceptions of both? In this paper I contend that Jefferson’s writings on the subject, traditionally read as a critique of constitutionalism, provide insightful answers to this question. Against the traditional reading, I suggest that Jefferson offers a distinctive understanding of the problem, one that brings to light what I call the problem of democratic recognition, that of the people’s changing composition in relation to founding authority. Rather than a wholesale critique of constitutional authority, I suggest that Jefferson provides a more nuanced understanding of the process of founding and re-founding from a radically democratic perspective, one which can offer important insights to guide contemporary theory. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]