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СВОБОДА ИЛИ ПОДОЗРИТЕЛЬНОСТЬ: КАК ЗАЩИТИТЬ ЛИБЕРАЛЬНЫЙ КОНСТИТУЦИОНАЛИЗМ ОТ ЕГО ПРОТИВНИКОВ?
The current crisis of constitutionalism as an apparent challenge to liberal
democracy makes it important to understand its social origins, implications,
and forms of protection. The book under review presents a broad vision of
the problem and a comparative analysis of theoretical, institutional, and
functional deviations of authentic liberal constitutionalism, including its values,
principles, and incentives. A fundamental work on the nature of contemporary
constitutional crisis, its causes, and practical outcomes in the
erosion of principles, norms, and institutes, the book could be interpreted as
an original encyclopedia of constitutional deviations of any kind deeply
rooted in the scarcity of enlightenment, institutional disproportions, and in
the target-oriented intentions of some political regimes to deconstruct, put
under question, or limit the achievements of the liberal democracy. From
this point of view, it should be appreciated as a courageous, profound, and
rather sustainable criticism of constitutional conformism which ignore the
very existence of illiberal legal transformation, diminishes its importance, or
even approves it as a form of constitutional realism. That is why the book
should be recommended as instructive reading not only for European intellectuals,
but for Russian intellectuals as well. In this context the book shows
how contemporary political regimes reduced the essence of liberal principles,
parliamentary democracy, separation of powers, independent justice,
and individual rights while keeping unchangeable all formal aspects of constitutionalism
or even using them for the establishment of illiberal democracy.
The implacable criticism of these deformations makes the book a good
guide in the labyrinth of legal misunderstandings, manipulations, and hypocrisies
at the epoch of populist democracy – instruction which could be
equally useful for true adherents of constitutional order and for its authoritarian
enemies. That makes the authors’ position rather ambivalent: on the
one hand, they stay in a constant search for a standard legal remedy against
the mentioned constitutional disease, while on the other hand they hope to
find it outside the traditional legal framework in spontaneous psychological
attitudes, mental prejudices, and even mistakes of constitution makers regarding
such items as constitutional beliefs, fears, and nostalgia. This approach,
based on a psychoanalytic vision of constitutionalism, perhaps could
be useful for the understanding of constitutional pathologies but probably is
not really instructive for rational constitutional constructivism as a calculated
balance between benefits and loses of political elites in power. The reach
of the empirical information of the book and the observation of the authors’
key ideas and arguments makes possible another conclusion: that reason,
not suspicion, should be the first duty of the constitutionalist.