In The Democratic Horizon: Hyperpluralism and the Renewal of Political Liberalism, Alessandro Ferrara seeks a philosophical breakthrough from what looks like it could be a pending dead-end for democracy. The best hope, Ferrara superbly maintains, lies through an extension or updating – a ‘renewal’, as he calls it – of lines of thought bequeathed to us, by John Rawls and others, under the name of political liberalism.

Somewhere near the crux of Ferrara’s reflection stands a class of institutional fixtures whose name is missing from his title. I mean the class ‘constitution’. I use that word to name a country’s scriptural basic law, its publicly cognizable corpus of canonically worded sentences ordaining the country’s basic institutional framework. My suggestion will be that it is no less tellingly a ‘constitutional’ than a ‘democratic’ horizon that Ferrara’s work, in conjunction with Rawls’, shows us to be facing.