States with constitutions, constitutions without states, and democracy: skeptical reflections on Scheuerman's skeptical reflection

Constraints on Skeptical Hypotheses

In this article I examine the constraints that skeptical hypotheses must satisfy in order to be used to raise significant skeptical challenges. I argue that skeptical hypotheses do not have to be logically, metaphysically or epistemically possible. They only need to depict scenarios that are subjectively indistinguishable from the actual world and must provide some indication of how subjects ca...

Aristotelian constitutions

One of the chief problems about discussing any aspect of Aristotle's political thought, but especially his thinking about constitutions, is the apparent disorder of the Politics. The relatively loose and dialectical nature of the argument is certainly responsible for some of its unevenness: the repetitions, the omissions of promised discussions of particular topics, and the sudden turns, perhap...

Constitutions and Democratic Breakdowns

Trusting Constitutions

Two explanations for the importance of trusting constitutions are offe-red : First, constitutions that convey trust towards citizens have posi-tive effects by fostering civic virtue. A crucial factor of a trusting con-stitution is the extent to which the citizens are allowed to actively par-ticipate in the political process. We present empirical evidence thatparticipation vi...

Fiscal Constitutions

1 A partial draft of this paper was circulated under the title ‘‘Discretionary Policy and Economic Volatility’’ in October 1995. We thank Robert Becker, Camelia Bejan, Marco Celentani, V. V. Chari, Russell Cooper, John Driffill, David Levine, Rody Manuelli, Albert Marcet, Ken West, and Bill Zame for helpful comments, without implicating them in the results. Earlier versions of the paper were pr...